"In Defense of Food"

My wife and her online book group have been discussing this, Omnivore's Dilemma, and all of Pollan's works for the past few weeks. I'll definitely alert her to the blog, Rod. I'm interested in the title of the blog, though, since Pollan himself opposes vegatarianism, at least the forms you see in western nations, seeing it as another faddish opportunity that our corporate food kings take advantage of.

The best defense of food is eating it. Ignore the experts, eat what you like, don't eat what you don't like. And remember, there are few sights more entertaining than the face on the vegetarian as you eat a rare steak.

My mother always used to tell me, "If you can't spell it, don't eat it." Then I became a medical transcriber, and now I can spell ANYTHING. This is not helpful.

"Never eat anything bigger than your head." - Miss Piggy

I would add: 1) Grow some of your own food. Fresh herbs are easy to grow as well as tomatoes and peppers and of course zucchini. 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.

2) Have everyone in the family cook. All too often its just the wife cooking and who can blame anyone if they turn to convenience foods if they have all the burden for food prep. Amazing what your kids will eat if they helped cook it.

3) Call Mom or Grandmother and ask them to teach you how to make a fav dish. Good family time and something you can pass on.

4) Teach a yankee how to make real barbecue.

Steve

I read it right after I read Fast Food Nation (I was a bit behind on that one). It was a good book. Having read it, Dominion, Food Revolution, and Fast Food Nation, even among these different perspectives, there is a central core of common agreement about farming, food politics, and food consumption. Dominion and The Food Revolution caused me to drastically change my diet. In Defense of Food made me fine tune my eating habits, but overall made me more confidant in the choices I've made over the past two years. I just turned 30 today, and I am healthier and happier now than I was when I was 20. I've been vegetarian for two years, and I gave up dairy for Lent--so I too, am a reluctant vegan.

I just finished _In Defense of Food_. It was absolutely life-changing. I am in debt to Mr. Pollan for his work!

Michael Pollan is Der Schizzle. "The Botany of Desire" is also quite a page-turner.

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.

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.

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.