These two books compliment each other very well; as Michael Pollan suggests we only eat food that our great-grandparents would recognize as food, and Ann Vileisis begins her book by describing in detail exactly what that was, and where it came from, through excerpts of a diary left behind by Martha Ballard, an accomplished late-eighteeth-century midwife from the area that is now Augusta, Maine. Both books also focus on the long road we've traveled since the beginning of the twentieth century, and how we've ended up where we are now with regards to our current Industrial 'Food' System.
Michael Pollan's new book is an extension of an essay published in The New York Times Magazine in January 2007, entitled "Unhappy Meals". The book is split into three sections, with the first section focusing on the shortcomings of 'nutritionism', the reductionist-scientific method of viewing food solely as a construct made up of 'x-number' of this nutrient plus 'x-number' of this vitamin, etc..., and assuming that the health benefits of whole foods can be duplicated by simply adding a nutrient or vitamin to any given processed food product that might be lacking same. The obvious problem there, is that there are so many complicated interactions taking place between all of those various component parts of a whole food that are not considered in that flawed method. A certain nutrient may very well be useless to our bodies without the presence of another specific vitamin or protein. There are an infinite number of variables to consider, and it would be impossible to even attempt to do so...and in my opinion, totally wasteful, ridiculous and unnecessary. And also, there are so many other elements of whole fruits, grains and vegetables that will most likely never be discovered...
I've always wondered what the point of all this is anyway? Why do we insist on viewing dinner as a chemistry experiment? Why don't we just eat real food, instead? These questions of mine are, of course, rhetorical...most of us know the reason is that Kraft, General Mills, Unilever or Cargill can't maintain a monopoly on bagging or boxing fresh potatoes or pears. Marketing also comes into play here...using the results of those 'tests' mentioned above, the food processors can then 'fortify' their products with those nutrients - and all of a sudden, Chips Ahoy and Lucky Charms can bear labels and government seals proclaiming them to be 'health foods'! Of course, that's only relatively speaking. It's not really mentioned that we shouldn't be eating things like that to begin with.
Section 2 of "In Defense of Food" is entitled "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization". It begins by describing a 1982 study conducted in Australia on a group of Aboriginal Australians who, after adopting the sedentary lifestyle and diet of Western Civilization, had recently developed the health problems (obesity, diabetes, etc...) commonly associated with modern society. That study, conducted by Kerin O'Dea, found measurable improvements in every aspect of their health after only a seven-week reversion back to a traditional Aboriginal lifestyle in an isolated region of Northwestern Australia. They had lost weight, their blood pressure had dropped, their glucose tolerance / insulin response to glucose had greatly improved, etc... Those results might seem obvious, but Pollan follows it up with an interesting question - "To what extent are we all Aborigines?" Consider how drastically our diets have changed in just the last few decades, which is really only the blink of an eye in comparison to how long human beings have existed and evolved. Pollan goes on to further explain just how much our diet has changed later in this section, the myriad changes brought about by the industrialization of agriculture.
Section 3 wraps it all up nicely; and contains many common sense, but nonetheless useful and rarely stated suggestions as to how we can improve the way we eat. And this part can be summed up in the simple mantra on the book's cover - "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."
An excerpt from a subsection entitled "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" -
Imagine your great-grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles. You're standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes - and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is it a food or a toothpaste? And how, exactly, do you introduce it into your body? You could tell her it's just yogurt in a squirtable form, yet if she read the ingredients label she would have every reason to doubt that that was in fact the case. Sure, there's some yogurt in there, but there are also a dozen other things that aren't remotely yogurtlike, ingredients she would probably fail to recognize as foods of any kind, including high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, carrageenan, tricalcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavors, vitamins and so forth. (And there's a whole other list of ingredients for the "berry bubblegum bash" flavoring, containing everything but berries or bubblegum.) How did yogurt, which in your great-grandmother's day consisted simply of milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get to be so complicated?
- Michael Pollan, "In Defense of Food" (pp. 148-149)
I definitely recommend this book. It's relatively short, at only 201 pages...and I enjoyed the "The Omnivore's Dilemma" more, but that's an unfair comparison because these are two different types of books. This book stands very well as what it is, and is definitely worth a read. I've read it twice now, the second time just prior to writing this diary. And of course, Michael Pollan being Michael Pollan - there are more than a few instances of unexpected humor in the strangest places. Pick it up at your local independent bookseller; or if you must buy online, please consider ordering through Powell's, an independent unionized bookstore.
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Ann Vileisis' academic background is as an historian, and it shows throughout her excellent book, "Kitchen Literacy". Her book begins with excerpts from the diary of Martha Ballard, and describes in detail exactly what it was that our not-so-distant ancestors ate, and where it came from. Descriptions of her "garden", which today would probably be considered a small farm, are intertwined with accounts of meals Mrs. Ballard prepared for her family in eighteenth-century Maine...and show how closely people lived to their land in those times. What little food Mrs. Ballard prepared for her family that was not grown, harvested or raised by her or her husband or children, was from one of a few other farms located within a few miles of their home. Foodsheds were much smaller in those days, admittedly by necessity...but walking through the aisles of a modern day supermarket might lead to questions of whether that is such a bad thing, after all. Do we really need the current endless supply of junk food, and other convenience food-like products? And for that matter, what happens when a disruption in the supply chain occurs? Can we say "Peak Oil"? How soon will we regret turning our productive agricultural land into suburban housing developments? Do we have enough time to begin the reversal process? Is it even possible any more? Will we ever realize that we can only temporarily 'defeat' nature, and that if we intend to exist much longer as a species, we are going to have to learn to work with nature's rhythms?
The rest of "Kitchen Literacy" details in depth the process through which we've ended up where we are today. Starting from the earliest sales of canned foods, the emerging trend towards marketing, packaging and brand-labeling; up to the introduction of Piggly Wiggly, A & P and the modern supermarket chains and their overtaking local neighborhood grocers and urban open-air food markets in the years just before and after World War I. Towards the end of the book, she touches on the beginnings of the organic food movement in California and the later rapid growth and industrialization of many of those.
These two books cover a lot of the same ground, but Vileisis comes at the issue from a historian's perspective and succeeds in doing exactly what she set out to do in the subtitle of her book - explaining how we lost knowledge of where our food comes from. I highly recommend this book, as well. My wish is that Vileisis follows it up with a future volume focusing more on where we are now, and where we need to go from here. If done in the same vein as "Kitchen Literacy", a detailed history of the recent rise of Farmers Markets, CSA's, the local foods movement, etc... would definitely be something else that I'd look forward to reading. I believe she'd do a great job on that, as well.
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Has anybody else recently any good books, articles, blogs, seen any films, etc... on general food and sustainability issues that you feel are worth sharing?
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