Michael Pollan's "radical common sense" on food

Michael Pollan, the man who so eloquently outlined the problems of nutritionism in his last book The Omnivore's Dilemma, is currently in London promoting his new bestseller In Defence of Food.

He appeared on the Radio 4 Food Programme yesterday. For those who fancy a listen, the programme is available on the wonderful iPlayer for those in the UK.

On the programme, Radio 4's Sheila Dillon summarised the primary contention of Pollan's new book as follows:

"We used to know how to eat well but now that knowledge, passed down through the generations, has been lost in a welter of confusion and complexity created by nutritional scientists, the food industry and journalists. Pollan rejects the quasi-religious idea of a diet based on nutrients: fats, vitamins, salts, sugars which puts the emphasis on the constituents of foods rather than the foods themselves."

Pollan's critique of the dominant food ideology of nutritionism rests understanding the four main principles of nutritionism itself:

1. Nutritionists uphold that the nutrient is the most important unit in understanding food - that food is essentially the sum of its nutrient parts - nutrients are those chemicals that we have determined to be active and important to our health
2. Since those nutrients are invisible, only experts (scientists) can see and experience nutrients using microscopes and for that reason nutrients require an 'expert class' to tell you what to eat - you can't navigate nutrients on your own you need scientists to tell you what to eat and government guidelines -- "you need a priesthood in effect to help you through this unseen mystery of the nutrients".
3. Like many ideologies nutrititionism divides the world into good and evil, in the case of nutrients there is always one satanic nutrient we are trying to drive from the food system -- once it was saturated fat, now it is transfats, and who knows what will be next. On the other side - to have good to go with your evil - there is the myth of the blessed nutrient, which as long as you get enough of it will help you to live forever. That's currently Omega 3 fatty acid but for a long time it was fibre. These roles of good and evil are consistently there but we constantly change which chemicals are good and bad for us.
4. Nutritionists believe that the value of eating is health - in their eyes food is either medicine or poison. However, it is important to acknowledge that we have eaten for many other reasons historically -- for a sense of community, to express our identity and also for pleasure -- and therefore that food is culturally experienced.
   

Pollan, who reminds us that he is a journalist rather than a scientist, notes that it is this cultural experience that has changed the most as the result of nutritionism:

"People made good decisions about diet and took care of their health long before the government or nutrition science. Back then we had cultural wisdom -- people passing knowledge on from generation to generation."

To quote a passage from his book that takes this point further:

"For most of human history, we have navigated the question of what to eat without expert advice. To guide us we had, instead, culture, which - at least when it comes to food - is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom was a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to children without a lot of controversy or fuss.

But over the past several decades, mum lost much of her authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and food marketers and, to a lesser extent, the government, with its ever-shifting dietary guidelines and food-labelling rules. Think about it: most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children."

In the Radio 4 interview, Sheila Dillon then did what only the BBC can and pulled out a fantastic archive interview with Danish sociologist Soren Askagaard from a conference on functional foods from 11 years ago who said:

"We have been using a scientific approach to diet and nutrition and food for a long time but in spite of its obvious relevance, this approach totally neglects culture and much of what has happened to our food and our food intake is due to cultural factors. We must seek cultural solutions to cultural problems. Our everyday food intake is not a scientific problem, it's a cultural problem."

Pollan praised the UK Schools Secretary Ed Ball's recent initiative to encourage kids to cook in schools as one way of providing a cultural answer and "reacquainting people with the raw ingredients of food".

Michael Pollen is, of course, famed for his somewhat prosaic "radical common sense" approach to simply going back to eating real food, noting that the problem these days is distinguishing real food from all the "edible-food-like-substances" that have crept into the supermarket whilst also ensuring that we respect the cultural norms that surround food as much as the food itself. He also suggests that we:

• don't eat too much
• stick mostly to plants
• don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
• eat things from the outside of the supermarket not the middle
• don't eat anything that flouts its health claims
• don't buy anything that has more than 5 ingredients
• don't eat anywhere except at a table (and no, a desk is not a table)
• eat slowly, don't wolf your food -- your body takes 20 minutes to tell your brain that you are full

Some further reading:

1. I discussed his last book and quoted one of his articles here.
2. All of Michael's articles for the New York Times and others are available from his site here.
3. Pollan references this article [PDF] called "Sorry Marge" by the Australian food sociologist Dr. Gyorgy Scrinis which contains the first use of the term nutritionism and outlines the classic case of the decision made by nutritionists which led to us to eating less butter and more margarine in the name of health.
4. Here are some links to the reviews of Pollan's new book by The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian and The Daily Mail
5. The Guardian has gone on to serialise two extracts from the book here and here