Can I tell you how great Michael Pollan's recent "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" is? I'm reading it now to get ready for next week's launch of The Reluctant Vegan, a blog I'm going to write on Dallasnews.com throughout Orthodox Lent. On the blog, I'll be talking about the intersection of food, culture, morality and spirituality. I'll be linking to it from this blog throughout its run. For CC blog readers who are particularly interested in food, I encourage you to get a copy of Pollan's book, which I'll be talking about a lot. Pollan has agreed to participate in the blog in a limited way, and that excites me a lot.
Here's a link to the PDF of the introductory chapter.
Here's a short blog Pollan wrote to promote the book on Amazon.com. Excerpt:
Anyone who's had a chance to read it--or even just glance at the cover--knows that the book is my attempt to help readers navigate what has become a treacherous food landscape, made especially confusing by the rise of something I call "nutritionism." "Nutritionism" is a highly reductive way of looking at food that presumes the nutrient is more important than the food and, because nutrients are invisible, we need experts to tell us how to eat. This supposedly more scientific way of eating is what I set out to debunk in the book, on the grounds that it not only destroys the pleasure of eating, but has actually done very little for our health, except quite possibly to make it worse. Why? Because the science of nutrition is still very sketchy, and because the food industry uses this sketchy science to make health claims for distinctly unhealthy foods. Heart-healthy whole-grain Cocoa Puffs?!?! You get the idea.My premise is that science doesn't yet know enough to tell us how to eat. So who, or what, does? Not me or any other journalist, god knows. No, the best guide to how to eat is the guide we relied on for thousands of years before people know what an antioxidant or carbohydrate was, and that is Culture. Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom--through mothers, dietary wisdom, based on generations of trial and error and the gradual discover of what keeps people healthy and happy, has been passed down for thousands of years. So the last third of my book is an attempt to recapture some of this cultural wisdom before it completely disappears under the onslaught of food marketing and nutritionism.
I try to distill this cultural wisdom into a series of eating algorithms--mental tools for navigating the food landscape and eating well. Instead of talking about how to get your antioxidants or probiotics, my rules of thumb go more like this:
+ Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
+ Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can't pronounce.
+ Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
+ Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the food is least processed.
+ Avoid food products that make health claims.
+ Eat meals and eat them only at tables. (And no, a desk is not a table.)
+ Eat only until you're 4/5 full. (An ancient Japanese injunction.)
+ Pay more, eat less.
+ Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
+ Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.
If any of this appeals to you, then you've got to get your hands on a copy of "In Defense of Food," which is sort of the practical, go-and-do version of the more theoretical "The Omnivore's Dilemma." I'll see you next week at the Reluctant Vegan, and we can discuss all this more in depth.
[By the way, this is the 3,000th post on the Crunchy Con blog. Thanks to you all for making this blog such a hit!]
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Actually, Pollan's new book is profoundly bad. Here he is ripping on nutritionists for being too simplistic and what does he do? Tells us we shouldn't eat anything our great-grandparents wouldn't recognize as food.
If you put a brain sandwich and a bowl of tom yum in front of my great grandparents and asked them to identify which one was "food," which do you think they'd choose?
And it really does seem like that for as many nutritional scientists he throws under the bus he's just as willing to wave their papers around like Chamberlain getting vitamins in our time.
I think the new book is a complete mess. A massive letdown from Omnivore's Dilemma.
If you havent gardened before be sure to plant lots of zucchini so you will have enough (evil grin). Herbs grow easily in pots btw.
Indeed, I recommend at least 2 plants per person in the household >.>
Brains . . . yum . . . . My father grew up on a farm and thought organ meats were proper food. He didn't like liver because he'd had it for lunch every day because it was cheap. He did like cows' tongues--also cheap. You haven't lived till you've been a small child staring in horror at a big, greyish-pink boiled TONGUE complete with little taste buds on it, sitting on a plate waiting to be sliced up so you can eat it under pain of "a good sound thrashing" for disdaining hard-earned food. Ewww . . . . It actually doesn't taste that bad, but you have to slice it up and hide the pieces in a sandwich or something so it doesn't look so creepy. Anyway, he kept bugging my mother to cook kidneys, so she gave it a try, but none of us wanted to eat them ever again. They smell like . . . well, like what you'd expect to come out of a cow's kidney. And the skillet full of scrambled brains? Well, we children seldom got away with saying we could not eat something--but there was universal agreement on that day that the brains were never going to make it past the kitchen door. Avert eyes! Dump! End of story! If you are what you eat, no one wants to be a cow's brain. Hmm . . . that should mean that no one wants to be a pig's rump, either, but I guess that never stopped anyone from eating ham.
My best friend's mother, a German Jewish refugee, used to make meat loaf out of ground beef hearts, and serve it with Rice-a-Roni. I lived in dread of this meal. Mr. Sig's grandmother considered ham loaf from Meijer's Thrifty Acres, served with canned corn, to be food. So, Michael Pollan's maxim, like many maxims, has a few flaws in it. But you have to try to take the sense from it, and not get all picky. If it prevents one human being from eating a Butterscotch Krimpet, then Pollan has not lived in vain.
True, cow tongue is not that bad, a little tougher than regular meat but lacks those "wonderful" flavors and aromas of other organs.
I think some of you are missing the point about Pollan's dictum about not eating anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. It's not about if your (or my) particular grandmother would recognize it, but would anyone's grandmother recognize it.
For example, my grandmother would have no idea what tempeh was, but it's still a venerable and traditional way of preparing soybeans. On the other hand, no one, not even an Indonesian grandmother, would recognize Textured Vegetable Protein, as it is purely a recent product of the industrialization of soybeans. That, in Pollan's view, makes it decidedly not food and something you should not eat.
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