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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] How to get back to real food, Michael Pollan
  • Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:24:17 -0700


"To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from
industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from
scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/08/health.foodanddrink
How to get back to real food, Michael Pollan
Tuesday January 8 2008

In the second and final extract from his new book, Michael Pollan says we
need to rediscover the simple rules for healthy eating. Here, he gives his
recipe for reclaiming control over our disastrous diets


The first time I heard the advice to "just eat food" was in a speech by the
nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you
should eat food - what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of
her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River,
refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with
that title. "In the 34 years I've been in the field of nutrition," she
said, "I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the
supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world." Taking its
place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes - "products
constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly
little actual knowledge".

Real food is still out there, however, still being grown and even
occasionally sold in the supermarket. Here are a few rules of thumb to help
you recognise it - and then make the most of it.

Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food

Why your great-grandmother? Because at this point your mother, and possibly
even your grandmother, are as confused as the rest of us; to be safe we
need to go back at least a couple generations, to a time before the advent
of most modern foods. Some nutritionists recommend going back even further.
John Yudkin, a British nutritionist whose early alarms about the dangers of
refined carbohydrates were overlooked in the 60s and 70s, once advised:
"Just don't eat anything your Neolithic ancestors wouldn't have recognised
and you'll be OK."

What would shopping this way mean in the supermarket? Well, imagine your
great-grandmother at your side as you go down the aisles. You're standing
together in front of the dairy cabinet. She picks up a pack of Go-Gurt
Portable Yogurt tubes - and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is it
a food or a toothpaste? You could tell her it is just yoghurt in a
squirtable form, yet if she read the ingredients label she would have every
reason to doubt that was the case. Sure, there is some yoghurt in there,
but there are also a dozen other things that aren't remotely yoghurt-like,
ingredients she would probably fail to recognise as foods of any kind,
including high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin,
carrageenan, tri-calcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavours,
vitamins, and so forth. How did yoghurt, which once consisted simply of
milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get to be so complicated? Is
a product such as Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a wholefood? A food of any
kind?

Avoid food products that make health claims

For a product to make health claims on its package, it must first have a
package, so right off the bat it is more likely to be a processed than a
whole food. Generally speaking, it is only the big food companies that have
the wherewithal to secure officially approved health claims for their
products and then trumpet them to the world. Recently, however, some fruits
and nuts have begun boasting about their health-enhancing properties, and
there will surely be more as each crop council scrounges together the money
to commission its own scientific study. Because all plants contain
antioxidants, all these studies are guaranteed to find something on which
to base a health-oriented marketing campaign. But for the most part it is
the products of food science that make the boldest claims, and these are
often founded on incomplete or erroneous science. Don't forget that
trans-fat-rich margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim it was
healthier than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to cause heart
attacks.

Get out of the supermarket

The surest way to escape the overprocessed, life-shortening western diet is
simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience
store, the fast-food outlet. It is hard to eat badly from a farmers'
market, from a weekly organic vegetable box or from your garden. It is true
that most farmers' markets operate only seasonally, and you won't find
everything you need there. But nor will you find elaborately processed food
products, long lists of unpronounceable ingredients, or ageing food from
far away. Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet - because you
can't buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes 12 months of the year, you
will find yourself experimenting with other foods when they come into the
market. The weekly veg box does an even better job of forcing you out of
your rut because you will find things in your delivery that you would never
buy on your own.

If you are concerned about chemicals in your produce, simply ask the farmer
at the market how he or she deals with pests and fertility and begin the
sort of conversation that, in the end, is the best guarantee of quality in
your food. So here is a subclause to the get-out-of-the-supermarket rule:
Shake the hand that feeds you.

Eat mostly plants, especially leaves

Scientists may disagree about what is so good about eating plants - is it
the antioxidants in them? The fibre? The omega-3 fatty acids? - but they do
agree that plants are probably really good for you, and certainly can't
hurt. Without plants, for example, we would be hard-pressed to get enough
vitamin C, an essential nutrient that humans long ago lost the ability to
synthesise themselves. Like other antioxidants, vitamin C contributes to
our health in at least two important ways. Several of the body's routine
processes, including cell metabolism and the defence mechanism of
inflammation, produce "oxygen radicals" - atoms of oxygen with an extra
unpaired electron that make them particularly eager to react with other
molecules in ways that can create all kinds of health problems, including
cancer. Antioxidants such as vitamin C harmlessly absorb and stabilise
these free radicals before they can do their mischief.

But antioxidants do something else for us as well: they stimulate the liver
to produce the enzymes necessary to break down the antioxidant itself,
enzymes that, once produced, go on to break down other compounds, including
whatever toxins resemble the antioxidant. This is one reason it is
important to eat as many different kinds of plants as possible: they all
have different antioxidants and so help the body eliminate different
toxins.

The advantages of a plant-based diet go beyond whatever is in the plants:
because plant foods - with the exception of seeds - are less energy-dense
than most of the other things you might eat, by eating a plant-based diet
you will probably consume fewer calories (which is itself protective
against many chronic diseases).

As for meat, we don't need to eat it - with the exception of vitamin B12,
every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else. (And the tiny
amount of B12 we need is not too hard to come by; it is found in all animal
foods and is produced by bacteria, so you obtain B12 from eating dirty or
decaying or fermented produce.) But it does supply all the essential amino
acids as well as many vitamins and minerals.

That said, eating meat in the tremendous quantities that westerners do is
probably not a good idea, especially when it comes from a highly
industrialised food chain. Several studies point to the conclusion that the
more meat there is in your diet - red meat especially - the greater your
risk of heart disease and cancer. Thomas Jefferson probably had the right
idea when he recommended using meat as a "condiment for the vegetables".

Eat wild foods when you can

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world are weeds - fat-hen (also
known as lamb's quarters) and purslane - and some of the healthiest
traditional diets, such as the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild
greens. These tend to have higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than their
domesticated cousins.

Wild animals, too, are worth adding to your diet when you have the
opportunity, if you can be sure you are not putting further pressure on
endangered species. Game generally has less saturated fat and more omega-3
fatty acids than domesticated animals, because most wild animals eat a
diverse diet of plants rather than grain. Wild fish generally have higher
levels of omega-3s than farmed fish. To judge by the experience of
fish-eating cultures such as the Japanese, adding a few servings of wild
fish to the diet each week may lower our risk of heart disease, prolong our
lives, and even make us happier.

Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet

Oceans of ink have been spilled attempting to tease out the components of
the Mediterranean diet, hoping to identify the X factor responsible for its
healthiness. Is it the olive oil? The fish? The wild greens? The garlic?
The nuts? The French ability to break many of the accepted rules of healthy
eating with impunity has been variously attributed to the salutary effects
of red wine, olive oil, and even foie gras (liver is high in B vitamins and
iron). Yet when researchers extract a single food from a diet of proven
value, it usually fails to adequately explain why the people living on that
diet live longer or have lower rates of heart disease or cancer than those
eating a modern western diet. The whole of a dietary pattern is evidently
greater than the sum of its parts.

Eat less

The scientific case for eating a lot less than we presently do is
compelling, whether or not you are overweight. Calorie restriction has
repeatedly been shown to slow ageing in animals, and some researchers
believe it is the single strongest link between a change in the diet and
the prevention of cancer.

"Eat less" is easier said than done, of course, in a culture of cheap and
abundant calories with no deeply rooted set of rules to curb overeating.
But other cultures do have such rules and we can try to emulate them. The
people of Okinawa, for example, one of the longest-lived and healthiest
populations in the world, practise a principle they call hara hachi bu: eat
until you are 80% full.

How on earth do you know when you're 80% full, however? You'd need to be in
closer touch with your senses than many Americans or Britons have become.
Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing and nutritional science at Cornell
University in the US, once rigged up bowls of soup in a restaurant so they
would automatically refill from the bottom. Those given the bottomless bowl
ate 73% more soup than the subjects eating from an ordinary bowl; several
ate as much as a two pints. When one of these hearty eaters was asked his
opinion of the soup, he said: "It's pretty good, and it's pretty filling."
Indeed.

Until we learn to attend more closely to our senses, we might be advised to
alter the external clues we rely on in eating. Among Wansink's
recommendations: serve smaller portions on smaller plates; serve food and
beverages from small containers (even if this means repackaging things
bought in jumbo sizes); leave detritus on the table - empty bottles, bones,
and so forth - so you can see how much you have eaten or drunk, and use
glasses that are more vertical than horizontal, since people tend to pour
more into squat glasses.

Eat meals

This sounds almost as ridiculous as "eat food", but it no longer goes
without saying. We are snacking more and eating fewer meals together.
Indeed, sociologists report that Americans have added to the traditional
big three "eating occasions" - breakfast, lunch and dinner - an
as-yet-untitled fourth that lasts all day long: the constant sipping and
snacking while watching TV, driving, and so on. One study found that among
18- to 50-year-old Americans, roughly a fifth of all eating now takes place
in the car.

That one should feel the need to mount a defence of "the meal" is sad, but
then who would have thought "food" needed defending? Let's just remember
that it is at the dinner table that we socialise and civilise our children.
At the dinner table parents can determine portion sizes, model eating and
drinking behaviour, and enforce social norms about greed and waste. Shared
meals are about much more than fuelling bodies; they are uniquely human
institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call
culture.

Do all your eating at a table

No, a desk is not a table.

Try not to eat alone

Though there is research suggesting that light eaters will eat more when
they dine with others (probably because they spend more time at the table),
for people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption,
if only because we're less likely to stuff ourselves when others are
watching. This is precisely why so much food marketing is designed to
encourage us to eat in front of the TV or in the car: when we eat
mindlessly and alone, we eat more.

Cook - and, if you can, plant a garden

My own vegetable garden is modest in scale - a densely planted patch only
about 6m by 3m (20ft by 10ft) - but it yields an astonishing cornucopia of
produce, so much so that during the summer months we discontinue our weekly
vegetable box and buy little but fruit from the farmers' market. And though
we live on a postage-stamp city lot, there is room for a couple of fruit
trees too: a lemon, a fig, and a persimmon (in Britain, I suppose we could
have plums and cherries). A garden offers the most straightforward solution
to the problem of being able to afford high- quality organic produce: the
food you grow yourself is fresher than any you can buy, and costs nothing
but an hour or two of work each week, plus the price of a few packets of
seed.

When your harvest lands on the kitchen counter, when you start cleaning and
cutting and chopping, you are thinking about a dozen different things -
what to make, how to make it - but nutrition, or even health, is probably
not high on the list. It is hard when contemplating such produce to think
in terms of nutrients or chemical compounds; no, this is food, so fresh it
is still alive, communicating with us by scent and colour and taste. To
reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry
and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch
and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts. And what these
acts subvert is nutritionism: the belief that food is foremost about
nutrition and nutrition is so complex that only experts and industry can
possibly supply it. When you are cooking with food as alive as this - these
gorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh - you are in no danger of mistaking it
for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients.

· © Michael Pollan 2008. Extracted from In Defence of Food: The Myth of
Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating by Michael Pollan, to be published by
Allen Lane on January 31 at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with
free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.








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