Dietary Extremism and Confusion in the Age of "Nutritionism"

 

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan is full of wisdom and crucial truths about the way we eat. One thing I learned is that the food industry has obscured and complicated the definition of what constitutes food resulting in our eating of highly-profitable processed foodstuffs that we should not be eating and less profitable real food that we should. It is in the food industry’s interests, Pollan points out, to make us addicted to their synthetic foodstuffs, what he calls “edible foodlike substances,” while avoiding authentic food. This results in all kinds of dietary excesses. Clearly, the food industry’s interests are in conflict with our own. And it’s not just the food industry that wants us to be confused. Pollan explains that nutritionists and journalists “stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental question an omnivore confronts.” And the question is what should we be eating?

Pollan is on a mission to save us from the confusion created by these institutions and to steer us away from “edible foodlike substances,” which he says provide the bulk of supermarket food. To avoid this processed foodlike matter, we should, he suggests, only shop at the far edges of the supermarket. These opposite ends showcase the animal proteins on one side and produce on the other. Pretty much everything in the middle is a forgery of what food should be. If we can focus on these opposite ends of the supermarket, we will be better prepared to follow his concise nutritional mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Of course, the food industry packages and markets their most profitable processed foods more aggressively and tries to take our focus off real food to the point that many of us don’t know what real food is.

The problem of what we should eat, and how much, is compounded, Pollan points out, by our once trustworthy parental guidance having been replaced in our current era, “The Age of Nutritionism,” by an unholy amalgam of food marketers, scientists, and government officials who impose upon us “ever shifting dietary guidelines, food-labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids.” These guidelines constantly change and often contradict the previous guidelines often resulting in public apathy and cynicism regarding the pursuit of healthy eating. Even worse, The Age of Nutritionism has over the last half century “actually made us less healthy and fatter.”

Pollan argues that we should not despair. There is a light and that light is beamed from what our mothers or our mother’s mothers ate for our dietary guidance because what they tended to eat was real food. And this is precisely Pollan’s purpose—“to offer a defense of food and the eating thereof.”

Not only is Pollan concerned with defining real food, he convincingly discerns real eating from mindless consumption and here of course his book intersects with Brian Wansink’s. Pollan quotes the eighteenth-century gastronomist, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who distinguished from the human act of eating, a rich cultural event, with the manner in which animals “feed.”

Pollan is not exaggerating when he claims he must make a defense of food because real food is being attacked by the “Nutritional Industrial Complex,” which is attempting to obliterate real food by replacing it with the “ideology of nutritionsim,” a dangerous dogma comprised of three false tenets: One, nutrients are more important than food. Two, only the scientific community can grasp the highly-specialized world of nutritionism and we, the general public, are at their mercy to guide us. Three, eating is not a cultural act of celebration, as the anthropologists have taught us over the centuries, but a “narrow concept of physical health” in which all the soul and joy has been squeezed out of the act of eating, which is now a cold, technical activity. Worse, this obsession with “correct” eating has pushed us toward extremes that seriously compromise our health and happiness. As Pollan writes: “We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

To steer us back on course toward healthy moderation, Pollan examines the serious shortcomings of the Western diet described as “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything—except vegetable, fruits, and whole grains.” This diet is so contrary to human health, according to Pollan, that no degree of adjusting it with nutritionism can render it suitable for our consumption. We must, Pollan argues, wean ourselves off of the Western diet altogether. In its place we must embrace the farmer’s market,  the “organic movement” and “local agriculture,” all of which are part of the “postindustrial era of food.” Eating local and organic foods, that is to say, eating real foods instead of industrialized processed foods, is the foundation for freeing ourselves from the Western diet. As a general rule, Pollan writes that we shouldn’t eat food that our great grandmother “wouldn’t recognize as food.” Additionally, we should avoid food products that contain unfamiliar ingredients and include high-fructose corn syrup. Another warning that the food we’re eating isn’t really food per se but a food product is when it boasts some health claim or other. This often means that the product was processed and the food industry is claiming that the process adds some nutritional value to the food, but what this really means is that a real food has been turned into a foodstuff. Perhaps the best way to eat real food is to avoid the supermarket and shop at the farmer’s market, which sells real food—produce—fruits, and vegetables. The farmer’s market features the very foods that are in line with Pollan’s mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Pollan’s crusade to turn eating into a celebratory cultural experience focused on real food makes him a torch-bearer of sanity and moderation in an age of misguided do-gooder nutritionists who, as Pollan shows, keep changing the rules, keep making us confused, keep stuffing substandard foodstuffs down our throats, and keep leading us down a path of dangerous dietary extremes.