Possibly the best piece of food writing I've seen in a year or more.
I've seen some great excerpts from the Omnivore's Dilemma, and now I very may well have to read it, since the author wrote a brilliant essay about food in the New York Times. Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan - New York Times (nytimes.com, 1/28/07) is absolutely brilliant. It begins so simply:Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.And it then becomes an expose on why Americans are so completely misguided about food. The article is clever, substantive, and (despite the amount of food-related reading I already do), made me think about things in new ways.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
You have probably long syspected that the processed food industry and its colleagues in agribusiness want you to eat poorly, because bad food is cheap and has fabulously high markups. But it isn't just a passive wish - the food industry intervenes to be sure you don't know any better.
Here's a sample that might send you over to the NYTimes website:
Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem . . . The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.Commerce trumps science, public health, and the public interest every time.
Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat.
Perhaps more interesting is Pollan's discussion of how commercial science's pressures to identify single, chemical causes for health problems has hampered progress in health. It's easiest to study individual chemicals and nutrients in isolation, and so that is what they do. Scientists see meat-byproduct eaters getting sick; they isolate some component of meat (such as saturated fat) that they suspect is to blame; they encourage meat-byproduct eaters switch to a lower-saturated by-product, and then are stumped when they keep getting sick. The relationships between the thousands of compounds in foods are lost.
I especially like his timely discussion of the omega 3s and 6s, and how they are being looked at in isolation.
It's been pretty clear that vitamin c in a pill isn't as good for you as an orange, and every year you read about the new discovery of a "new" component of something like bioflavinoids that have always been in an orange, and which might be the next big miracle cure packaged into pill form - but likely still not as good for you as an orange, which is full of chemical combinations unavailable in pill form (at least, until they start just dehydrating oranges and putting them into pills).
This is a great article by a clear-thinking omnivore, with a sensible omnivore's perception on diet. Go read it. (Buy it, or ask me to mail you my hard copy if you know me.) It's excellent.
Labels: food, health, nutrionism, nutrition
posted by Arlene (Beth)5:47 PM
