I was reading this book by Michael Pollan called “In Defense of Food” that a whole bunch of barefoot NPR-loving hippies were going on and on about a while back.  Sorta kinda being one of them, I had to pick it up and give it a go.  I was talking to my bud Ian about it the other day, and trying unsuccessfully to explain Pollan’s position articulately, so I promised to write up a longer (and presumably more well thought out) blog entry about it.

And boy, did I do a good job when it comes to the “longer” part.

Let me first explain a bit about Ian’s background and my own, so you have an idea where we’re coming from.  I’m a wiry dude. I’m pretty skinny and can eat pretty much whatever I want without seeing any and all detrimental health effects it may be causing.  Lots of folks are rather loathe to hear me “complain” about that, but the fact is I have no feedback mechanism that tells me if my heart is ticking along like my new favorite watch or if it’s viscous like the freakin’ Alberta tar sands in there.  So I would like to balance two goals of a) consuming enough calories to sustain life (harder than you might think), and b) not dying.

Ian is of course a Mensch.  Right now, he’s working to fight human trafficking in Southeast Asia, when he could be doing far more selfish things.  I think it’s fair to say that Ian favors the imperfect solution that is available NOW to the perfect one that isn’t – and this applies to feeding the world, too.

And Pollan advocates for a couple of things that I think make a lot of sense.  He leads with his thesis: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”  So to unpack this a bit: “Eat food” – what does that mean?  Sounds intuitive, but… “For a while it used to be food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket.”   A product of an unholy menage a trois between the marketing departments of food companies, the food scientists they employ, and the reductionist impulse in the sciences, these foodlike compounds are an edible agricultural-industrial complex.  The “not too much” part is more or less self-explanatory, but the finer points of this mean you should be paying more for higher-quality food if you can, and that you shouldn’t throw out the cultural aspect of eating.  Turn the TV off and be present and all that.  “Mostly plants” is good for you and the rest of the world as well – both environmentally a socially.  Pollan refines his point by saying that we’re already eating mostly seeds at this point (in oils and additives and such), so we should actually be eating more leaves.

None of that is very useful unless you understand where Pollan is getting his information from.  On the face of it, a good deal of what he says flies in the face of the nutritional wisdom you probably have come to accept.  And in fact over half the book is dedicated to the justification of his advice.  I’m not really going to be able to do all of his arguments justice here, so if you are intrigued, you should probably pick up a copy.

Pollan’s first argument is that what he calls “nutritionism” is a croc.  I’m not a scientist, and haven’t even taken a great deal of super-quantitative courses, but I have come to the conclusion that the scientific method is one hell of a thing.  It’s been said that democracy is a terrible system for government – but it just so happens to also be the best one we’ve been able to come up with so far.  I think a similar argument can be made for science.  It’s slow, it’s hyper-focused on details, it’s susceptible to political and social skewing, and it can suffer from really hateful bouts of intellectual hubris.  But it is one of the very, very best ways of arriving at reliable information.  So this required a small amount of reconciliation for me to digest.

The primary example of this Pollan cites is the demonization of saturated fats, which resulted in the substitution of margarine for real butter.  This occurred back in the day, before we knew about trans fats and hydrogenated oils – both of which were in the “healthy” margarine in spades.  This is what I mean by the reductionist impulse in the sciences – food science didn’t warn us about trans fats because it didn’t know about them yet, so nobody studied it.  I think it’s likely we’ll always be able to identify smaller components of what is essentially a diet - so this reductionist approach will likely always have its blind spots.  Maybe science should study diets and lifestyles as apposed to chemical compounds.

From here, Pollan notes that there are healthy populations subsisting on all manner of different diets – maybe tons of animal fats, maybe no animal fats, maybe tons of seafood, or maybe almost completely vegetarian – but they’re all healthy.  This really doesn’t square with nutrition science’s seemingly continuous quest to find a nutritional “silver bullet” to answer the question of why Western countries have such high rates of cancers, heart diseases, and diabetes.

Maybe the biggest factor, says Pollan, is refined foods, because they allow you to easily eat too much of something that nature makes you go out of your way to get.  Oh, not just that, but industrialized food production – citing studies showing what shouldn’t be surprising (but is): Nutrient content of foods grown in poor-quality soils is lower than that of foods grown in higher quality soils, even with fertilizers.  Since 1950, the overall nutrient content in crops has decreased dramatically, even as crop yields have risen just as dramatically.  This kindof blew my mind.

And that last point is a big one.  Up until now, all of Pollan’s advice had been good for the individual as well as the earth, and was available to everyone.  Even the working poor could benefit from it, as eating less meat is a cost-saving endeavor.  And even though refined carbohydrate products have become somewhat cheaper than their real-food counterparts, there are other ways to eat real food cheaply.  But this last part doesn’t work out so well for the poor:

“There’s no escaping the fact that better food – whether measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) – costs more, usually because it has been grown with more care and less intensively. Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America, and that is shameful; however, those of us who can, should. Doing so benefits not only your health (by, among other things, reducing your exposure to pesticides and pharmaceuticals), but also the health of the people who grow the food as well as the people who live downstream and downwind of the farms where it is grown.”

(Pollan, 184)

I think this was the crux of Ian’s argument: it’s all well and good that the hippies eat organic and all, but this isn’t feeding the world.  It just isn’t scalable.  Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) like Golden Rice – now that might feed the world!

I think that’s a little bit of an overly rosy assessment, as nutrition science has a history of coming up with “the perfect” something, only to realize they messed something up later.  When scientists thought they identified all the important compounds in breast milk, they invented a baby formula.  But they missed some micronutrients, and some babies ended up with chronic conditions.  Same could happen with Golden Rice.  With GMOs, you have the added complication of international intellectual property to deal with.  Also, we’ve got enough of a monoculture problem as-is.  I think it’s safe to say that monocultures and poor species diversity among our foods in general is a negative to ecology, food security, and nutrition.

But what can you do if poor people are eating dirt cakes for extra nutrition?  I think that urgency outweighs a good deal of potential objections to industrial farming, pesticides, and GMOs.  People need to eat, and I think the imperfect solution that is available now does in fact beat the perfect solution that is not.

Like I said, however, most of what Pollan advocates doesn’t require you to buy all-hemp clothing, learning to play the sitar, getting dreadlocks in your hair, or use any of a number of recreational drugs – you don’t have to be an all-organic hippie to do it.  And you don’t have to follow the rabbit all the way down the hole at once either.  If you start working only a subset of the ideas into your lifestyle, I think you’re going to see a net positive for yourself and for the world.

Because after all, in this country, people used to mortgage their houses to build bigger kitchens that barely got used.  It doesn’t seem that it would take much to improve our food culture.