Pollan’s In Defense of Food
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Chew on This gives us a review of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
. He’s the guy who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals:
The moral of this story - that humans do better on food that’s as close to its original state as possible - is the subject of In Defence of Food the latest book from US writer Michael Pollan. author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma . In Defence of Food is partly about how progress in food processing created the western diet which in turn helped fuel new epidemics - like diabetes - which modern medicine is now trying to fix.
The book is also about what he calls the rise in nutritionism - our habit of focussing on what single nutrients or components in food - like fibre - can do for us rather than on the benefits of eating the whole food itself. ‘Nutritionism’ makes us think that you can make a processed food healthy simply by tossing in some extra nutrients - think refined breakfast cereals with some added fibre and vitamins.
I still like Pollan’s advice for escaping the processed diet:
- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number.
- Avoid food products that make health claims (food products making health claims are in packets and more likely to be processed, he points out)
- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle - processed foods dominate the center aisles, while fresher food is around the walls.
- Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Pollan’s advice here is to try and shop at farmer’s markets whenever you can.
