In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
By Michael Pollan
Penguin Group
Hardback 256 pp $21.95

Michael Pollan is acutely concerned with the quality of America's food. He is a huge believer in farmers' markets, a fierce critic of agribusiness, a man who would take an ax to barrels of high-fructose corn syrup as gleefully as the temperance queen Carrie Nation did to kegs of beer.

All in all, he sounds a good person to avoid at dinnertime -- or so I thought.

Pollan, a prolific author whose latest book is In Defense of Food, is an omnivore (he eats meat and veggies) and a locavore (he likes things grown close to home). But one thing he decidedly is not is a boravore (someone who bores you to death on the subject of healthy food.).

I came to In Defense of Food ready to dislike him. I left it hoping to share a salad with him. His writing is down-to-earth, his forays into food chemistry are understandable, and his humor is unavoidable. He notes, for instance, the thousands of supermarket items screaming that they're "lite" or "cholesterol-free" -- but stresses that the most healthful foods in the store can make no claims at all, because they're not packaged.

He calls that "the silence of the yams."

Pollan on food has been likened to Dr. Benjamin Spock on babies, and in tone, the two are soul mates. The genial pediatrician who, for better or worse, guided the upbringing of us baby boomers advised frazzled moms: Watch out for well-meaning advice. Have faith in your own common sense. Relax.

The book, subtitled "An Eater's Manifesto," strikes a similarly encouraging tone in the very first paragraph. In seven words, he provides the philosophical essence of his answer to "What's for supper?" -- a question known to induce swoons and palpitations over the lethal potential of sugar and salt, flour and fat.

"Eat food," Pollan advises. "Not too much. Mostly plants."

And quit fretting. "No people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do -- and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems," Pollan writes. "We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating."

The evidence is everywhere. In the supermarket the other day, I saw a butter-like spread in a container boasting "cardiologist-endorsed!" Even 100 years ago, Americans were keener on scientific eating than enjoyable eating; Pollan writes of Horace Fletcher, an enormously popular health nut who would have spa patients "Fletcherize" -- or chew each morsel 100 times, sometimes to the rhythm of special chewing songs.

Over the years, a public eager for scientifically guided eating got just that -- in the form, Pollan says, of "highly processed foods and refined grains, the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals... the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn and soy."

The problem, he concludes, is that science doesn't know what it sometimes pretends to know about food. Citing a recent study by professors at the Harvard School of Public Health, Pollan says that even such assumed wisdom as the link between most saturated fats and heart disease has not been proven.

In fact, the fat that has been most strongly incriminated -- a little item called trans-fat -- has been urged on frightened consumers for 30 years so they could escape the evils of butter.

Pollan is hardly the first writer to laud organic, unprocessed foods, preferably grown somewhere in the neighborhood. But he is certainly among the most accessible. His guiding principles for good dining: Don't eat things your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Be wary of products listing more than five ingredients. And be especially wary of any food that claims to be good for you.

Of course, to do that, you have to understand what Pollan means by food.

By Pollan's standards, a ham-and-cheese sandwich is food -- unless the meat comes from a hog with most of its fat engineered away, the cheese is a chemical-laced chunk of orange plastic, and the bread is, say, Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread.

Poor Sara Lee! Pollan lists all 41 of the ingredients she poured into her enigmatically named "whole grain white bread," including something called azodicarbonamide for a softness like Wonder Bread's. There was a time, he points out, that the government would have forced Sara Lee to slap a kiss-of-death label on every wrapper and call the contents "imitation bread.''

That rule was dropped -- to the delight of the food companies -- in the 1970s. According to Pollan, legislators and government regulators, influenced by a host of food interests, have not been strong advocates for health, consumers, or common sense. The list of lackluster protectors includes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"The FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce the consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system," he writes. "So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food."

I might just have to grab a carrot and Fletcherize on that for a while.

-- Steve Chawkins is a staff writer who covers state issues for the Los Angeles Times.

First published May 28, 2008
Copyright © 2008 Consumer Health Interactive

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