A Review of "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan - Part II

In Part II (The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization) of his just released book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan begins with a tale of ten middle-aged Australian Aborigines, all overweight diabetics, who had been living in a settlement and eating a Western diet chock full of refined carbohydrates. Kerin O'Dea, a nutrition scientist, asked them to participate in an experiment: spend 7 weeks in the bush hunting and gathering the traditional Aboriginal foods. The result was dramatic. They lost weight, naturally, but also "all of the metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved or completely normalized...."

What are the diseases brought about by the infamous Western ways of eating? Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and diet-related cancers are the big ones. O'Dea and others who have replicated her findings in other native populations (Native Americans and native Hawaiians) are showing us that it doesn't take a long time to reverse the ill effects of our horrible ways of eating things that really are not food. They also show us that the idea of "Nutritionism" with its single minded focus on fats or carbs as the guilty culprits that make us fat or sick is wrong-headed. It isn't one thing, it's the entire range of foods and how they are produced that act together to either make us healthy or ill.

The typical Western diet consists of "lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains." Pollan points out that this is not new information, that scientists began recognizing the effects of western vs indigenous diets in the early 20th centuries. People like Albert Schweitzer observed that when native populations were introduced to refined flours and sugar and other industrialized food products, western diseases were sure to follow.

All kinds of theories were offered -- from natives being poorly adapted to modern foods, to genetic and demographic theories. But Pollan points out that "When you adjust for age, rates of chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes are considerably higher today than they were in 1900." Chillingly he notes that most of us today simply accept that conditions like cancer and heart disease are givens, so we look for medical solutions rather than focusing in on what and how we eat.

In a fascinating account of a Canadian dentist by the name of Weston A. Price, who set up a practice in Cleveland, OH, we find an answer to the question of why industrialized societies have such great dental problems. Price traveled the world to solve this mystery. He searched for native populations that had not been exposed to modern refined foods. No matter where he found these natives (in the mountains of Switzerland, lowlands of Africa, Australian bush, New Zealand or the Everglades of Florida and more), they all had no need of dentists. Their teeth were healthy and their gums free of diseases.

Not content with mere observation, he took pictures of the teeth (this was in the 1930s) and sent home samples of their foods to be analyzed . He found that all his population groups were eating a diet that contained on average ten times as much vitamins A and D as the typical Western diet. What is most amazing is that none of the diets were the same. For example, the Masai ate hardly any plant foods, for example, while the people in the Hebrides consumed no dairy.

What he was on to was how nutritionally starved we have become in the quest to process foods so that we can ship them great distances and store them for months and years upon the shelf. The closer we humans are to the natural links of the food chain, the more nutrition we gain from our food.

It starts with the the soil, which gets robbed of nutrients to grow more grains to process into refined food products or to feed more animals to slaughter and process to feed more people. Other researchers were developing this critique of an impoverished food supply in the 1930s, but World War II created a demand for industrialized foods (think Spam) and by the end of this horrific Western conflict, processed food was a way of life for most Europeans and Americans.

Pollan puts it bluntly -- the Western diet is:

"...a radical and, at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. The rise of the ideology of nutirionism is itself part of that change. When we think of s aspecies' environment, we usually think in terms of things like geography, predators and prey and the weather. But of course on e of the most critical components of any creature's environment is the nature of the food available to it and its relationships to the species it eats."

Pollan offers five fundamental recent transformations to our foods that we can reverse if we choose:

1. From whole foods to refined.
2. From complexity to simplicity.
3. From quality to quantity.
4. From leaves to seeds.
5. From food culture to food science.

Pollan goes into great detail and provides excellent examples of what he means for each of the above transformations. I won't give it all away, as I do think this book deserves to be read and talked about and acted upon. I will give you one example for number 5. Pollan talks about how food once was something that was part of one's cultural traditions. What we ate and how it was grown, gathered and prepared was handed down from generation to generation. Now food is packaged as something that is "good for you" with added vitamins and Omega 3s and everything else that has vanished because our soils are depleted and our food is processed to death. Grandmother doesn't tell you what is good for you anymore, it is the nutritionists from General Mills or other corporate food processing behemoths.

Coming soon -- Part III, in which we learn how to get over Nutritionism as a way of eating.

Review: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan's follow up book to The Omnivore's Dilemma (reviewed here in four parts) provides us with some much needed guidance. After following the four food chains, he described in his previous book, the reader is left contemplating the dilemma and not quite sure what to do. Those four chains were:

1. A fast food meal
2. An Agri-biz organic meal
3. A pastoral meal from a sustainable farm
4. And a meal that was entirely hunted and gathered

None of the meals was vegetarian or vegan, however if I were a meat-eater, I'd stop and think hard before eating animal products from options 1 or 2 after reading how those animals were fed and slaughtered.

Now Pollan addresses the dilemmas he left hanging with this advice:

Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

Sounds simple, but how to convince people to do that after a life time spent absorbing the typical Western diet? Pollan makes a convincing case. His new book is divided into three sections, which I will review one at a time. Today's section:

The Age of Nutritionism

How did we get from eating food to eating products that must be labeled with complete ingredients, along with amazing pseudo-scientific claims? Leading off with "An Eater's Manifesto," Pollan states:

"...you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to 'eat food,' which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat."

The health claims began in earnest with the advent of nutrients replacing real food in the supermarkets. Product claims of low-fat, low cholestoral, vitamins added all grew out of scientific studies that were trying to discover what exactly is in food that is good for us or bad for us. In the early 1d9th century, William Prout first identified the three major constituents of food: protein, carbohydrates and fat.

Justice Von Liebig followed with his discovery of the essential chemicals for building life from the soil up the food chain: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. He developed formulas for beef bouillion and the first baby formula (made of cow's milk, wheat flour , malted flour and postassium bicarbonate -- babies who drank it failed to thrive), which were not as nutritious as he expected. It wasn't until micronutrients (vitamins) were discovered in the early 20th century, that nutritional science really began to take off.

Pollan then takes us through a little-known event in 1977 that he says is responsible for the shift away from food to nutrients in the last two decades of the 20th century. The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human needs, chaired by George McGovern (a man for whom I once voted for president). Responding to reports that the typical US diet was leading to an increase in chronic diseases, the committee prepared a document called "Dietary Goals for the United States."

"The committee learned that while coronary heart disease had soared in the US, certain other cultures that consumed traditional diets based mostly on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic diseases. Epidemiologists had also observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease had temporarily plummeted, only to leap upward once the war was over."

Based upon all that evidence, the committee issued guidelines that called for Americans to cut down on dairy and red meat. Can you guess who leaped into the fray? Why the red meat and dairy industries, of course. Senator McGovern's state of South Dakota was home to many cattle ranchers. McGovern bowed to pressure and the guidelines were re-written so that Americans were advised to "choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake." Pollan puts it in sharp language:

"...with these subtle changes in wording, a whole way of thinking about food and health underwent a momentous shift. First, notice that the stark message to eat less of a particular food--int his case meat--had been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any official US Government dietary pronouncement. Say what you will about this or that food, you are not allowed officially to tell people to eat less of it or the industry in question will have you for lunch. But there is a path around this immovable obstacle, and it was McGovern's staffers who blazed it: Speak no more of foods, only nutrients."

And so began the age of Nutritionism, in which food is broken down into components which accompanying claims:L lowfat vs saturated fat, high and low cholesterol omega 3 vs omega 6, good carbs vs bad carbs and so on. Pollan points out that the advent of low-fat products coincides with the rise of obesity and diabetes in the US.

Pollan digs in deep to the claims and the research for the various nutrients. This first section is fascinating and enlightening, and leads to a conclusion that when food became a substance filled with nutrients that are either good or bad for you, eating became a chore rather than a pleasure. References to the French way of eating are found throughout the book. The French eat food that is filled with all the wrong stuff, and yet they remain slimmer and healthier than Americans. By the end of In Defense of Food, you will be considering not only French cuisine, but French attitudes about food and its place in your life.

Tomorrow, we'll delve into Part II: The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization. It's not very pretty and it will probably make you feel queasy, rather like the typical American meal.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Says Michael Pollan in an excellent in-depth article entitled "Happy Meals" in the New York Times Magazine. Pollan is the author of "The Omnivore's Delight," (reviewed in a series of Village Green entries here here, here and here) who is making a lot of people rethink what human diet is really best for us. When he says "eat food," he is telling us to eat unprocessed plants for the most part, with some animal products on the side, but never as a main course.

Pollan presents an overview on how food was transformed into "nutrients" and how that has led us into obesity and "nutritionism." Along the way, we learn how the beef industry proved to be the death of Senator George McGovern's political career as well as how our reliance on chemical fertilizing has decreased the nutritional value of everything we eat, among many of the fascinating points Pollan continues to make about 21st century food chains.

The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 4

The final meal prepared by author Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma is hunted and gathered. Upon moving to Northern California, he connects with some folks who still understand the woods and the wild. So Pollan embarks on a pig hunt, becoming the predator in a food chain that starts with oak trees that take energy from the sun to produce acorns which the wild pigs feast upon. He also hunts for mushrooms, adding fungi into the mix.

Pollan gathered cherries in Berkeley and some wild greens from the surrounding hills. He made sourdough bread using yeast from the air itself, which I'd never heard of doing -- simply exposing the dough mixture to air through an open window. The yeast spores are everpresent, apparently.

It was fascinating to contemplate the evolution of the original hunter/gatherer humans, their diets changing as they moved from treetops to savanah and then on to fertile deltas where crops could be grown, and then animals domesticated for consumption. The rise of seed corn as a commodity in the 20th century saw huge increases in the planet's population. By the end of the 20th century, cheap processed food fed the poorest of the poor, while the wealthy began looking for "organics" and "alternative food sources." Pollan hints that of the two species -- corn and homo sapiens, the former may be the real driving force of nature.

One thing is for sure -- there are many more dilemmas involved in eating than one suspects. Most of us engage in rather mindless eating without doing much thinking about the where and the how of the food that is before us. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a must read!

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Part 3 (the meme)

I've been tagged by Pho, tagged as in "for a meme" a term I had to look up and found that it is something like a chain letter only not linked to any threats of dire fortune if one doesn't keep it going. It's more of a controlled random way of forging blog links, so I don't mind participating one bit -- especially since it turns out to be total serendipity here at the Village Green.

The meme's instructions are:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
   
2. Open to page 123, go down to the 4th sentence.
   
3. Post the text of the following 3 sentences on your blog.
   
4. Name of the book and the author.
   
5. Tag three people of your own.

I'm glad to do this because the book right in front of me is -- as you might expect -- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It is at hand because I'm about to post my third comment in a row, takin g a look at the Pastoral Grass food chain. Page 123 turns out to be the first page of that section in a chapter called All Flesh is Grass. Here are the three sentences:

"I was tired. I'd spent the afternoon making hay, really just lending a hand to a farmer making hay, and after a few hours in the midday sun hoisting and throwing fifty-pound bales onto a hay wagon, I hurt. We think of grass as soft and hospitable stuff, but once it's been dried in the sun and shredded by machines--once it's become hay--grass is sharp enough to draw blood and dusty enough to thicken lungs." (Omnivore's Dilemma, p 123)

This was my favorite section of the book -- the chapter on Polyface Farm in Virginia. The farm raises chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, as well as tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries in a unique configuration of animal and crop rotations. This all happens on one hundred acres of pasture plus 450 acres of forest. The guy who runs it calls himself a "grass farmer" and his name is Joe Salatin. A fascinating fellow! But even more so is his way of farming which he deiscribes as a place where animals do most of the work.

Grass farming recognizes that energy comes from the sun and is stored in plant leaves, such as grass, which is consumed by animals who are then consumed by humans. Salatin has observed nature and his farming techniques are like an "intensive rotational dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer and the grasses are his verdurous stage."

Basically, he grazes his cows on pasture land then moves them before the cows over graze the grass. Grass will recover its vitality after one clip of cow teeth, but not as well after two or more bites down to the ground. So the cows are constantly moved with portable fencing. After the cows leave one section, a mobile chicken coop is brought in, affectionately known as the "Eggmobile!" Chickens in pens go straight to the cow pies (!) and peck out the grubs and other nasties growing in them. The chicken coops stay for one day and are moved the length of the coop to new ground so that the entire pasture benefits from the chicken manure which supplies the grasses with copious amounts of nitrogen.

The beauty and intricacy of this operation is that it is highly productive without the added costs from antibiotics, wormers, paraciticides, and fertilizers. There is a lot more to it than my brief summation above -- Pollan delves into the nature of grass plants and soil, doing a magnificent job of taking us on a grand tour of the the chain of food and life itself. Pollan spent a week working on the farm, and even participates in the weekly slaughter of chickens for sale. I admire him for his willingness to experience and record things that I could probably never bring myself to do. I know I couldn't kill an animal to eat it, but after reading this chapter -- I began to understand my heritage as a human onmnivore. If I were to become a meat eater once more, I would want link to the chain that had animals who lived their lives on a farm like Polyface.

Oh and tagging this meme far out of the park and on to: Microdot, Nerve Doc, and Kevin.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Part 2

Continuing on with Michael Pollan's provocative book about the food chains available to the human species, let's look at what he calls "Big Organic." This food chain markets the word "organic" to consumers with a conscience -- but it is still Agri-biz and monoculture-focused.

An example would be Rose the organic chicken, advertised as free of antibiotics and artificial hormones who are raised with "access to the outdoors," one of federal organic rules. The chickens are raised in long low sheds that have open doors that lead to a grassy yard. The only thing is, the chickens never venture outside even though the doors are open. For their first five weeks, they are kept inside, so they only know being fed and watered indoors. By the time they are five weeks old, their habits are formed and they would be terrified to go out into some strange outdoor environment. And by the way, after 7 weeks -- the chickens are slaughtered. So much for the happy free-range lifestyle for chickens.

Pollan gives us the scoop on the giant organic farm businesses in California, including Earthbound, a brand I used to purchase at the Mustard Seed. I've been very leary though, since the E.coli contaminated spinach was identified as coming from Earthbound. Wild pigs were reported as the E.coli carriers along with

"Samples taken from a wild pig, as well as from stream water and cattle on the ranch, have tested positive for the same strain of E. coli implicated in the outbreak, said Dr. Kevin Reilly of the California Department of Health Services."

It doesn't matter how organic and holistic one's farming practices are -- if the neighboring acreage is supporting unsanitary practices with its animals, the ground water is easily contaminated and wild animals help spread disease as well.

So now I am leary of vegetables grown on monoculture fields whether organic or not! I found an indoor lettuce grower online, but wow -- it is pricey. I'd like to figure out a way to make something out of recycled materials. Anybody have any ideas?

At least I have the egg problem solved. My mom sends along a picture of an actual free roaming and apparently happy chicken from someone who is raising chickens to sell their eggs. I won't be fooled by the organic advertising any more!

The Omnivore's Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals

If we are what we eat, most of us would be comprised of corn with a large side of petroleum. Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, follows the human food chains back to their origins by tracing the paths of all the items in four meals: a fast food meal from McDonald's representing processed food; an Agribiz produced "organic" food meal; a pastoral meal produced on an amazing farm in Virginia where nothing goes to waste and animals lead happy lives and are slaughtered as humanely as possible; and finally, a meal totally gathered and hunted in the woods and wilds of northern California.

Pollan wants us to become mindful of what we are eating and consider the effects of how it is produced upon the planet and upon our own bodies. It puts the human animal in a place she'd rather not be -- face to face with the reality of what it means to live on this planet and recognize that after all, we are but another thing that dies to feed other things.

Those who eat animals and/or their products, would really rather not know about the conditions those animals live in, but Pollan buys a steer calf and follows it through its short miserable life. He goes into great detail explaining how the stomach's of cows are evolved to digest grasses. That is what cows should eat, but now they are penned in CAFOs (Contained Animal Feeding Operations), and fed a corn-based mash. Cows do not digest corn naturally. So that upsets the balance:

"Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs, since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen. But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own, and in this new, man made environment new acid resistant strains of E.coli, of which 0157:H7, is one, have evolved--yet another creature recruited by nature to absorb the excess biomass coming off the Farm Belt. The problem with these bugs is that they can shake off the acid bath in our stomachs--and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the rumen with corn we've broken down one of our food chain's most important barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.." (Omnivore p 82).

Big Agribiz with its monoculture of corn fields and silos that produce and store the kernals that feed the cows on CAFOs burns up enormous amounts of petroleum products to produce its crop of field corn #2, including petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the fuel used to run the massive machines that work over the massive amounts of acres which are "farmed" these days. According to Pollan, one fifth of petroleum consumed in America goes to the production and transportation of food.

Those corn kernals go into just about every processed food humans consume, in the form of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) and other fattening engineered food products. We fatten the cows on corn, then proceed to fatten ourselves on HFCS and other corn derivatives.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Pollan's book are the chapters describing the meal at the end of each food chain. In the case of the processed corn chain, it is a chicken McNugget, made from 38 ingredients including TBHQ, or tertiary butylhydroquinone, sprayed on to help preserve the freshness. It is actually a form of butane and extremely toxic if you swallow a gram of it. McDonalds isn't going to put a gram of it on your nuggets, but someone who eats those things a lot might be accumulating that stuff somewhere in their bodies, don't you think?

Yes, this book provokes an awful amount of thinking and I wish everybody I knew would read it ASAP. I will be writing about it all week as there is much to ponder and reflect upon -- especially concerning what I learned about my vegetarian life-style (30+ years now!) and whether after reading the Omniovore's Dilemma I could ever bring myself to eat flesh.

To be continued.....