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Author's Diet: Slow Down, Enjoy Food

Posted on: Wednesday, 9 January 2008, 15:00 CST

By KAREN HERZOG

Michael Pollan may be to foodies what Dr. Benjamin Spock was to new parents a generation ago.

Pollan is the reassuring voice that tells anxious Americans who want to eat better to trust their instincts and ignore the so- called experts whose messages waffle from one piece of advice to another - especially this time of year, when post-holiday guilt sends Americans scrambling for the latest diet fix.

In his just-released book, "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" (Penguin Press, $21.95), the journalist and author makes a convincing argument for avoiding "Nutritionism," which he says divides food into its individual nutrients and then plays them against each other, fueling fads such as low-fat and low-carb eating.

Pollan says fad diets have only made Americans fatter and sicker with chronic diseases, which in turn have led to dramatically increased health care costs.

He contends there's an all-too convenient relationship between nutrition scientists and food marketers, and says "the Western diet" is to blame for what ails us. Returning regular meals to the table and cooking to the kitchen - instead of relegating both to check- off items on a multi-tasking list - also would help reverse the "devaluing" of food, says Pollan.

Pollan, who will be in Milwaukee on Monday for a talk at Alverno College, argues in the book that food needs defending from "nutrition science on one side and from the food industry on the other - and from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered."

In a phone interview last week from San Francisco, the first stop on his book tour, Pollan explained that his message boils down to seven common-sense words that are the subtitle of his book: "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

By food, he means things your great-grandmother would recognize as food - not the processed, packaged foods in supermarket center aisles that scream health claims and/or convenience and that have chemical ingredients too complex to understand. He refers to those foods as "edible food-like substances."

Instead, Pollan suggests in his fifth book that shoppers stick to the perimeter of the supermarket, where "real" food such as milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables quietly reside.

Slowing down to savor leisurely, cooked-from-scratch meals with friends and family would help with portion control, giving diners time for their tummies to tell their brains they are full. It also would restore the sense of pleasure and community that are integral to eating and replace mindless eating in front of the TV, which leads to overeating.

Pollan said that when his 15-year-old son was younger, whenever he didn't eat enough fruits or vegetables at the table, Pollan would quietly slip a bowl of green beans in front of his son as he was watching television. "They would disappear, and he wouldn't even realize what he was eating."

So when did America take a wrong turn down the food path to chronic diseases?

Pollan points to several "red letter days." One of the first was in the 1870s, "when we figured out how to refine grain and turn it into the crack version of carbohydrates," he said. Refining grain "removed the healthy parts from grain to get a shot of fructose."

When processed foods came along in the 1950s and '60s, that signaled a decline of cooking, Pollan said. "The microwave takes it another important step in the 1980s with processed, single-serving entres," which fragmented the family dinner hour.

Cup holders in cars and minivans took food further away from the family dinner table.

Pollan hopes that the high demand for corn for both ethanol and grain to feed cattle and hogs for export will make it cost prohibitive to keep using high-fructose corn syrup in foods - a sweetener in everything from soft drinks to ketchup.

Eating more fruits and vegetables isn't less expensive; it simply takes more money and more time to eat healthfully, he said.

"That's a fact. You have to start cooking and realize that food is as worthy of your disposable income as your cell phone or cable TV - things that weren't in our budget 20 years ago."

You get what you pay for in food, just like any other consumer product, Pollan says. "It's the principle of value."

His advice?

"Turn off the noise of food marketers." Don't eat any food you see advertised on TV. Don't pick up packaged food at the store with a health claim on it.

"The healthiest foods sit there quietly," he said, without a package on which to post a health claim.

Americans "know what we need to know to eat well," Pollan says. "We resist that knowledge because we're enchanted by the promises of the middle of the store. We need to hear the voices of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers again. It's not that complicated."

Pollan's last book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals," was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and a Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley.

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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