IN PRINT: BOOK REVIEW
In Defense of Food

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
(New York, NY, Penguin Press, 2008, 244 pages, cloth, $21.95)

Reviewed by Hope Villella, director of social action and pastoral planning at the National Pastoral Life Center.

Beginning with the questions, “What should we eat?” and “How should we eat it?” could lead one to look to science and environmental journalist Michael Pollan’s newest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, for a whole variety of modern explanations or directives on diet and consumption. Those who know Pollan’s work might imagine it to be a tome about socially conscious eating. Others might pick it up for the principles it enumerates—a “how-to” guide to eating healthfully. Still others might look to it as a historical study of food production and consumption in Western culture. And while none of these people will be disappointed, for those who gather each week around the eucharistic table, Pollan’s fundamental assertion that what we should eat, real food, has a wholeness that is greater than its constitutive elements will resound. What nourishes us cannot be dissected in order to be understood nor can it be diluted down and continue to satisfy our hunger. It is precisely against these abuses that this book makes its “defense.”

Pollan begins and ends with the argument that our best response to the constant battery of competing claims on ethical, responsible, and healthy eating can be summed up in the mantra, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” He explains that whereas at one time in human history this would have been a statement of the obvious, the advent of the two modern forces of nutritionism and food industrialization have brought “edible food-like substances” into our lives and made it not only possible but actually quite likely for us to disobey that guideline.

The book embarks on an exploration of nutritionism, the idea that our culture has become so caught up with what is inside any given ingestible item that our belief in the quality of what we eat has come to be reduced to the vitamins and nutrients of which it is composed. In his somewhat technical but fascinating section on the evolution of nutritionism, Pollan follows the trail of this assumption through to its conclusions. In our faith that scientific understanding could unearth for us the most healthy, life-extending diet possible, Americans have dispensed with traditional eating patterns and even the wisdom of our tastebuds and have latched onto diets that make claims of “low-sodium,” “high-fiber,” “cholesterol-lowering,” and the like. As science has increasingly been able to isolate and modify nutritional components, our diets have certainly been altered, but our health continues to decline as rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity soar.

Working hand-in-hand with the religious adherence to nutritionism is the food industry’s willingness and ability to process and engineer our food to make it more appealing to those attracted to the claims of nutrition science. Over the years it has also worked to use nutritional and scientific advances to adapt our food, making it more abundant, more easily preserved for transport to many places, easier to prepare quickly, even easier to digest. This has not been without cost, as it has brought about a loss in the holistic nourishment of many particular food items by disregarding the way their vitamins and minerals naturally interact in and of themselves and with the other foods in the meal in which they are eaten. Many recent and not so recent examinations of traditional diets suggest that it is just such interactions that have protected indigenous peoples against many modern health plagues.

Though still largely inexplicable to the scientists and nutritionists who would dissect them, an exploration of these findings led Pollan to present a three-part framework for engaging food. As promised, these parts are a return to his initial mantra. “Eat food,” that is, eat those things that are universally recognized as food, the fewer added chemicals and the less packaging the better. Eat “mostly plants,” which have naturally supplied humans with fundamental nourishment since the days of hunter-gatherers. “Not too much” eating is also a key. He encourages readers to focus less on the quantity and more on the quality both of the meal itself and of the atmosphere in which it is eaten.

While Defense of Food makes a good case for dispensing with the trappings of nutritionism and industrialization, it does not suggest a reactionary inclination to “go back to the land” or to our days of hunting and gathering. In the midst of a defense against the onslaught of marketing that, as Pollan points out, convinces us that advertisers know better than our own ancestors what we should eat, this book offers an offense that works together with its “defense.” It argues that our growing awareness of how far we have moved from healthful eating makes it possible for us to move forward with a perspective that reframes the way we look at our food in order to become a responsible, sustainable culture. Like a eucharistic people that continues to recognize the sanctity and mystery of the food that has been given it, but which carefully tries to offer a meal shaped by the realities and context of the community in which its Bread is broken, this book directs us, both secular and religious, forward with hope toward an ethic of eating that incorporates our traditional wisdom with attentiveness to the realities and the signs of the times.