In Defense of Food

By Ian on August 2, 2009 in Food, Health

Updated with the video above from Michael Ruhlman Notes from the Food World blog. Link via kottke.org. I’ve written also about overeating recently. And many other posts on food.

I just finished In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It is a bestseller and very interesting. For so many years I was interested in eating well and this has given me a rethink. And reading it after I read The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite which I blogged about earlier.

He talks about how we got where we are and that we need to escape from the western diet which we all know has it troubles.

So he dedicates pages to defining food. giving some rules of thumb including:

don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize a food
avoid food products containing ingredients that are
- unfamiliar
- unpronounceable
- more than five in number
- include high fructose corn syrup
avoid products that make health claims

And how to do this he adds

shop the periphery of the supermarket and stay out of th middle
get out of the supermarket whenever possible (such as farmer’s markets)

Then he gives advice on what to eat

mostly plants of course, and especially leaves
you are what you eat eats too. What is the animals you are eating eating.
eat well grown foods from healthy soils, in other words there is more in soil that plants need than synthetic fertilizers
eat wild foods if you can
take supplements, in moderation a multivitamin and mineral pill maybe some fish oil supplement

Basically he advises that we eat traditional cultural foods, tried and tested over generations. What I found interesting is his comments on soy products. We’ve industrialized them rather with textured soy protein etc rather than relying on the traditional soy products such as tofu.

Along these lines he advises us to

regard traditional foods with skepticism
don’t look for a magic bullet in the traditional diet

Then more on what too eat

not too much
pay more for less, of higher quality
eat meals
do all your eating at a table (a desk is not a table)
don’t’ get your fuel from he same place your car does
try not to eat alone
consult your gut. It takes 20 minutes for us to feel full so don’t just eat by visual clues
that is, eat slowly
cook and if you can plant a garden

I couldn’t help noticing on the following photograph of the Apollo 11 launch day breakfast of steak and eggs that the steak is not massive like we now consider a steak — particularly in Texas!