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Talking with Michael Pollan
http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-e5549273jan27,0,791029.story
BY ERICA MARCUS | erica.marcus@newsday.com
    January 27, 2008

Until a few years ago, Michael Pollan was known as a gifted writer who had
carved out a somewhat improbable career producing lyrical books and essays
on botany and agriculture. In 2002, the Berkeley, Calif.-based
author-journalism professor veered off into food.

"There was a moment when Gary Taubes published 'What if fat doesn't make
you fat?' in The New York Times magazine," he recalled recently at the
Manhattan offices of his publisher. Taubes' much-debated article defended
the Atkins Diet and maintained that it was carbs, not fat, that were behind
the American obesity and diabetes crises. At the time, Pollan didn't focus
on the merits of Taubes' case. What astounded him was how "the whole
country changed the way they ate overnight." What kind of food culture did
we have, he wondered, if we were "willing to do a complete 180" on the
basis of one article?

His new interest led him, in 2006, to publish "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a
magisterial doorstop examining the ecological and moral implications of the
current American diet. It was widely - and wildly - lauded, even though the
largely meditative work avoided placing blame and giving advice.

Now, with "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" (Penguin Press,
$21.95), Pollan considers how we got ourselves into this mess and suggests
what we should eat to get out of it - all in 200-odd zippy pages.

According to Pollan, the American diet is in the grip of nutritionism, a
"reductionist ideology" that considers food to be essentially the sum of
its nutrient parts. Once we stop thinking about eggs, broccoli and butter
and begin focusing on protein, fiber and fat, he writes, we cede our
understanding of food to the experts - since only scientists (and their
popularizers, nutritionists and journalists) can explain the hidden
realities of foods to us.

Why did nutritionism take root in the United States while other
industrialized nations have remained relatively immune? "There was a vacuum
here," Pollan said. "We had no single dominant food culture, but there was
a desire among Americans to find a common denominator. That denominator
became science."

In his research, Pollan found that the roots of nutritionism run deep in
American history. Such food faddists as Horace Fletcher (1849-1919), the
so-called "Great Masticator" who preached that food should be chewed 32
times per minute before being swallowed, and John Harvey Kellogg (1852-
1943), whose Battle Creek sanitarium advocated teetotaling, vegetarianism
and frequent enemas, were the forerunners of Drs. Dean Ornish (no fat) and
Atkins (no lean).

Nutritionism took a great leap forward in the 1970s as government agencies
and public health organizations responded to growing concerns about rising
rates of heart disease. At the same time, changes in federal law made it
easier for manufacturers to market "imitation" foods alongside their
"whole" counterparts. (Pollan writes in "In Defense of Food": "Fats in
things like sour cream and yogurt could now be replaced with hydrogenated
oils or guar gum or carrageenan. ... As long as the new fake foods were
engineered to be nutritionally equivalent to the real article, they could
no longer be considered fake.")

Another long-standing hallmark of American food is how cheap it is.
Compared to other industrialized nations, Americans spend far less of their
income on food, just 10 percent, compared to 15 percent for the Italians
and the French, and 17 percent for the Spanish. Agricultural abundance,
Pollan said, has turned us into a people who expect food to be cheap.

This sense of thrift doesn't extend to other areas of consumption. "People
understand that there's a reason to buy a BMW instead of a Ford, that an
Armani suit is different than a suit from Syms, but when it comes to food,
there's no expectation that you get what you pay for."

Although he's spent the last six years chronicling our national eating
disorder, Pollan is cautiously optimistic about the future. "Social change
can happen," he said. "Remember, not too long ago it was acceptable to
smoke in front of your children." And fear will play a part. "When parents
find out that their kid has type 2 diabetes, they are motivated to change
how they eat," he said.

Certainly the federal government has a role to play. Right now, Pollan
said, it is too beholden to Big Food. "We have to move the responsibility
for food policy out of the USDA and into the Food and Drug Administration
or the surgeon general's office," he said. "The USDA is in the business of
promoting the sale of U.S. agricultural products. It's never going to tell
us, 'Stay away from meat,' or 'Don't eat high-fructose corn syrup.'"

In the meantime, he says, it's never been easier for individuals to change
the way they eat, as local, pasture-raised and especially organic food have
entered the mainstream. "Forty years ago, it looked like we were driving
toward the Jetsons - toward a meal in a pill. Back then it would have been
impossible to eat this way. Now it's possible."

Old habits diet hard

At its simplest, Michael Pollan's philosophy can be summed up as follows:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." At the end of "In Defense of
Food," he provides a dozen nuts-and-bolts guidelines to help achieve these
goals:

1. Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

2. Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce.

3. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.

4. Avoid food products that carry health claims.

5. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.

6. Better yet, buy food somewhere else: the farmers' market or CSA
[Community Supported Agriculture buying co-op].

7. Pay more, eat less.

8. Eat a wide variety of species.

9. Eat food from animals that eat grass.

10. Cook, and if you can, grow your own food.

11. Eat meals and eat them only at tables.

12. Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with
pleasure.