BOOKS:
Up From Nutrition

By Liam Julian

Liam Julian on In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan. In Defense of Food. Penguin. 256 pages. $21.95

I had the good fortune, upon first moving to Washington D.C. after college, to room with a high-school buddy who had worked his way through George Washington University by waiting tables at a high-end restaurant and who was, by the time I arrived in town, managing the place. As a result, I spent not a few hours hanging around waiters and chefs, people who generally shared my enjoyment of good food and wine. Many of my free moments were passed at my roommate’s restaurant — usually at the bar, maybe reading a book, sipping a Rioja, and munching on duck confit.

It is probably safe to presume that 30 years ago most Americans hadn’t tasted Rioja and duck confit; it is far less safe to presume so today. The United States, long considered by Europeans a culinary wasteland, has in the past three decades become the world’s center for innovative, quality cuisine. And Americans, the evidence seems to suggest, are more concerned than ever before about what they eat.

The success of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is a testament to this. It has sat for weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, proudly proclaiming that Americans are no longer content to nosh on just whatever is placed in front of them, but now actually care about the food that occupies their plates.

One woman deserves most credit for this tectonic shift: Alice Waters, who in 1971 opened her iconic restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Prior to Chez Panisse, fine dining in America usually meant enjoying European-derived meals prepared by European (or at least European-trained) chefs. In fact, Waters was herself inspired to begin cooking by a visit to France in the summer of 1964, where a meal in Brittany, at a tiny inn adjacent to a burbling stream, opened her eyes. The cured ham served with fresh melon from the garden, trout (fished from the stream only after Waters ordered it), and spirited raspberry tarts made a lasting impression on her: fresh ingredients — especially fresh vegetables — are essential for good eating.

Waters originally positioned Chez Panisse to replicate the cooking that she had discovered overseas. This was not the traditional French haute cuisine, though, which was and still is largely based on the master-sauce approach: sauté a hunk of protein in fat, deglaze with wine the leftover bits, add butter and cream and, say, shallots, and — voila! Waters concentrated instead on simple, rustic cooking techniques from places like Provence. While fine dining in France and the United States was at that time about manipulating ingredients through laborious, multi-step processes, Waters was simply coaxing from her ingredients their intrinsic deliciousness. Laissez-faire cooking, in a sense.

This philosophy became the basis for New American cuisine, whose trademarks, the New York Times reported in 1984, were “an adventurous, often improvisational use of the finest American ingredients and an exquisitely simple and straightforward approach to their preparation.” American restaurants responded, in no small part because this way of relating to food was inspiring. In 1973, for example, Johnson and Wales College in Providence, Rhode Island, had 141 students in its culinary-arts program; by 1982, it had 1,600. And these new American chefs retained a loyalty to fresh ingredients that bordered on the fanatic. Lawrence Forgione, cooking at the Connaught Hotel in London in the mid-1970s, endured repeated barbs about the awfulness of American food (from the British, no less!). By the early 1980s, though, he was directing the kitchen of the River Café in Brooklyn, and he had completely embraced the New American philosophy. His free-range chickens and elk came from upstate New York, mallard ducks he procured from Sag Harbor in Long Island, and his wild greens were summoned from Westchester County. He told a reporter in 1982, “The ingredients dictate the cuisine.”

That fresh, natural ingredients matter doesn’t sound like such a radical concept, but in the United States in the early 1970s it was. This period saw the proliferation in supermarkets of new, industrially produced and packaged food products, which were touted not for their quality but for the ease and speed of their preparation. Microwave ovens entered households in the 1970s, too, as did microwavable frozen-food dinners and pastries and breakfasts. Restaurants aspiring to New American ideals had to work overtime to resist the larger culinary trend, which was speed and efficiency in food preparation trumping quality. In such an environment, chefs who procured vegetables from local farmers and used only the freshest ingredients truly were radicals.

And gradually the tenets of these radical, pioneering chefs trickled down. Larger numbers of restaurants began paying attention to their ingredients’ worth; to a greater extent, price and efficiency were measured against quality when chefs placed their food orders. And more recently, this basic idea — that fresh, whole foods are important — has seeped into the decision-making process of home cooks, too. What was once a trickle, though, has become a deluge.

Whole Foods Market started out in 1978, in Austin, Texas, as a small vegetarian establishment that appealed to customers as much for its counter-culture sensibilities as for its kale. What a difference 30 years makes: For the quarter that ended February 25, 2008, Whole Foods posted $2.5 billion in sales. According to a 2005 report by the Organic Trade Association, the organic industry has grown by 20 percent each year for the past two decades. Organic food has become big business. Clearly, ever increasing numbers of Americans yearn to eat healthy, tasty foods.

They are stumped, though, by the never-ending aisles of processed food products. Every package, it seems, spouts its own health claim in bold, red letters, and many shoppers simply don’t know which, if any, to snag from the shelf. It is for this reason that Michael Pollan has written In Defense of Food, his second best-selling book about eating. His first, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, introduced our problem: “When you can eat just about anything,” Pollan wrote, “deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety.” The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a masterful examination of where our food actually comes from, but it left many readers without the answers they most craved — how do they escape the omnivore’s dilemma, how do they make their eating both more pleasurable and more healthful?

That’s where In Defense of Food comes in. In this book, Pollan sets out a basic guide for eating — “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” — and then explains in detail how America’s eating disorder has been engineered by a combination of savvy corporate marketing, and governmental, journalistic, and scientific shortsightedness.

Pollan begins his examination in the 1950s, when a growing number of scientists were backing the “lipid hypothesis” — the idea that fat and dietary cholesterol were responsible for rising rates of heart disease in the U.S. Acting on this burgeoning consensus, the American Heart Association in 1961 began advocating a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol. By 1977, with rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes still rising rapidly in America, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, held hearings about the problem. Learning that other cultures, those that consumed diets based largely on plants, were not experiencing the same health issues, the committee issued a direct recommendation: Americans should cut back on their consumption of red meat and dairy products. Bad politics. “Within weeks,” Pollan writes, “a firestorm of criticism, emanating chiefly from the red meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee.” The members quickly rewrote their recommendations; instead of advising Americans to forgo red meat, they advised them to “choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.” Pollan notes two important changes that this seemingly slight revision wrought. First, the government was no longer telling its citizens to eat less of any kind of food (and never again would). Second, the revision erased distinctions among kinds of food, and in their place it substituted nutrients. Meat, poultry, and fish ceased to exist as distinct units. Rather, they became simple mechanisms for transferring nutrients to their eaters.

When the National Academy of Sciences released its seminal report on diet and cancer in 1982, it, too, eschewed classifications based on foods and instead organized its presentation nutrient by nutrient. This, Pollan says, codified the “Age of Nutritionism,” which prizes a diet not for its variety, prizes foods not for their taste and history, but instead views dinner merely as a method of nutrient delivery.

Antioxidants found in fresh vegetables and fruits may help ward off cancers. But remove them from their cozy homes inside real foods, and they don’t work at all. Beta carotene ingested as a supplement actually increases the risk of certain cancers.

So what if the government and the food industry care more about nutrients than about the natural products that house them? Won’t a focus on nutrients make our country healthier in the long run? Pollan marshals an army of facts and figures to show explicitly why this isn’t true.

First, the science behind nutritionism is faulty. Foods are so complicated that scientists, in order to study them, must take a reductionist approach, and when they do, consumers get lousy data. Pollan outlines the problems, which are numerous. For example, one hypothesis supposes that the antioxidants found in fresh vegetables and fruits — antioxidants such as beta carotene — help ward off cancers. That appears true. But remove those antioxidants from their cozy homes inside real foods, and they don’t work at all. Beta carotene ingested as a supplement actually increases the risk of certain cancers.

This is why a casual stroll through the supermarket or a glance at the local newspaper’s health section can be so confusing. Food science, based on nutritionism, goes through fads. The lipid hypothesis that dominated American diets for 30 years may now turn out to be total hogwash. In a recent review by prominent scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health, “the authors proceed to calmly remove, one by one, just about every strut supporting the theory that dietary fat causes heart disease,” Pollan writes. Furthermore, he reports, the authors find only two studies that “have ever found ‘a significant positive association between saturated fat intake and risk of chd [coronary heart disease]’; many more have failed to find an association.” What about cholesterol? According to Pollan, “the review found ‘a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of chd.’”

Just because the scientific justification of new nutritional findings is questionable, though, doesn’t mean journalists won’t report them as fact, or that governments won’t base their recommendations on them, or that companies won’t pander to them. Which brings us to the second reason that a focus on nutritionism is not making Americans healthier: It’s encouraging us to eat more processed foods and less various foods.

Whole foods are notoriously poor at adapting to nutritionism’s ever-shifting winds: Broccoli, regardless of which nutrients are in vogue at the moment, is simply broccoli. Its chemical makeup cannot be substantially changed. Processed foods, however, can be reformulated to suit the vacillating desires of eaters, who are influenced by meandering science and government’s always-changing dietary regulations. That’s why everything under the sun now contains Omega-3 and everything from processed meats to breakfast cereals loaded with unpronounceable chemicals to candy bars now boasts health claims on its packaging.

Pollan recommends that eaters avoid products that carry health claims: “The American Heart Association currently bestows (for a fee) its heart-healthy seal of approval on Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, and Trix cereals, Yoo-hoo lite chocolate drink, and Healthy Choice’s Premium Caramel Swirl Ice Cream Sandwich — this at a time when scientists are coming to recognize that dietary sugar probably plays a more important role in heart disease than dietary fat.” And the array of items on display in the supermarket hides another fact — they may be varied in their presentation, but most of those processed foods are simply reconfigured presentations of crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans. The can of Coca-Cola and the Twinkie are pretty much the same thing: Empty calories (added fat and added sugar) from corn, redesigned with chemicals.

When Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, wanted to figure out why it is that the poorest Americans are also the nation’s most obese, he decided to investigate the most efficient way to spend a hypothetical dollar at the supermarket. How could his dollar bill purchase the most calories? Processed foods, it turns out, are by far the most efficient way to get calories — a dollar can buy 875 calories of soda (corn), for instance, but only 170 calories of orange juice. Between 1985 and 2000, the real price of fruits and vegetables rose by almost 40 percent, while the real price of soda dropped by 23 percent.

Government subsidies encourage farmers to produce far more corn (and soy, wheat, and rice) than the nation actually needs, so the crops are refined, manipulated, and added to processed foods, which are then priced so cheaply that buying fresh vegetables and other real foods is counterintuitive. Especially for low-income consumers, purchasing processed foods is a no-brainer — it’s by far the most efficient way to spend a dollar in the supermarket. Unfortunately, it’s also profoundly unhealthy. Drewnowski told me that one of the simplest ways to predict obesity is by looking at how money much a person spends, per calorie, on food. The fewer dollars one spends, the higher the probability that he will be obese.

That the federal government is subsidizing foods that make Americans obese and unhealthy is bad enough; that it actively discourages farmers from growing healthier alternatives — alternatives for which there exists a marked consumer demand — is inexplicable. Which brings us back to Pollan’s original recommendations.

The first is to “eat food,” which means avoiding “any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature.” Pollan suggests that eaters refrain from buying anything their grandmothers wouldn’t recognize, anything containing more than five ingredients (or ingredients that are hard to pronounce), and anything that screams health claims. That means shopping the perimeters of the supermarket — where the produce, meats, dairy, and fish are typically located — and avoiding the middle, which is the province of process. And whenever possible, he writes, Americans should get out of the supermarket and patronize local farmers; customers who shop farmers’ markets not only ensure that they are buying real food without additives and preservatives, but also that their food will generally be fresher and taste better than supermarket fare.

The second is to eat plants, by which he means to suggest eating more leaves. Corn is a plant, after all. “In all my interviews with nutrition experts, the benefits of a plant-based diet provided the only point of universal consensus,” he writes. Not that we know, exactly, what it is about plants that makes their eaters healthy — but who cares? It’s a fact that vegetarians are less susceptible to most diseases linked to a Western diet, and in “countries where people eat a pound or more of fruits and vegetables everyday, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States.” Leaves are also less energy-dense, and someone who consumes bunches of them will likely consume fewer calories, which is, in itself, a protection against many chronic diseases.

Pollan’s final suggestion will surely engender the most opposition: Don’t eat too much. To make this case he points to the French, who confound nutritionists by eating loads of saturated fat, drinking barrels of wine, and yet remaining far slimmer than Americans. How? The answer may not have much to do with nutrition science. Pollan notes that the French typically eat less, refrain from snacking, spend more time at table, and dine with others. They also generally care more about the quality of their dinner than the quantity of what’s on their plates.

For the reader who had a rude waiter during his last jaunt in Paris, or the one who remains irritated by Dominique de Villepin, or he who is simply unconvinced by the French example, Pollan offers other arguments. “Overeating promotes cell division,” he writes, “and promotes it most dramatically in cancer cells; cutting back on calories slows cell division. It also stifles the production of free radicals, curbs inflammation, and reduces the risk of most Western diseases.”

This isn’t hippy-dippy stuff. We can still enjoy the occasional bacon cheeseburger and wear shoes, while at the same time we become more aware of what we’re eating, more aware of the traps built into America’s industrial food system, and more knowledgeable about how to use common sense to avoid those traps. The larger point is that food and eating should not be isolated in the realm of science, but that they are most satisfying and healthful upon becoming a cherished part of our daily routine. Eating is not refueling, and Americans suffer when they view it merely as such.

In Defense of Food refreshes through its prudence. This book is not a tirade against big-business, against scientists, against government interference. Pollan instead takes a level-headed approach and presents his thorough research in placid prose. He doesn’t preach to the choir. He actively seeks converts through common-sense advice. This is remarkable largely because so much writing about food and nutrition leans toward histrionics and hyperbole: Nutrients are either enemies or saviors, the food industry is either the solution or the problem, etc. Pollan is careful to avoid this, and his down-to-earth, nonconfrontational tack, about what is certainly a controversial subject, makes his message all the more powerful.