Michael Pollan: On Food at Philadelphia's Free Library

I went to The Free Library of Philadelphia on Thursday night to hear Michael Pollan talk about his new book In Defense of Food. You can listen to the library's podcast of the event here. It's a little over an hour long. Pollan is a journalist and a professor at UC Berkeley. He writes about the politics of food.

This was the most packed I had seen the Free Library. There were about 200 extra seats on the main floor with a remote video feed from the live event downstairs. I was close to the head of the massive line outside the library on Vine St (which curled around and up 19th St) and got some good seats in the main room. They announced that 700 people had come out for the event so I'll assume that the main room sat 500.

Pollan started off light heartedly by talking about some comments he'd received after writing his last book The Omnivore's Dilema. He said people would come up to him and say that they'd get halfway through the book and not want to finish it. Why? Because with each page, there was another food they shouldn't eat and by the end, there might be nothing left! And that's part of the reason why he wrote his latest book defending food. He moved to the meat of his talk, the ideology of food today which is nutritionism.

Food has moved away from the whole food product to the nutritional value within food. The nutrient Packaging claims "low fat" or "no cholesterol" or "good source of antioxidants" these days. Not the carrot, but the beta carotene in the carrot. Since nutrients are invisible, compared to whole foods, nutriotionism is mostly understood by a select few: the "experts" and the government. A pseudo priesthood is formed around the concepts of nutritionism.

There's the Good v Bad argument for foods. Omega-3 v saturated/trans fat and so on. Cholesterol used to be bad, but now, eggs are back to the "good" side. He predicted that Omega-6 fatty acids would be the next nutrient to be labeled "evil".

Maintain and promote bodily health. He said that Americans eat very differently than the rest of the world. We eat to promote or retard health with no in-between. There's bran-something or junk food. The western diet, however, has penetrated many other cultures and is slowly killing people along the way.

The roots of nutritionism has its roots in the 1860s-1870s with Sylvester Grahm (sp?), John Harvey Kellog (sp?), Horace Fletcher (sp?) among them. Fast forwarding to the 1970s is the start of the new nutritionist movement. He talks about it in the fist chapter of his new book. In 1973 the FDA unilaterally removed the imitation rule. The imitation rule was part of the 1938 act of Congress which established the FDA. It said that there were traditional foods that everyone was familiar with (bread, milk cheese...) and if people bought an item which claimed to be one of those traditional foods, they should get what they pay for. If not, that food should be labeled an imitation. With that, you couldn't sell margarine as butter. The FDA move to remove the rule was backed by lobbyists and groups like the American Heart Association. You could now drop "imitation" as long as the product was not nutritionally inferior. So now, traditional foods could be changed on the inside and still be packaged as the real thing. Pollan cites this act by the FDA as the biggest trigger to the state of food today.

Secondly, in 1977, Senator George McGovern (D-SD) put forth new dietary guidelines for Americans. One of the biggest points was to eat less red meat. He got slammed by the entire food industry and McGovern had to rewrite the words to say: "choose meats that will lower your saturated fat intake". But nobody knew what saturated fats were so the industry was fine with it and now, the phrase was turned into a positive: to choose meat. That would be the last time the government ever said to eat less of any whole food product. This was reaffirmed in 1982 with new guidelines.

He read a section of the first chapter of his book discussing the golden age of food science. People were more concerned with the nutritional value of foods that weren't supposed to have certain nutrients in them. In 1988, oat bran was found in everything processed on the supermarket shelves. Later, Omega-3 was added to the animals themselves and not on the processed side. Pork chops could be eaten to reduce their saturated fat intake. Flax seed was fed to hens to increase Omega-3 to their yolks. Flax seed was also fed to pigs so that Omega-3 could find it's way into hot dogs and hamburgers. Produce was cast aside, boring and not marketed. But cereals were labeled for their great source of whole grains. Anti-oxidants are hailed in products and juices. But in reality, every plant is a source of anti-oxidants.

Pollan reminded us that people have eaten well for thousands of years without a problem. We didn't need labels telling us what was and was not healthy. He chided to be wary of any product screaming to be "healthy". He also reminded us that nutritionism is a very new science only 170 years old or so. It's at the same state as surgery in the 1650. Surgery was really interesting, but maybe not for everyone just yet; wait for nutrition's anesthesia to come around. The digestive tract is still not understood. There are as many neurons in the digestive tract as in the spinal column. He jokingly alluded to Stephen Colbert's "thinking with your gut" mantra.

Nutritionism arose to solve a problem. The problem of the western diet. Lots of processed food, lots refined grain, lots of bread and processed meat, very few fruits and vegetables and a super abundance of calories. That diet reliably causes chronic disease in the people who eat it. At the start of the 1900s, when other cultures found the western diet, they developed diseases never known until the western diet was introduced: obesity and diabetes. Nutritionism arose to find the cause of the problem(s) within the western diet. If the problem is found, it can be eliminated and people can go on eating the way they do without a problem.

How did people eat before nutritionism? What was the authority to guide people in how they ate. It was through culture which Pollan says is a fancy word for "your mom", at least in relation to food. People ate very differently, but they all worked for people. The Masai warriors of Africa only eat milk, cattle blood and some meat; in South and Central America people eat mostly corn and meat; the Inuit of Alaska and Greenland eat seal blubber and lichens: there is not one ideal diet. The only exception is the western diet. Culture, being the distilled, proven wisdom of the tribe. When a person ate a particular mushroom and died, the rest of the tribe named that mushroom the death cap mushroom and they didn't eat it anymore. He joked that rats had to relearn culture with each generation and we had an upper hand.

How to eat healthier: some points Pollan has found through his research.

#1 Don't eat anything your great-/grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Your great-grandmother wouldn't know what a gogurt tube was.

#2 Don't buy anything with more than five ingredients. Citing the example above, he says that yogurt is nothing more than milk and some bacteria.

#3 Don't buy anything that has high fructose corn syrup in it. Not that it's necessarily bad, but how many cooks prepare food with high fructose corn syrup? It's a sign that the product is highly processed.

#4 Shop the perimeter of the market. Around the perimeter is: produce, meat, fish, dairy, eggs - all items fairly untouched and unimproved by the food industry. The things in the middle of the store are not only highly processed, but highly profitable for the food industry. He gave the example of oatmeal, which he cited as being 79¢/lbs. for organic (99¢/lbs. in the Whole Foods on South St). A few cents of it is processed and holes are cut into it to create Cheerios and sold for $4/lbs. But when others copy and it becomes a commodity, cereal bars come along. Bars with a white layer on top which is supposed to fool us into thinking "milk". But those become commodities as well. The newest thing in the cereal aisle is the cereal straw (Lady and I were horrified at this one). Straws made from cereal material, lined with the same white "milk" substance and then you eat the whole straw. Now, the end product is selling for $10/lbs. from the same base oats which cost 79¢.

#5 Don't buy food that makes health claims. The ones that make health claims are the ones that are processed. Broccoli growers can't afford to pay the American Health Association for a study, but cereal people slap on an AHA label promoting the whole grains inside the sugary box.

During the Q&A session, the first questioner asked if any one culture got it right above others. Pollan said that different diets work for different people. He also noted that foods that were once banquet foods, prepared for special occasions, are mistakenly hailed as traditional food. Things like fried chicken and french fries. He says that preparing these things yourself will make you value the work that went into it and make you eat them less.

The second questioner told of how when friends come to eat at her house, they used to say, "that tastes good, can I have the recipe?" but now, they say "you should be a professional". Pollan noted that today, with celebrity chefs on TV cooking for your entertainment, cooking has been removed from your kitchen and now people cook less and less. The cooking shows have made cooking seem very daunting. He joked that watching things on TV isn't good for doing it; same goes for pornography. He urged us to buy whole foods and shop at the farmers' market to force us to cook more often. He also cited a study which found that poor women who cook are healthier than rich women who go out to restaurants a lot.

In closing he advised that the best choices for our health are the best for the environment. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Eat local and in season. Prepare food yourself. He said that he was surprised that nobody asked about the cost of eating this way: it's more expensive to do so. If you can, spend more on food: pay more, eat less. He said that Americans spend 9.5% of our money on our food compared to Italy and France who spend about 15%. Vote with your forks he said. You get what you pay for - he said that people understand the value of everything except for food. But for those who can't spend a little more, you must vote with your votes and change our farm policies. Junk food is subsidized while healthy food is not. Supermarkets also need to be in inner cities. Access to fresh produce is a direct measure of health.

I've been tangentially familiar with Pollan's work, but hearing him talk was a treat. He was funny. He was sincere. He was very knowledgeable. My girlfriend and I are committed to cooking more and eating more veggies (she hates veggies!). We've made lots of changes in our lives in the past 3 years in regards to eating habits, but more steps need to be taken. We have some wonderful friends who are very knowledgeable as well as access to lots of information on the internet. We're also armed with a few good books and cookbooks to push us.

Here's to eating better.