New food order

>> Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food
offers eaters alternatives to the
propaganda of nutritionism

by Juliet Waters

Orhorexia is not yet listed as a medically recognized disorder, but it seems to be well on its way, according to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The term refers to people who have an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. Everyone knows one (if they aren’t one already). As far as Pollan is concerned, the United States is becoming an entire nation of orthorexics. The key qualifier here, however, is unhealthy obsession. Given how quickly Pollan has come up with a follow-up to his much discussed book on epicurean food politics, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan himself is clearly guilty of some level of food obsession.

Then again, who isn’t? Who couldn’t be, in our world of study after study of the effects of every letter of vitamin, species of fat and category of carbohydrate? This is a world in which the Mars Corporation recently endowed a chair in “Chocolate Science” at a California university in order to study chocolate’s nutritional value. Soon to be endowed, no doubt, chairs of nougat and caramel.

If we’re going to be obsessed with something, Pollan argues, we’re best off being obsessed with staying away from the products and propaganda of “nutritionism.” Defined here, nutritionism is the ideology that supports the premise that the nutrients present in food are more important than the food itself; and because nutrients are invisible, we need the help of experts to figure out what to eat.

What we really need, however, writes Pollan, is to recall that humans, like all animals, have been managing to choose their own food for millennia without the advice of experts and the help of studies. Moreover, back when we were doing this, we suffered from significantly lower rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. In fact, if we are going to be consulting any experts on food, we’re probably best consulting fish. The source of all that healthy omega-three oil in their bodies is the green underwater plant life they eat. And they don’t even eat that much of it.

That Pollan is such a massive fan of omega-three is evidence that few of us can escape at least one obsession with a nutrient. But few can argue with the basic premise supporting his ideology: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This, Pollan believes, is pretty much all the advice we need on a healthy diet.

Simple? If only. The problem now lies in deciding what the hell food is, and then finding it. In the last century, so much science has gone into food production that it’s become amazingly difficult for North Americans to find the kind of food that humans ate before science began working on it.

Whether it’s in soil engineering, livestock management, or what gets done to food to turn it into packageable products, there’s good reason to be suspicious of most of the food available to us. “You are what your food eats.” But few of the animals we eat actually eat plants, as opposed to engineered feed; and few of the plants that they, or we, eat come from reasonably natural soil.

Historically, whenever the government has made any push to recommend an actual food as opposed to a “nutrient,” or worse, to eat less of a particular food, the pressure from the food industrial complex has been massive. Try to imagine the government supporting just one of Pollan’s rules of healthy eating, like “get out of the supermarket whenever possible.” Politically, they’re better off giving us food charts.

The problem, as Pollan makes amply clear, is that nutritionism, especially privately funded nutritionism, has a lot riding on keeping us unhealthy. The unhealthier we are, the more we need experts. The more studies they give us, the more we become confused and anxious. And the more confused and anxious we are, of course, the more we eat.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan,
Penguin, hc, 244 pp, $26.50