Three Takeaways from "In Defense of Food"
Michael Pollan's book about how most 'food' is actually fake
Michael Pollan has a follow-up book to The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he tackles what omnivores like ourselves should in fact eat.
In the book, Pollan lays out the radical changes in the American diet, which have rapidly shifted since the turn of the 20th century. Chief among them: food science. By reducing a food to its component nutrients, and attempting to conquer them, food scientists have created food that leads to increased prevalence of chronic diseases: diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, etc.
Pollan has distilled his food advice into this simple mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The first part, “eat food” seems self-evident, however as Pollan goes onto explain, it is anything but. Most ‘food’ stocked in supermarket shelves is not actually what our grandparents would call food, rather pure calories plus maybe a few nutrients, cleverly disguised in an envelope that looks like traditional foods.
Not wanting to give the whole book away, here are three illustrative takeaways I got from the book.
1. A food is more than a sum of it’s parts.
Take wheat for example, a grass. With a big seed. Already, wheat and other grasses were a necessity for civilization to develop. They were easily dried, and could be traded and transported easily. But this was not enough. Humans in there infinite wisdom sought to further refine the wheat seed—to reduce it. Thus, flour was conceived of as a way to make this source of calories more condensed, and more shelf stable. The first mills could grind the whole grain very with little finesse. Although early stone grinding could remove the bran from the wheat seed, all other parts of the grain—the germ, the embryo, and the endosperm— were ground together.
This was progress. A streamlined source of calories pound for pound without all the fiber from the bran weighing it down. However, it still had limitations. By grinding the germ of the wheat grain, many pesky oils were contained in the flour. They added rich nutrients to the flour, but made it turn a dim yellowish color. More importantly, due to the oils present, the flour would go rancid if left on the shelf too long. This too, could be solved via innovation, and refined further. The advent of rollers allowed the bran and embryo to be separated before the milling, leaving only he endosperm to b ground into flour. Thus, we have the modern white flour. Pure and white. Vastly superior in calorie content, and more practical because of its super long shelf life.
But through all that innovation, something got lost. White flour is very good at delivering calories, but they are almost entirely empty, meaning devoid of any nutrition. Wheat flour is simply distilled energy. By removing the bran, many of the valuable nutrients in wheat flour vanished: folic acid, other B vitamins, antioxidants such as carotenes, omega-3 fatty acids, and much of the protein vanished. This presented itself in multiple ‘deficiency diseases’. Lack of B-vitamins caused pellagra and beriberi1, while the public was also found to have a deficiency of folic acid.
Still, these were solvable problems! In the 1930s millers began injecting B vitamins into their flour, and in 1996 public health officials ordered millers to add folic acid into their flours. The problem of course, is that it’s easier to notice a deficiency in a diet, rather than the benefit reaped by eating a certain food. Indeed, even with our B-vitamins and folic acid artificially re-injected into our white flour, something slightly intangible is better about eating whole grains.
In a study2, it was found that those who eat a diet rich whole grains, were less likely to die “from all causes”. In addition, even after for controlling for levels of B vitamins, folic acid, dietary fiber, iron, zinc, and more, they found additional health benefits to eating whole grains. Something intangible, or otherwise unreduced from the grain was leading to a health benefit. Food science has not discovered what, or else “WonderBread” would be as healthy as
In our effort to reduce and streamline, and filter down a food to it’s ‘useful’ components, something is lost. Think about other refined foods: apples become apple juice, potatoes become chips, corn becomes corn syrup, a cow becomes ground beef. What invisible links are we breaking? What health benefits are we losing by stripping down foods to their component parts?
Pollan ends this section by stating: “A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts.” Food for thought.
2. We are divorced from our food chain.
Food is a relationship with the Earth. Or, it used to be anyway.
In the past, farmers could see the cyclical nature of the food cycle by looking out of their windows. It was beneficial to have healthy cows, which in turn would produce healthy manure, which in turn would grow healthy food. Cows, it turns out, have four stomachs designed to digest and process grass, and turn it into many usable nutrients in the form of manure. The cows needed the grasses and plants to thrive, and crucially, the cash crops needed the cows to enrich their soil.
However we’ve now largely divorced the crop from the land that it’s growing on. Once it was discovered that plants largely need only the ‘big three’ macronutrients to grow—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium— large scale farms began injecting these in the form of fertilizer. This fertilizer was synthesized in labs, from fossil fuels.3 Cow manure became instantly devalued, and in turn so did the cows. Almost overnight, it was now feasible to plant just corn, or soybeans, or anything else, and no longer a need to tend to cows as well. Big agriculture was injecting the exact nutrient compositions it needed to grow . Hydroponics that just happens to have dirt as the growing medium.
This untangling had many downstream effects that bubbled to the surface in the years and decades after the divorce. Because we no longer rely on healthy cows to create healthy soil, we can afford to grow cows and cash crops in totally different locations. And of course, it’s much more efficient to keep cattle indoors and feed them corn seed. Unfortunately for the cows, their four stomachs are only evolved to process grass, and therefore they get extremely sick and must be put on antibiotics.4 Understandably, this leads to cows producing much more unhealthy manure. Lucky for us, we have fertilizer.
3. You’re probably eating imitation food, and you don’t know it.
In 1938, congress passed a law called the “Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act” which among other things required that imitation foods be labelled as such.5 Seems reasonable, however in 1973 the FDA (note, not an an act of congress) quietly revoked this requirement. Walk into any supermarket in the united states, and you can see and buy a thing labelled ‘bread’ on the packaging, which is not, in fact, bread. A bread product, perhaps, but not bread in the traditional sense.
In fact the 1938 rule is based off of the “traditional foods that everyone knows”.6 The notion was that some food are so ubiquitous, and commonplace that there is a known, common-sense cultural definition about what that food is, such as bread and cheese. However food science has gotten so advanced and deceptive that it’s impossible to discern whether that cheese you’re looking at in a package matches that culturally agreed upon definition of cheese. It only seemed fair then, to know, that if you’re eating something labelled as cheese, you are in fact eating cheese, not an imitation cheese product.
Lobbyists in the game were delighted when this imitation foods rule was repealed. Ever since, the line between imitation and real food has been getting more and more blurry. And sadly, our cultural definitions are changing to match these trends. A new food-normal is evolving slowly but surely, with cultural norms of flavor, portion size, looks, and textures of foods no longer being passed down from parent to child, but rather from all-knowing food scientists. One of the most counter-cultural things you can do then, is to learn bake that loaf of bread yourself.
Please consider reading Michael Pollan’s 2008 “In Defense of Food” if you enjoyed this and want to learn a whole lot more on the subject. I personally believe that the USA needs more food literacy, and this would benefit anyone who wants to be a more conscious eater.
Michael Pollan , “In Defense of Food” (2008) page 109
David R. Jacobs and Lyn M. Steffen, "Nutrients, Foods, and Dietary Patterns as Exposures in Research: A Framework for Food Synergy," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003; 78 (suppl): 508S-13S.
Michael Pollan , “In Defense of Food” (2008) page 109
Michael Pollan , “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006) page 78
https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/histories-product-regulation/1938-food-drug-and-cosmetic-act
Michael Pollan , “In Defense of Food” (2008) page 150