Blog Post 4

In Defense of Michael Pollan

I found Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to be particularly boring. Not because of the subject, but because of the way that subject is presented. After I finally finished, I felt like I just read a 201 page research paper. That aside, Pollan clearly presents his argument and supports it with an overwhelming about of evidence and detail.

Pollan’s main argument is that the so-called Western Diet is extremely unhealthy; it’s the reason that America has the highest percentage of obese people. The Western Diet, he says, is too much processed and refined foods and too little fruits and vegetables. Most of the food that Americans eat isn’t food at all; its “synthetic” edible substances recreated in laboratories and factories. All the weird chemicals that go into these substances are what is making people sick and overweight. Replacing these foods with organic meats, fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy products would give people a happier, healthier life.

Most of the book is Pollan describing research done by him and many other people that seems to support his claim. He starts off by describing how scientists have tried to isolate a single or small handful of compounds that make people healthy, and then try to add them to other foods in a kind of weird experiment. What these scientists don’t understand is that it’s not necessarily a single compound in foods that makes it good for you; it’s very possible that a whole range of chemicals present work together to make you healthy. Most of the developments in nutritional science has made things worse, not better.

He moves on to describe problems with the Western Diet. One issue is that Americans are consuming more calories while eating fewer nutrients. Another issue is that methods that the food industry uses to get more out of their crops, like the refining process and planting huge amounts of a single crop, result iin food having less nutrients than they did a century ago. So know, in order to get the minimum amount of nutrients we need, we have to eat more. Also, he says, food choice used to be based on culture (another word for your mom); now, it’s based on science. People are choosing foods that scientist say is good for them instead.

The last part of the book is composed of tips that Pollan offers to help people make better choices about what and how much they eat. Some of these tips include treating meat as a side, not an entrée; eat more leaves; eat whole meals instead of snacking all day; eat only when at a table and with other people; avoid products with unrecognizable or unpronounceable ingredients; and my personal favorite, avoid products that make health claims.

Another underlying argument Pollan makes is that nutritionalism is an overcomplicated science that has no real bearing on trying to eat healthy. Focusing on just a few nutrients is not the way to decide what food to eat; instead, you should just “eat food your great-grandmother would recognize.”

While I didn’t neccisarily enjoy In Defense of Food, the subject is an interesting one, and Pollan makes many valid points to support his claim denouncing the Western Diet.