In Defense of Food
In Defense of Food: an eater’s manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Watching, without a great deal of surprise, the destruction of the world’s economic system and of course the calling into question of the ideology: American capitalism, that has sustained, created and destroyed it, can only reflect on the years 2001-2008, the period of time during which I wrote thousands of letters of alarm about the unsustainable way of life that I discovered during those years in the USA after 20 years of absence.
Now at a pivotal point, when Americans have reached out to an “other” to save them, I can only hope that the burden place on such slim shoulders does not break them.
American hypocrisy has become so constant in the only pursuit that matters: MORE, that everyday living for a great percentage of the population has become contradictory on the face of it.
An economic system geared to producing more money, rather than a secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, is now in tatters.
To break bread together is a ritual that binds. The pace of American life has destroyed that ritual and helped to destroy the family that both sustains and has sustained the ritual of the communal meal.
People now fuel up, often on the run or in their car, alone. They fuel up on manufactured food that is akin to mainlining sugar to its close biochemical containers, producing quick energy that the body can’t handle.
“We’re in the middle of a national experiment in the in the mainlining of glucose.” (p. 113)
For many this leads to diabetes II and its attendant by-products: obesity, hypertension, heart disease and certain cancers. Young with kidney stones are showing up, increasingly, due to the amount of salt found in what has become known as the Western diet.
All part of the Western diet and the metabolic syndrome that has produced the explosion in weight that people carry and the problems, mentioned above, that flow from it. Young obese children appear to be, when the cell walls of their heart is examined, 40 or older. A ticking health time bomb.
The root of all this is our economic system and the advertising Leviathan that sustains it. I am not a Marxist, though his analysis of capitalism is still the best we have. It should be dusted off and read. His philosophy of history and predictions should be quietly bypassed.
The history of modern industrial life in the West has taken place within an environment that has increasingly downgraded Christianity and the idea of God that fills The Divine Comedy with light we can bathe in as we read, but can’t really understand.
We are frail and weak creatures, forced out of amniotic paradise, slapped into breath and then set loose into a world we hardly understand; thus when the overriding comfort of god disappears, few of us are able to believe in nothing and sustain ourselves; as G.K. Chesterton saw so clearly, we tend, once our major sustaining belief is lost, to grab hold of another: almost anything will do.
Thus for so many Americans, still mouthing Christianity, and going to church, as John McCain doesn’t, the real God is MORE.
That MORE is part of the most unrelenting system that human beings have ever created; contemporary capitalism. It melts everything, no matter how sacred. It is a dragon that must be bridled, so that its positive productive possibilities can be used in the service of human well-being, not difficult to define, instead of profit, another name for more.
Go back and read Adam Smith’s two books. What has been done in his name would infuriate him. The crimes of our present band of thieves must be carefully documented, so that we can see the linkage between our ideology and CDOs, sub-prime mortgages and the other instruments of our present destruction. Greed, the desire for MORE, lies at the basis of it. The willingness of thousands of people in positions of fiduciary responsibility to skip their required reading of the fine print and go for it with dollars not their own, so that Whitefish Bay Wisconsin will do without teachers, northern Norway towns can’t afford to staff its libraries and New York’s MTA will raise prices and do without needed maintenance. Three examples among tens of thousands.
In Defense of Food deals with the destruction of our food history. The substitution of that which has sustained us for millennia for a unsustainable quick hit. With reason, the more complex an ecology, the more sustainable it is. It is similar to an oriental carpet. Count the number of threads per square inch.
If I ear from that complexity, I am also imbibing protection from the predators that are everywhere, for what the plant has developed to sustain itself can sustain me. To denigrate that garden, to produce a monoculture for cash is to rip the carpet apart, loosen the threads and destroy the complexity that sustains. Thus we then must add to that mono-culture chemicals to kill the predators that previously were held off by the plant itself and then use that denatured product as a basis for manufacturing food that is less nutritious and must have other chemicals added to it to be able to sustain long distance shipping and time on the shelf.
That is what the application of capitalism has done to our food supply with the secondary effects to our health and well-being described above. Complex foods take time to digest and thus allow the body time to assimilate them; they nourish and give us feedback that tells us to stop eating.
Something that fast food does not do, hence the obesity epidemic and as Pollan feels, the constant eating to satisfy body needs that our denatured foods can’t satisfy.
“Our ancient evolutionary relationship with the seeds of grasses and frit of plants has given way, abruptly, to a rocky marriage with glucose and fructose.” (p. 114)
We are what we eat. What we eat is killing us, but it provides PROFIT and the opportunity for those interested in this to make even more money, by producing products for those made ill by the previous food products.
“Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West – recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it is easier, or at least more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way the civilization eats.” (p. 136)
There is only one cure for our exploding health care costs: health itself. A great part of that health can be achieved by eating well. Contemplate these statistics. In 1960, the USA spent 17/6% of its income on food and 5.2% of its national income on health care; now those figures are: food 9.9%; health care 16%.
The basic rules are simple:
1. eat more complex foods;
2. eat more whole foods;
3. eat for quality not quantity;
4. shift from seeds back to leaves;
5. pay attention to what grandmother ate rather than food science.
Pollan does not tell you what to eat, but how to choose what you eat. His book is clear, well-documented and full of life-saving info. Reading it and gradually adapting his common sense ideas would add years to your life and slowly destroy the industrial system of food that is killing us.
