Those pithy statements in the title represent the best advice that food journalist Michael Pollan can give us about eating in a healthy and sensible fashion.
Eat real food (stuff that grows in or on the land or in the sea). Don't eat too much of it (a nice way of saying eat less). Try to eat mainly plants (vegetables, fruits, grains) so go easy on the meats.
If the great American eating public (and that includes most of us) followed his advice, we might be able to put a large dent in cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and many environmental problems that we have created. And, in turn, that might save us hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care costs.
Last night Regee and I went to hear Michael Pollan speak at the Strathmore Concert Hall in Maryland. He is the author of many books about food and health. Those books have made many people think hard about what constitutes "food" and how perverse the American idea of food and eating has become.
His most recent book is called Food Rules. In a very slim volume (naturally) it sets out some rules (personal food policies, a little traditional wisdom and new insights) about the food we should be eating and the way in which which should be eating it. That might sound a bit preachy but the book is full of humor, good sense and revelations about ourselves and our society.
An illustrated version of the book will be coming out on November 1. Pollan said that he had updated it to include some new rules and sayings that readers of the original book have sent in--including this one:
"The whiter the bread, the sooner you're dead!"
“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”
― Michael PollanThe point he was politely making is that a lot of the "food" we find on the shelves in the middle section of the supermarket cannot really be called "food" as it is traditionally known. He prefers to call it "highly processed" or "edible food-like substances".
“Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.”
― Michael Pollan
The audience was laughing along as he produced each strange product. Actually, it is no laughing matter. This is what I would call "industrial food". It is highly processed (mainly soy and corn, the two largest crops in this country), aggressively marketed (the food industry spend $42 billion a year on advertising) and it is cheap--ridiculously cheap. And, of course, we love it because it is cheap and just about everything contains salt, sugar and fat in cunning proportions to make us keep coming back for more. Food as addiction!
“The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them. ”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
He told us that our so-called Western Diet consists of "lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything — except fruits, vegetables and whole grains". Compare that to the many different traditional diets around the world--from Inuit (high in blubber) and Zulu (lots of milk and blood) to Amazonian tribes (high in starch) and the people of the Mediterranean (lots of wine, fresh local ingredients and sinful desserts). None of these traditional diets have been known to kill vast numbers of people. However, the Western diet is directly linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity--all of them killers. What on earth is going on here?
“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual
One interesting statistic he gave us was that Americans spend 7% of their incomes on "food". The Chinese spend 35% and the French and Italians between 15-18% of their incomes on food (without quotes). That is a good indication of where food comes on our list of priorities.
He then went on to describe how we seem to have become more interested in "nutritionism" than whole food. Fruit and vegetables are known to be "good" for us. We have been consuming them for hundreds of thousands of years with good results. We know they contain nutrients. But now our food "scientists" are trying to find out why they are good for us. They have been happily isolating nutrients that may be the X-factor in terms of benefits for us--vitamins, beta-carotene, antioxidants, omegas 3, 6 and 9 are just a few. These are what he calls the "blessed" nutrients. Then, of course, you have the "bad" or "evil" substances such as trans fats, saturated fats etc.
However, the sad fact is that once these "blessed" nutrients are isolated and put into supplements, they don't seem to do the same job. In fact, isolated beta-carotene has been shown to be quite dangerous. Our food "scientists" are a long way away from understanding all the complex interactions of real food in our digestive systems. A new report comes out every day stating that some "blessed" nutrient is not thought to be so beneficial any more. Vitamin E was the most recent one!! But we continue to focus on "nutritionism" rather than whole food.
“The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology.
In Pollan's view, "nutritionism" and "nutrients" have become marketing tools. The amazing presence or thankful absence of blessed or evil nutrients are plastered all over the packaging and people buy accordingly. (Have you ever seen any writing on an apple or a cabbage?). Who deliberately looks for products with trans-fats any more? Aren't they outlawed in New York? But, equally, who can go past a big bottle of POM without thinking about all those amazing antioxidants that are going to rejuvenate our bodies? You get the point.
“The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology.
In Pollan's view, "nutritionism" and "nutrients" have become marketing tools. The amazing presence or thankful absence of blessed or evil nutrients are plastered all over the packaging and people buy accordingly. (Have you ever seen any writing on an apple or a cabbage?). Who deliberately looks for products with trans-fats any more? Aren't they outlawed in New York? But, equally, who can go past a big bottle of POM without thinking about all those amazing antioxidants that are going to rejuvenate our bodies? You get the point.
“...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. ”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual
One part of me wants to say: "Yeah, I've heard it all before. Big Oil, Big Money, Big Pharma--and now Big Food. But another part of me is thinking that Big Tobacco is still around and that we know they have been trying to kill us for decades. And now a lot of them are in the food business and being just as ruthless. But then I am just paranoid. Surely no American food corporation (Monsanto, Walmart, Purdue, Kellogg?) thinks that profit is more important than my health? But I digress. Back to Pollan.
So what's the solution? Pollan believes that just cooking your own meals, however basic, is a good start. You can only cook food! Vegetables can be found in America! You can eat meat but make it the side dish not the main course--and remember the Meatless Monday movement. Fruits and grains abound--eat them. Try to stay out of supermarkets. There are lots of farmers' markets around. Eat whatever is in season. Eat local. Remember the rules. And also remember that the French and others find it very strange that Americans often eat alone, eat in their cars, eat while walking on the street, eat in front of the television and generally see eating as a chore. Food is not a celebration if eaten alone.
“... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
You can sigh and say this all sounds very nice for those who can afford it--and good food is very much at the mercy of your own financial health. But he asked whether it wasn't time to be a little more active on the policy front. Would it be catastrophic to subsidize some real foods, to make them more available in poorer parts of inner cities, to make some portion of food stamps available just for real foods? In the current political climate just about any suggestion on food is going to be cut and diced by one or the other political party, by Big Food and their lobbyists, by enraged communities who don't want to be pushed around by "food Nazis" and all the usual stuff.
In my view, tackling food policy is not for the faint of heart. It hits a lot of emotional chords and politicians are not known for their courage in such situations. But Americans have shown that they can undergo remarkable corrections and transformations without killing off society in general. Whether it be smoking, seatbelts or trans-fats, a way has usually been found to move in a more beneficial direction for society as a whole. Let's hope that in the highly contested food and health arenas we can ultimately find a way to discover the real and very beneficial relationships that exist between animals, food, family, community and the wider environment.
“Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
To end on a humorous note, Pollan showed us a bottle of some energy drink called the Urban Warrior or something to that effect. Who knows what it really contained but, like Red Bull and other "energy" drinks, it probably contained high levels of sugar and caffeine and other (legal) stimulants. But this product claimed that it was going to reverse all the effects of work-related stress and late partying. In fact, it was going to have a radical effect on your brain itself, rejuvenate it and juice it up so that you could get back into the fray the next day.
He told us to be ready to see more products that were going to have a startling effect on your brain because the food industry had just identified a huge new segment of the market--us poor old retired geezers who were forgetting things and generally winding down. Yes, that's us--the "cognitive decline market!!"
Well I have an answer to that. Eat more vegetables and fruits (and a little red wine) and your brain will prosper.
In other words EAT WELL....umm, that is, eat food...not too much--and mostly plants!!
Note: All photos in this blog were taken from the Press Kit on Michael Pollan's website: http://michaelpollan.com/
In addition, all the quotes throughout the text are taken from: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2121.Michael_Pollan?page=1
Here is a complete list of all Michael Pollan's books:
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