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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Ellen Ussery review of Pollan book
  • Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:02:27 -0700



In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan
In-defense-of-food-cover
Guest Article: © The material on this page is copyright by Ellen Ussery,
May 20, 2008.
http://www.themodernhomestead.us/article/In-Defense-of-Food.html

Ellen wrote this review for the Summer 2008 issue of Wise Traditions, the
quarterly journal of Weston A. Price Foundation, an organization dedicated
to reminding the eating public of the profoundly important relationship
between traditional foods (as opposed to their industrial look-alikes) and
health, based on the revolutionary work of Weston Price in the earlier half
of the last century. The WAPF site is a tremendous resource on nutrition
and health, and could profoundly alter some of your perspectives on these
issues.

This review was posted to the site October 27, 2008.

Michael Pollan is an elegant and engaging writer. He can take a complex
subject and weave its many threads into a seamless narrative that is both
highly informative amd eminently readable. With his best selling The
Omnivore’s Dilemma, he opened the eyes of the masses to the ecological
and ethical dimensions of our food choices. No wonder so many people
concerned with the future of agriculture and our food supply began to think
of him as Saint Michael.

It feels a bit like blasphemy, then, to take issue with his current
offering, In Defense of Food. It has much to recommend it, especially when
he delineates how we came to the current sorry state of affairs in which
human beings—who have been eating for millions of years—suddenly find
themselves in need of expert guidance for this most basic activity. He
gives us a history of the confluence of well intentioned government policy,
flawed science, industrial profiteering, and regulatory idiocy. As a
result, food itself now needs to be defended against the Nutritional
Industrial Complex, which conspires to disassemble and then reconfigure it
in beguiling new forms, in response to ever changing nutritional ideology.

The concept of “Nutritionism” is one of the catchy hooks upon which he
hangs his story. It is the central theme for his powerful case against our
modern food culture. Essentially, nutritionism is the widely shared but
unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food lies in its
individual nutrients. Because these are abstract and invisible, we need
scientists and journalists to explain them to us. We then begin to think of
food only in terms of bodily health, and lose sight of its pleasurable and
social aspects. Food becomes nothing more than a nutrient delivery system,
and the distinction between whole and processed foods is lost.

Nutritionism is complex and reductionist, Pollan says. His antidote to the
resulting confusion is this simple admonition: Eat Food, Not Too Much,
Mostly Plants. Clever. And it works. But only up to a point. At the end of
the book, as he fleshes out these simple phrases, he offers invaluable
guidelines to help reprogram the victims of nutritionism: Accept as food
only things that your great-grandmother would have recognized as such. Buy
a good portion of it from local farmers who raise “well-grown food from
healthy soils;” or better still, grow some of it yourself, if only a pot
of herbs. Take time to prepare meals yourself, and sit down at the table
with family and friends to enjoy it together in a leisurely way.

His goal is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters by opting
out of the Western Diet. But we may not get there from here using his
directions, because there is a fundamental disconnect between his excellent
analysis and some of his recommendations—often obscured by his enormous
skill as a writer.

He tells us to eat less meat and that just about any old traditional diet
will do. He tells us to eat more plants, but never more saturated fat.
Indeed, he continually refers to saturated fat as something to be avoided.
It is hard to understand how he comes to such conclusions when they
contradict what he has said elsewhere in the book.

We will come back to these points later, but first let us look at what he
has to say about the rise of nutritionism. As he tells it, the crucial
moment was in 1977, when the McGovern Committee on Nutrition and Human
Needs formulated their Dietary Goals for the United States. Because they
embraced the “lipid hypothesis”—which held that the consumption of
fat and dietary cholesterol was responsible for the rapidly rising rates of
heart disease during the twentieth century—they initially advised to
“reduce consumption of meat and dairy products.” In the face of
pressure from the powerful meat and dairy industries, however, the wording
was changed to “choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated
fat intake.” According to Pollan, the implication of this apparently
simple change was profound: The focus was now on individual nutrients
rather than on actual foods.

This shift of focus supplied the “ultimate justification for processing
food by implying that with a judicious application of food science, fake
foods can be made even more nutritious than the real thing.” What
followed was thirty years in which we replaced fats with carbohydrates, and
have become less healthy and considerably fatter.

But now, Pollan tells us, scientists have come to see that the whole
low-fat campaign was bogus. He quotes prominent scientists as saying that
“it is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been
based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended
consequences.” An example of flawed evidence and logic cited by Pollan is
the ignoring by advocates of the lipid hypothesis that “during the
decades of the twentieth century when rates of heart disease were rising in
America, Americans were actually reducing their intake of animal fats (in
the form of lard and tallow). In place of those fats, they consumed
substantially more vegetable oils.” He devotes an entire chapter to this
logical sleight of hand, “The Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis.”

So far so good. But round about here he opines that it is hard for him
“to imagine the low fat/high carb craze taking off as it did or our
collecive health deteriorating to the extent that it has if the
Committtee’s original food based recommendations had stood: Eat less meat
and dairy products.” Actually, I seriously doubt that the original
wording by the McGovern Committee would have prevented the increasing
presence of ersatz carbohydrate foods in the American diet. As Pollan has
explained so well, both here and in his many other writings, the forces of
agriculture and the food industry were perfectly poised to take advantage
of any opportunity by which they could increase the sale of corn and soy,
using all the food engineering, marketing, and regulatory influence that
money could buy. The taboo against the eating of traditional fats itself
was all the opening they needed to push such an agenda.

More crucially, Pollan makes a compelling case that the lipid hypothesis on
which the McGovern Dietary Goals were based, whatever the choice of words,
was seriously flawed. By what logic does Pollan demolish the foundational
hypothesis itself, but then accept with approval the major recommendation
it engendered? Pollan doesn’t say, and that is one of the puzzles of this
book.

Such contradictions continue to crop up, as for example: “But eaters
worried about their health needn’t wait for science to settle this
question [what it is about a meat-heavy diet that causes higher rates of
coronary disease and cancer] before deciding that it might be wise to eat
more plants and less meat. This of course is precisely what the McGovern
committee was trying to tell us.”

Pollan’s frequent refrain that we should “eat less meat” seems to
assume that the unhealthful consequence of eating a lot of meat is settled
science. It is not—he makes it seem so by slight of hand. He slips in
references to research on the matter without giving it the kind of scrutiny
he himself applies to nutritional studies in other parts of the book. For
example, is it known what kind of meat the subjects in these studies were
eating? Was it grain-fed or grass-fed? Pollan makes it abundantly clear
that the two are completely different foods, and advocates eating only the
pastured variety. Studies with conclusions about meat tell us nothing
unless this distinction is made.

He cites The China Study, by Colin Campbell, as a particular authority for
the conclusion that we should limit meat. This was an epidemiological
study, subject to a myriad of misinterpretations—as Pollan demonstrates
when he explores the pitfalls and limitations of modern nutritional studies
in the chapter “Bad Science.” He closes that section with this
quotation from a noted epidemiologist: “I don’t believe anything I read
in nutritional epidemiology anymore.” But inexplicably, Pollan evinces no
such qualms about swallowing the China Study.

Finally, in suggesting that we needn’t wait for science to settle exactly
what it is about eating meat that supposedly causes coronary disease and
cancer, Pollan ignores his previous implication that our present national
dietary disaster was created when the McGovern Committee acted in a
similarly precipitous manner.

Here is another puzzle: Why does he disregard major portions of the work of
Dr. Price in preference for others? He gives us a lengthy discussion of the
findings of Dr. Weston A. Price, some of which are slightly
misrepresented—just enough so to support the anti-meat stance Pollan
seems bent on taking. For example, he says that Price found populations who
“thrived on diets in which fruits, vegetables and grain predominated.”
This is not accurate, since it gives the impression that animal foods were
not fundamental among the populations Price studied; and is contradicted
when he himself says, “Price found groups that ate diets of wild animal
flesh to be generally healthier than the agriculturists who relied on
cereals and other plant foods. . .,” with “the healthiest of all the
populations” Price studied being “. . .tribes that subsisted on milk,
meat, and blood from pastured cattle as well as animal food from the Nile
River.”

He reports that Price found these diets to be “on average ten times
higher in Vitamins A and D than modern diets.” Pollan implies that the
discrepency had to do with the stripping of nutrients from grains in modern
processing, but in so doing ignores the essential point that these vitamins
are only found in animal fats. However, later on he does observe that organ
meats with their high levels of fat soluble vitamins were particularly
prized. He notes as well the degree to which the health of pastoral
populations was a reflection of the quality of the pasture on which their
animals grazed, and the resulting levels of A and D in their butter.

But it is only the connection between the soil and the health of the
eaters—the ecological aspects of Price’s work—that Pollan focuses on
when making his recommendations. He is content to leave behind all of
Price’s conclusions on the value of animal fats, and take away only the
partial truth that “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.”

He did not see that animal fats are the key to reversing the damage done by
industrializing our food supply—and indeed, many of the worst aspects of
nutritionism. Animal fats are what is missing in Pollan’s attempt to
restore us to our proper relationship to food. In this endeavor he notes
five different changes that have taken place since we have industrialized
our food supply. We have gone: from whole foods to refined, from complexity
to simplicity, from quality to quantity, from leaves to seeds, and from
food culture to food science.

In explaining these transformations Pollan finds that he must borrow from
nutritionism’s reductive vocabulary to delve into the implications of a
change that he feels is the most egregious of all—that from leaves to
seeds. He almost apologizes for doing so. But he needn’t. The fact is:
You can’t unopen Pandora’s box. You can’t navigate the modern food
world by ignoring nutritonism as part of the landscape. You need to
understand what it is and be able to know it when you see it or you will
soon find yourself on the road to nowhere. This is what is so valuable
about Pollan’s work: It fills in the map with all the new sideroads and
subdivisions. But your journey to the land of optimal health and happiness
will be impeded by an uncrossable desert if you ignore guidance from
earlier explorers who actually got there.

Price did. And he was unambiguous about the need for animal fats.

We cannot transform the relationship of humans to the soil, as Pollan
advocates, without adding back the missing link, that most miraculous of
food processors: the grazing animal—a creature who takes leaves from the
soil, disassembles and reconfigures them, producing foods that contain the
optimal balance of an unimaginable variety of nutrients, many of which
science hasn’t even identified. All packaged in their own appetizing and
satisfying nutrient delivery systems: meat, milk, and fat.

This is a food system based on plants. And that is exactly what Pollan says
we need in order to redress the harm that has been done in the shift from
leaves to seeds. But he is in the land of wishful thinking if be believes
we can do this by eating more plants, only a tiny bit of meat, and ignoring
animal fats. If we follow his directions we will find ourselves still in
the grips of nutritionism, but this time with the Nutritional Industrial
Complex busily providing us with things like high Omega 3 asparagus. We may
not be fat, but you can bet we will be very hungry.

We should be grateful that, even though he misses the major import of Dr.\
Price’s work, he does introduce it to a wider audience; and he does show
that the lipid hypothesis was a flim-flam.

We should also be grateful that his next book will be about orchids.


©Unless otherwise noted, all material on this site, both text and photos,
is copyright by Harvey and Ellen Ussery, 2005-2009. Individuals may copy
and circulate it freely under the following conditions: This site
www.TheModernHomestead.US must be attributed as the source; any material
copied must include this copyright notice; and no charge may be made if you
pass copies on to others, other than the actual costs of copying, if any.
No material on this site may be published in any print or electronic media,
whether or not for profit, without written permission of Harvey or Ellen
Ussery.

DISCLAIMER: Information offered on this website is based on decades of
research and practical experience. However, we are not trained
professionals in any health, environmental, or other field. We therefore do
not offer the contents of this website as advice or recommendation for any
specific practice; nor will we be responsible for the consequences of the
application of any information or ideas presented on this site. ~Harvey and
Ellen Ussery





  • [Livingontheland] Ellen Ussery review of Pollan book, Tradingpost, 01/04/2009

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