Parenthetical

I think I’m breaking up with Michael Pollan.

Ever since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma last year, I’ve been a devoted disciple. Now let me be fair and introduce my biases up front: I’ve been an environmentalist since I could read, and I’ve been into sustainable food for years. That’s why I read TOD (it even gets a fannish abbreviation! Such is the squee) in the first place; I am not a non-fiction reader at all, but I totally drooled all over it. My opinion hasn’t changed: it’s a fucking fabulous book, life-changing for the better for just about everyone who reads it.

So when his new book, In Defense of Food, came out, of course I rushed right out and bought it. The idea is that while TOD takes the environmental perspective, IDOF approaches the question of “What should we eat?” from the perspective of nutrition.

Pollan’s opening mantra is, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Good advice, hard to argue with that. And indeed, much of his advice is good: eat slowly, cook rather than reheat, eat with people, eat until you’re full rather than until your plate is clean, eat more whole foods and fewer processed foods. None of this is new, but it bears repeating. Very little, in fact, was new to me — though, to be fair, outside of librarian stuff, there’s no subject I know so much about as sustainable nutrition. But most people in this country do need to hear this stuff, including the sort of people who read Pollan’s books. So I’m glad the book exists, even though maybe I didn’t need to read it.

I do wish the book were better, though, and that’s where we head into break-up territory. My first quibble is with his critique of the science of nutrition, which takes up the first two-thirds of the book. Michael Pollan is a very smart man, with a gift for critically digesting (pun intended) science and making it palatable (snerk) to the layman. He did this fairly brilliantly in TOD. So why does he not see (or express, anyway) the contradiction between “all traditional cuisines evolved for a reason, and keep their populations healthy, so pick a traditional cuisine and eat that way,” and “eat more plants than meat, and more leaves than seeds”? He says himself that certain populations (Eskimos, some African tribes) are quite healthy eating virtually no plants — so why shouldn’t we be?

The answer, I suspect, lies partly in the different genetics of different populations, which he touches on but never gives much credit to. Western industrialized nations, and the U.S. in particular, are such hodgepodges of genetics and culture that who can possibly say what our “traditional cuisine” ought to be? This is only one example of his disappointing reluctance to really dig into the science and challenge both the mainstream views of nutritionists as well as his own deep anti-Western diet bias. (I think that’s part of why TOD is such a better book — he went into it an “ordinary” eater, consuming his share of fast food and industrial meat, and curious about what all that meant. Now he’s too much of his own disciple to write critically on the subject.)

When he made me feel guilty for my eating habits, though, was when I knew I needed to dump him. The sometimes-uncritical science I could forgive, but the emotional abuse was just too painful. I should say first that I almost never feel guilty about eating: good food is one of my favorite things in life, and I am not ashamed of that. I think I eat pretty well — mostly high-quality, local, seasonal real foods as ingredients in my own cooking, almost nothing with “high-fructose” or “partially hydrogenated” on the label — though I’m sure I eat more sugar and white flour than I should. (Because flour + butter + sugar + eggs? Yummy!)

But this book made me feel bad about eating. “I may be showing my age, but didn’t there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between-meal snack? Well, it is gone. Americans today mark time all day long with nibbles of food and sips of soft drinks, which must be constantly at their sides, lest they expire during the haul between breakfast and lunch” (p. 191). The scorn for snackers — for Americans, for eating — fairly drips from passages like this. I noshed some dried fruit this morning from the stash that I keep in my desk, and felt disgusting, a slave to my gluttonous American tummy and a pawn of the food marketers. Dried apricots, people! Unsulphured and organic! This is unlike me.

The man is right that my snacking is about marking time, not about actual hunger. I could easily consume many fewer calories in a day and be just fine — healthier, probably. But I can tell the difference between really wanting to eat a particular thing, and just being bored and wanting to eat something. If I only follow the former urges and not the latter, and continue to choose things made of simple lists of ingredients that I recognize as food (or created myself), I ought to be just fine. But IDOF made me feel like a gluttonous pig contributing to the wasteful, nutritionally devoid, environmentally blighting indulgence of modern American culture, in the way that overweight people are encouraged to feel by diet books. And I don’t have to take that from a book!

So it’s goodbye, Michael. You went a little too far, and now the honeymoon is over. I still totally respect you, and I hope we can still be friends.