26 September, 2009

For Michael Pollan, Food, and Me

I heard it on the radio
Too much of what they said wasn't so
And now we've got to do those things
That they thought before were so wrong
To be healthy and strong


~~~~~Genesis, "Living Forever"


Long before Michael Pollan was writing books about junk food and the Western diet, the great social commentators (ahem) Genesis were singing about health food fads. One study says nutrient X is harmful so people start avoiding it. Then another study comes out which says that X isn't so bad after all so people reintroduce it into their diets. The cycle goes on.



Pollan addressed this and much more in his speech at the Kohl Center on Thursday which was part of the UW's Go Big Read program, a campus-wide reading program which had selected his In Defense of Food as its initial book. I attended Pollan's speech never having read any of his books. However, I have read a couple articles from his pen and heard him interviewed so I was not completely ignorant going in.

The pamphlet I received upon entering noted that Pollan "has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect". This distinction is hogwash. Just because human beings build malls and wear Snuggies doesn't make us supranatural. We are simians just like our monkey cousins and our tools have not somehow removed us from the natural world. This gripe aside…

After a greeting by Chancellor Biddy Martin and an introduction by a UW professor whose name I didn't catch (Bill something-or-other), Pollan ascended the podium and proceeded to unpack a grocery bag. After several seconds, the table next to him was laden mostly with highly processed foods: a box of Froot Loops, Pop Tarts, Wonder Bread, et al. He noted the presence of some farmers in the audience clad in green t-shirts who, rightly or wrongly, see him as being anti-farmer and welcomed them to the conversation.

Pollan explained that he wanted to connect the dots between our food system, our diet, and our health problems. No small feat. Starting with that box of Froot Loops, he said that "food" inside was 44% sugar by weight yet the box had a Healthy Choice label on it which was bestowed by an industry group. Some people may have come to protest Pollan, but I don't think anyone in the arena took issue here. "Eating has become very complicated," he told us. We need to be experts, of sorts, to understand and evaluate the nutritional claims of what passes as food these days.

The Froot Loops incident was illustrative of what Pollan calls "Nutritionism", which is his term for how American generally view food. There are four premises behind it:

1) Food is the sum of its nutrient parts.
2) We can't see nutrients so we need food scientists to direct our diets.
3) There are "good" nutrients and "bad" nutrients.
4) The point of eating is how it affects one's health.

He then noted that other cultures see different values in eating such as pleasure, a sense of identity, and the act itself as a communal exercise. Pollan traced this attitude back to the "scientific eating" trend of the 19th century and you can watch it in action by viewing the BBC program Edwardian Supersize Me. In one scene the show's heroes can be seen leaning over their plates at a certain angle, chewing a certain number of times, etc. in pursuit of eating scientifically. More proximately, he explained how George McGovern's Senate committee on nutrition spawned the government direction "eat less red meat" and that this led directly to Nutritionism.



I have a wee disagreement with Pollan here. The premises behind his Nutritionism are, generally speaking, not recent inventions as he would have us believe. While specifics may differ, the attitudes are age-old. Medieval texts advise people on how to eat according to season so that their humors remain in balance. For instance, in the summer, it was recommended that people eat foods that were "cool" and "moist" such as cucumbers, apples, and veal with vinegar. There is no qualitative difference between a person in 1400 eating to balance humors and someone today eating to increase their anti-oxidant intake.

This isn't a major issue but I think that anyone who is looking to overthrow Nutritionism should keep it in mind. Big Agribusiness didn't just pull these attitudes out of its ass yesterday. Indeed, they have been with Western eaters, if not eaters around the world, for centuries. Pick your battles wisely. Perhaps it would be better to put a different spin on these attitudes rather than trying to discard them wholesale.

As Pollan went over this material, I couldn't help but think that Nutritionism has a cousin which I call Herb Supplementism with its own attendant premises such as:

1) Natural = good; modern Western medicine = bad
2) Herbal supplements are good because they have nutrients that improve our health.
3) We can't see the nutrients in leaves, roots, and berries so we need people who say things like "The Chinese have used this stuff for centuries" to tell us what supplements to spend copious amounts of money on and for what reason.

Look at the claims made on the bottles of these pills that all have asterisks on them with the caveat "This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease." They are just as ridiculous as the claim that Froot Loops is healthy and both sets of claims are made by large industries looking to part you from your lucre.



Pollan continued by saying that despite supposedly having a wealth of information to help us make better choices in eating, Americans continue to see a rise in health problems related to their diets. He talked about what Genesis sang about. Saturated fats are bad so we come up with replacements such as hydrogenated oils which has trans fats which are even worse. So saturated fats become "good" again.

He then addressed the persistence of Nutritionism. First, it was sustained by effective marketing. Second, Pollan said that unhealthy processed foods are cash cows in contrast to the unprocessed kind. When you can make more money producing Pop Tarts, you've got little incentive to sell broccoli. In addition, government subsidies promote massive crops of corn and soy, which dominate our processed foods. In other words, our whole food system is slanted towards unhealthy foods – from the crops in the ground to the supermarket and everywhere in between. In his words, the American diet is a catastrophe.

While the bulk of his talk was dedicated to documenting the catastrophe, he spent his final minutes offering solutions. Pollan rolled out his famous dicta "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.", "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.", and "If it has more than five ingredients, it's not food." Shop at farmers markets, he implored. You will get better food and engage your fellow citizens more than if you shop at supermarkets. Changing how we eat would lead to a revolution in American agriculture which would also benefit farmers who would be paid better for the food they grow and produce.

We didn’t stick around for the Q&A session but I have to admit that there wasn't much in his speech that I would call controversial unless you are Monsanto or ADM. I thought that the main weakness of his argument came towards the end when he suggested remedies to our situation. Perhaps he goes into more detail in his book but, going from what he said Thursday, I felt that his advice had a rather narrow audience. A lot more work needs to go into implementing his ideas if more than a rather small number of people are going to be able to eat by his dicta.

Take Detroit, a city of nearly one million people. A Wall Street Journal article from this past summer notes that "No national grocery chain operates a store" there. In large part, people there are left with fast food and the processed foods from convenience stores. Additionally, smaller, locally-owned markets aren't up to the challenge. I am very skeptical that farmers markets are the solution here, although they can certainly be part of it.

Jim Goodman over at Civil Eats wrote:

When farmers disparage small-scale ecological agriculture because it “will never feed the world” they conveniently forget that conventional agriculture has not fed the world either, despite 60 years of promises to do so.

So what if conventional ag hasn't fed the world? Does that mean without it everyone would be fed? Or is it possible that without it, we'd have even more people starving on this planet? Norman Borlaug isn't credited with saving the lives of one billion people by running farmers markets. He did it by breeding new strains of wheat and rice.

But his methods weren't without critics, especially in those camps that felt that genetic crossbreeding was unnatural and had negative effects, which included large-scale, monoculture farming operations that required input-intensive farming techniques.

Borlaug refuted those claims by saying the green revolution was a change in the right direction. Referring to the environmental lobbyists he once remarked, “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”


I am getting a bit off track here because Pollan did not address hunger in developing worlds in his speech and, to the best of my knowledge, does not do so in his books. I bring it up to say that, if we start transforming agriculture here in the U.S., it will have an effect outside our borders. Pollan talks about the eating habits of the richest, most well-off people that have ever existed on this planet and I am convinced that they are connected to those in developing countries and elsewhere. We may not feed the whole world, but we do feed part of it.

UW-Madison food scientist John Lucey stood up for his profession by noting that "scientists have helped preserve foods longer, improved food safety and cut meal preparation time for busy parents." Again, with the caveat that I've not read his books, I wish Pollan would give some credit to modern food science or at least acknowledge it as a double-edged sword because we Americans are the most privileged eaters in all of human history. My European ancestors didn't spend their summers tanning and water skiing. Instead they were fending off starvation. Grain stocks from the previous autumn were running out as was the meat from that pig they had slaughtered and salted. July was not a fun-filled month for many back in the day as they struggled to forage and perhaps trap an animal for food. This kind of seasonal starvation is no longer a problem in the West and it's due, in part, to modern food science. The citizens of Detroit could sure use some supermarkets, but they're position is a million miles away from an incredibly large number of people on this planet who fight starvation and disease daily. The struggle of the wealthiest group of people on this planet to avoid Twinkies pales in comparison to the struggles of many millions, if not billions, more to simply obtain potable water.

Having said all this, I will not hasten to add that I intend to read his books. I also would argue that, if his visit gets people thinking about the wider issues around food and gets people who've never been to a farm to go to one, then the Go Big Read program can surely count its first effort as a success.

(Event photos found here.)

Epilogue

The professor who introduced Pollan noted that he liked to turn things around and look at different viewpoints. By way of example, he mentioned the author's The Botany of Desire where Pollan took the idea of Man domesticating plants and instead looked at the world as if plants had domesticated Man.

And so it occurred to me to do the same. Namely, what if we turn Pollan's maxim "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" around:

What did our great-grandmothers eat that we here in 2009 don't recognize as food?

I'll start things off with brains. What else?

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