Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
I’ve really got to hand it to Michael Pollan for being so savvy with his catchy, catchy taglines.
I just finished another book by him, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Overall, it was a very quick and easy read. It was equally interesting as The Botany of Desire, but definitely more politicized. The book is divided into three sections and the first two deal with “nutritionism” and the Western diet and the accompanying diseases. These first two sections do a good job in dispelling ambiguities of the politics of food and agriculture and exactly how much policies have affected the way and what we eat now and consequently, have made us “overfed and undernourished.” Much of these first two chapters deal with a lot of potential and relevant ideas, especially with the healthcare debate going on right now. An interesting, but seemingly obvious figure he gave was that “in 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food, and 5.2 percent of national income on healthcare. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on healthcare has climbed to 16 percent of national income” (p. 187-188).
It’s the third section, where he attempts to elaborate on the tagline, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” that I take issue with. Granted, it’s still very good and informative, but some rules of thumb he offers are simply out of most people’s abilities, financially. If we could all afford to eat organic and local, only shop at farmer’s markets, and drink a glass of wine every night, of course we’d be happier and healthier. However, Pollan does acknowledge this division, especially in explaining his “Pay more, eat less” sub-clause.
I can’t help but approach these simple suggestions with cynicism. How do you get people to change a behavior that is so engrained in their culture? …That is economically sensible and time-saving? (When I mentioned finances in the above paragraph, I meant to include time, in addition to money.) Clearly the high costs of medical bills isn’t just a problem with the healthcare system—it’s rooted in our indifference to what we eat and how we take care of ourselves.
Regardless, I did enjoy and appreciate his social and ecological approach to food and eating:
“Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. ~Wendell Berry” (p. 196-197)
He dwells quite a bit on the “French paradox,” which took me back to Paris and my experience with endless bread, cheese and wine. The rest of the tips are good, though I much preferred to read the “guidelines” that were dependent on changing our own behavior, not our means. Oh, and now I also want my own garden.
“No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener or the farmer who grew it, this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight” (p. 200-201).
On to my third Pollan book, Omnivore’s Dilemma.
My name is Millie.
I enjoy yoga, traveling, cooking, reading and running.
And, sometimes I write.
If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, I can ride pretty fast. 
