In Defense of Food

Food is not the combination of its nutrients. A meal is not the combination of the foods.

Michael Pollan attacked food science: it is really not much more than voodoo or, at best, tools for the food industry to make money. Experiments proved that we can be as healthy as Japanese, Eskimo, or Europeans as long as we abandon the “Western diet,” really “American diet” of highly processed foods and large amount of refined sugar.

It is interesting that many of the proof points Michael Pollan made were based on food science publications and research.

He said that the American food industry, a giant sector that formed a very close partnership with the US government, is poisoning us and making a huge profit doing so. First, the government subsidizes grain production — corn, soy, and wheat — to make them unnaturally abundant and cheap. Next, food enterprises turned them into highly profitable items sold in the supermarkets. The number of derivative products from those grains are mind boggling: an average American consumes nearly 3000 calories per day from corn, soy, wheat, or rice. Those calories are nearly 100% “empty” in the sense that they are nearly pure sugar. These empty calories then crowd out other foods and make us fat and sick. Then the medical industry spawned up to treat us, so that we can continue eating those calories.

It gets worse.

The food industry produces only those can be mass produced and easily transported. This makes most foods mono-cultural, there is no variation in beef, pork, chicken, milk, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, etc. Whatever is produced must have commercial benefits: fast growth, insect/disease tolerant, ease of harvest and transportation, etc. They don’t have to be good for us. Americans are losing the protection of diversity in foods.

What to do? Michael Pollan offered several simple rules (many are the same his other book “Food Rules”).

• Try not to shop from supermarkets. They are really the outlets of the food industry that are poisoning us. Buy from farmer’s market instead. If you must shop at supermarkets, stay at the perimeter and stay out of the aisles, that are stocked with pure processed foods.

• Don’t buy anything that does not exist 100 years ago, such as Twinkies, Go-gurts, or whatever has high-fructose corn syrup in it. Be careful, while breads existed then, Wonder Bread did not.

• Don’t buy anything with a health claim. If something is supposed to lower cholesterol, reduce heart disease, lose weight, what-so-ever, they are likely to have been fortified with something to make such claims. As such, they would have to displace something else that are most likely naturally.

I kept on reading Michael Pollan since his Omnivore’s Dilemma. I felt, however, that this shall be the last, at least on the topic of foods. He has become repetitive and too single-minded. Omnivore’s Dilemma was a personal journey with revelation, discoveries, and redemption. This one has become proselytizing. While it was informative, it was also less fun.