In Defense of Food: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.
I recently listened to the NPR Science Friday podcast with Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food. The book can be summed up with the tagline: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants. Pretty simple.
Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine article on organic food and vegetarianism changed my life. In it, he made the argument that although our meat production industry is cruel and dangerous, we shouldn’t all become vegetarians because humans never evolved as vegetarians. Rather, we should seek out humanely raised meat products. They’re better, healthier, and more akin to what our bodies are evolved to eat.
Another interesting argument he made is that while the ideal pig would live in the wild, pigs have been so domesticated that they couldn’t survive in the wild. Therefore, be satisfied with organic, free-range, humanely raised pigs from farms. It’s OK. Eat them and be happy.
Before hearing of In Defense of Food, I often would make the somewhat-facetious argument that science has been able to distill the nutritive value of natural foods into the essential elements that we need to survive. Science could condense everything we need into a pill, and we’re better off for it. It’ll be free of impurities—no organic junk—sterile with nothing dangerous in it. Chemical and process should be more sterile—and safer—than dirty and natural. So if you think natural is better, then you’re imbuing something spiritual to the liquids and fibers that hold the nutrients together. You’re saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You give plants soul, and you want to eat that soul.
Pollan takes a different approach to this. He says that nutritionists have manipulated the industry where they attempt to convince the populace that reducing our food to pure nutrients is better for us. Maybe it’s true, but it’s a scientific/marketing decision and nothing based on experiment. Furthermore, you have to combine this with the risks of human manufacture, especially at a massive, industrial level. That’s where the super bugs and poisons leech in. When you suck out the nutrients and then inject them into processed food, you create an infested Frankenstein of food mush that’s much dirtier than anything nature creates.
So while natural foods might have “soul” and nutrients might be “good enough” for us, it’s the industrial system that produces this soulless, “good enough” product that will kill us in the end.
I can buy that for now. Though I still think that you should be able to reduce a zucchini down to everything that’s good for you and throw away everything that’s not, and overall you’ll get something that’s better for you then originally.