In Defense of Food Books/Nonfiction

By Janet Maslin

In Defense of Food

An Eater’s Manifesto

By Michael Pollan

244 pages. $21.95. The Penguin Press.

Reviewed by Janet Maslin

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Not all scientific study of Mars is about extraterrestrial exploration. Some of it is about chocolate. Scientists at Mars Corporation have found evidence that the flavanols in cocoa have beneficial effects on the heart, thus allowing Mars to market products like its health-minded Rich Chocolate Indulgence Beverage.

In the same spirit, nutritionism has lately helped to justify vitamin-enriched Diet Coke, bread bolstered with the omega-3 fatty acids more readily found in fish oil, and many other new improvements on what Michael Pollan calls “the tangible material formerly known as food.”

Goaded by “the silence of the yams,” Pollan wants to help old- fashioned edibles fight back. So he has written “In Defense of Food,” a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. “We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again,” he writes.

In this lively, invaluable book – which grew out of an essay Pollan wrote for the New York Times Magazine – he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion. In his opinion, the industry-financed branch of nutritional science is “remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study.”

Some of this reasoning turned up in Pollan’s best-selling “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” But “In Defense of Food” is a simpler, blunter and more pragmatic book, one that really lives up to the “manifesto” in its subtitle. Although he is not in the business of dispensing self-help rules, he incorporates a few McNuggets of plain-spoken advice: Don’t eat things that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Avoid anything that trumpets the word “healthy.” Be as vitamin-conscious as the person who takes supplements, but don’t actually take them. And in the soon to be exhaustively quoted words on the book’s cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’

Do we really need such elementary advice? Well, two-thirds of the way through his argument Pollan points out something irrefutable.

“You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy,” he says. Other writers on food, from Barbara Kingsolver to Marion Nestle, have expressed the same alarm, but “In Defense of Food” is an especially succinct and helpful summary.

Pollan shows how the story of nutritionism is “a history of macronutrients at war.” If the conventional scientific wisdom has moved from demon (saturated fat) to demon (carbohydrates), creating irreconcilably different theories about the health benefits of various foods, it has also created an up-and-coming eating disorder: orthorexia.

“We are,” he underscores, “people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.” This book is biliously entertaining about orthorexia’s crazy extremes.

He recommends that we pay more attention to the reductive effects of food science, recognize the fallibility of research studies (because to replicate the healthy effects of, say, the Mediterranean diet completely, you need to live like a villager on Crete) and dial back the clock. Pollan advocates a return to the local and the basic, even at the risk of elitism. He recommends that Americans spend more on food: not only more money but also more time.

Eat less, and maybe you make up the financial difference. Trade fast food for cooking, and maybe you restore some civility to the traditional idea of the meal. “No, a desk is not a table,” he points out. Though he shouldn’t have to tell us that, readers will be glad he did.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.