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In a
nation of Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chickens, and Taco Supremes,
over 60% of Americans are either overweight or obese. Why
is the collective weight of America growing so much in the
past few decades? In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater's
Manifesto, Michael Pollan attempts to answer these questions
and more.
Unlike
diet books, Pollan does not tell his readers that they need
to cut bread, red meat, or a combination of both from their
diets while engorging themselves on various products from
various companies. The book does not center so much on what
one should eat but how one should eat, and he sums up his
entire book with one simple statement: "Eat food. Not too
much. Mostly plants." And it is with this statement that Pollan
takes the readers on a journey through the twentieth century
history of food in America and how a good portion of Americans
have become simultaneously obese and malnourished.
Pollan
believes that the main problem concerning food and eating
in America is that most Americans do not consume food but
rather a mass pressed into a shape resembling food. In some
cases, these foods are so chock-full of chemicals and added
nutrients that they do not resemble natural food—food
that someone's great grandmother would recognize as food.
It is
for this reason that Pollan states to "eat food," but it is
easier said than done because of the food industry and big
business. Only so much can be done with a tomato or an eggplant,
but breakfast cereals and fad foods can make money, and these
products gain much of the support of big business. Margarine,
for example, is considered by Pollan to be the first processed
food, and when it was first developed in the nineteenth century
it was dyed pink in order to distinguish it from butter because
it was not a real food. However, food companies labored to
get the pink dye out of margarine and to have the word "imitation"
removed from its label. The government consented to do so
as long as margarine and other processed foods contained equal
nutrients to real foods. As a result, one is hard-pressed
to tell what food is real and what is fake in the grocery
store, and with government approval of certain processed foods
to fight certain ailments, the customers, like cattle, follow
where they are told to go.
To counter
this, Pollan states that Americans should look to the diets
of other countries, and he concentrates on countries such
as France, Italy, Greece, and Spain, whose diets are quite
high in fat but whose people tend to be thinner and healthier.
This is because they are people who appreciate the value of
traditional, natural foods, and unlike America, they take
the time to eat and to enjoy their food without gulping down
as much as possible in as short of time as possible. Pollan
believes that Americans should move away from their "Western
Diet" and come to enjoy food again for its quality, not its
quantity.
Food
and eating is a touchy subject because many people are quite
sensitive about their weight, and a book informing them that
most of what they eat is wrong can be poorly received. However,
Pollan possesses an easy, humorous style of writing that harshly
criticizes how America and its money-conscious diet is killing
its citizens but does not offend individual readers by picking
on individual eating habits. Instead, it gives a larger picture
of how big money and government policy has led to a great
amount of the obesity in this country because food has moved
away from being something of pleasure and communion into a
business.
It should
be noted that Michael Pollan is a journalist and not a scientist.
For this reason, some of his writing must be taken with a
grain of salt, including his discrediting most scientific
surveys that focus on nutrients and not food as a whole. But
with the prevalence of processed foods, cheap fast foods that
do not rot, and America's turning away from healthier foods,
his view might benefit the reader more than many of the scientific
studies performed in the last 30 years. Since evidence shows
that cultures who stick to traditional diets stay healthy
and those who adapt to the "Western Diet" get sick, something
must truly be done to save America from Twinkies.
(June,
2008)
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