The Berkeley Science Review: Articles

Book Review
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan (view PDF)
by Kathryn Peek

The question of what to eat can be one of daily anxiety for people conscious of the repercussions of their food choices on the environment and on their personal health. Despite the ever-increasing amounts of nutritional advice available, our country is becoming more and more unhealthy. Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley Knight Professor of Journalism, has spent the last few years investigating both our nation's means of food production and our eating habits. In his latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Pollan sets out to distill his and others' recent food reporting into a concise set of guidelines to make us healthy, happy eaters.

In Defense of Food ostensibly picks up where Pollan's previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, left off. In that earlier tome, Pollan investigated the sources of the American diet, from fast food and agribusiness to "big organic" to local and foraged; in this slimmer volume he goes on to advise the reader on how to make sound food choices. The food he defends is food as it was defined before heavily processed "foodlike substances" became predominant in most grocery stores. In three well-organized sections, Pollan reviews the history and pitfalls of nutrition science, isolates the Western diet as a probable cause for Western health problems, and gives concrete guidelines for healthy food consumption.

According to Pollan, nutrition science is still a developing discipline, and is prone to making claims that do not hold up under further scrutiny. In the first part of In Defense of Food, Pollan questions the validity of the central "nutritionist" assumption that food is merely the sum of its constituent nutrients, and that consuming those nutrients holds the same value no matter what form they take. He argues that such an outlook ignores the importance of the effects of different foods and nutrients on one another, something that scientists are just beginning to appreciate. He also suggests that the nutrient-based approach is destructive to health because it will forever be limited by what it has not yet discovered. This scientific hubris, he claims, has led to such tragedies as fortified white bread replacing whole grains in the American diet.

Pollan's argument against nutrition science begins with a history of the discipline that goes back to the mid-1800s, when chemists concluded that proteins, fats, and carbohydrates comprised all food. He then goes on to chronicle our increased appreciation of food's chemical complexity with the discoveries of vitamins, cholesterol, antioxidants, and omega-3s. From this historical context, we are to gain a healthy distrust of current nutrition science results. And to some degree he is right. But public skepticism should come from an understanding that nutrition science is exactly that, a science, and a difficult one. Uncertainty is part of the scientific process, and previous failures should not be the reason we disbelieve current results. He does defend nutrition scientists for doing the best they can in a field with notoriously difficult-to-isolate variables, but the overall tone is perhaps a bit hard on scientists, and on the scientific process itself.

From his skepticism of nutritionist results, Pollan goes on in the second section to advocate a return to traditional diets, defined as the food cultures that existed before the advent of readily available refined sugar and flour (and long before margarine), and that generally include plenty of vegetables and whole grains. Essentially, he wants us to eat like our great-grandparents ate. His argument is based on several epidemiological and nutritional studies. A few of the experiments he cites stand out for their cleverness, like one that followed ten diabetic Aborigines as they returned to a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a period of seven weeks. The subjects all showed marked improvement in type II diabetes indicators and signs of overall health. From such results, Pollan postulates that the Western diet is responsible for the suite of health problems collectively referred to as "Western diseases" (including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes). He concludes that we should avoid the pitfalls of low fat or low carb crazes, and instead stick to a well-rounded diet of minimally processed foods. Pollan's argument that the food industry is evolving faster than humans is a convincing one. Thus inspired to eat well, where does the reader go from here?

In the forward-looking third section, Pollan creates a set of guidelines by which to eat. Here, In Defense of Food represents a step back from a food culture steeped in fads, and instead makes recommendations based on good evidence. The guidelines fall into categories organized around the three-sentence mantra of the book: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He expands on each of these sentences with paragraphs headed by statements like "Get out of the supermarket whenever possible," "Eat well-grown food from healthy soils," and "Do all your eating at a table" (with the charming one-sentence admonition, "No, a desk is not a table.") The guidelines are all founded in lessons learned earlier in the book, and are reasonably easy to follow.

For a culture filled with anxiety over the nutritional consequences of our food choices, the most valuable lesson from In Defense of Food is how to enjoy eating again. Pollan advocates that by paying attention to food and paying more for it, emotionally and financially, we will choose things that are better for us and also relish them more. Some sections may come across as unsympathetic to the scientific process, but otherwise, In Defense of Food is very well researched and compellingly written. By using a more conversational tone than he did in The Omnivore's Dilemma (parentheses abound), Pollan manages to give sound advice without sounding pedantic. And by supplying guidelines for making food choices rather than laying down a specific set of dietary rules, he empowers the reader to make this way of eating a way of life. We would all do well to follow his counsel.

Kathryn Peek is a graduate student in astronomy and a member of the same CSA (farm produce subscription) as Michael Pollan. She likes to think that her kale rubs elbows with his cabbage.

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