AN EATER'S MANIFESTO #5

That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known for a long tie. Early in the twentieth century an intrepid group of doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything-except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way of eating and adopted the Western diet, there soon followed a predictable series of Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. They called these the Western diseases and, though the precise causal mechanisms were (and remain) uncertain, these observers had little doubt these chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet.

What's more, the traditional diets that the new Western foods displaced were strikingly diverse: Various populations thrived on diets that were what we'd cal high fat, low fat, or high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed, there have been traditional diets based on just about any kid of whole food you can imagine. What this suggests is that the human animal is well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet, however, is not one of them.

Here, then, is a simple but crucial fact about diet and health, yet, curiously, it is a fact that nutritionism cannot see, probably because it developed in tandem with the industrialization of our food and so takes it for granted. Nutritionism prefers to tier with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the fist place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of the Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or searching questions about it.

But we can. By gaining a firmer grasp on the nature of the Western diet----trying to understand it not only physiologically but also historically and ecologically---we can begin to develop a different way of thing about food that might point a path out of our predicament. In doing so we have two sturdy---and strikingly hopeful---facts to guide us: fist, that human historically have been healthy eating a great many different diets; and second, that, as we'll see, most of the damage to our food, and health caused by the industrialization of our eating can be reversed. Put simply, we can escape the Western diet and its consequences.

This is the burden of the third and last section of In Defense of Food: to propose a couple dozen personal rules of eating that are 'conducive not only to better health but also to greater pleasure in eating, two goals that turn out to be mutually reinforcing.

These recommendations are a little different from the dietary guidelines you're probably accustomed to. They are not, for example, narrowly prescriptive. I'm not interested in telling you what to have for dinner. No, these suggestions are more lie eating algorithms, mental devices for thinking though our food choices. Because there is no single answer to the question of what to eat, these guidelines with produce as many different menus as there are people using them.

These rules of thumb are also not framed in the vocabulary of nutrition science. This is not because nutrition science has nothing important to teach us-it does, at least when it avoids: the pitfalls of reductionism and over-confidence---but because I believe we have as much, if not more, to lean about eating from history and culture and tradition. We are accustomed in al matters having to do with health to assuming science should have the last word, but in the case of eating, other sources of knowledge and ways of knowing can be just as powerful, sometimes more so. And while I inevitably rely on science (even reductionist science) in attempting to understand many questions about food and health, one of my aims in this book is to show the limitations of a strictly scientific understanding of something as richly complex and multifaceted as food. Science has much of value to teach us about food, and perhaps someday scientists will "solve" the problem of diet, creating the nutritionally optimal meal in a pill, but for now and the foreseeable future, letting the scientists decide the menu would be a mistake. They simply do not know enough.

You may well, and rightly, wonder who am I to tell you how to eat? Here I am advising you to reject the advice of science and industry-and then blithely go on to offer my own advice. So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

Not that we had much choice in the matter. By the 1960s or so it had become all but impossible to sustain traditional ways of eating in the face of the industrialization of our food. If you wanted to eat produce grown without synthetic chemicals or meat raised on pasture without pharmaceuticals, you were out of luck. The supermarket had become the only place to buy food, and real food was rapidly disappearing from its shelves, to be replaced by the modern cornucopia of highly processed foodlike products. And because so many of these novelties deliberately lied to our senses with fake sweeteners and flavorings, we could no longer rely on taste or smell to know what we were eating.

Most of my suggestions come down to strategies for escaping the Western diet; but before the resurgence of farmers' markets, the rise of the organic movement, and the renaissance of local agriculture now under way across the country, stepping outside the conventional food system simply was not a realistic option for most people. Now it is. We are entering a postindustrial era of food; for the fist tie in a generation it is possible to leave behind the Western diet without having also to leave behind civilization. And the more eaters who vote with their forks for a different kid of food, the more commonplace and accessible such food will become. Among other things, this book is an eater's manifesto, an invitation to join the movement that is renovating our food system in the name of health-health in the very broadest sense of that word.

I doubt the last third of this book could have been written forty years ago, if only because there would have been no way to eat the way I propose without going back to the land and growing al your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot. There was really only one kid of food on the national menu, and that was whatever industry and nutritionism happened to be serving; Not anymore. Eaters have real choices now, and those choices have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture---all of which, as we will see, are inextricably lied.

That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

In Defense of Food
Author: Michael Pollan

http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food

http://www.depsyl.com/

http://back2basicnutrition.com/

http://bionutritionalresearch.olhblogspace.com/