Thursday, January 03, 2008

Skinny Bitches vs. Pollan's Defense of Food

SB and diet guru Rory Freedman [Left]

With the official coining of vegansexual, there's no surprise in how a couple of self-described skinny bitches have parlayed the success of their first book into Skinny Bitch in the Kitch. They got some nice play on the front of yesterday's Times' Dining section.

Myself? I know cheeseburgers are bad for the rainforest, etc., etc., but that I still want to eat them on occasion. I nonetheless suspect that Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food would be more to my liking. According to Janet Maslin:

Nutritionism has lately helped to justify vitamin-enriched Diet Coke, bread bolstered with the Omega-3 fatty acids more readily found in fish oil, and many other new improvements on what Michael Pollan calls “the tangible material formerly known as food.”

Goaded by “the silence of the yams,” Mr. Pollan wants to help old-fashioned edibles fight back. So he has written “In Defense of Food,” a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. “We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again,” he writes.

In this lively, invaluable book — which grew out of an essay Mr. Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine, for which he is a contributing writer — he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion. In his opinion the industry-financed branch of nutritional science is “remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study.”

Some of this reasoning turned up in Mr. Pollan’s best-selling “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” But “In Defense of Food” is a simpler, blunter and more pragmatic book, one that really lives up to the “manifesto” in its subtitle. Although he is not in the business of dispensing self-help rules, he incorporates a few McNuggets of plain-spoken advice: Don’t eat things that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize. Avoid anything that trumpets the word “healthy.” Be as vitamin-conscious as the person who takes supplements, but don’t actually take them. And in the soon to be exhaustively quoted words on the book’s cover: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” An inspiring head of lettuce is the poster image for this mantra.

Do we really need such elementary advice? Well, two-thirds of the way through his argument Mr. Pollan points out something irrefutable. “You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy,” he says. Nor would you eat substances like Go-Gurt, eat them on the run or eat them at mealtimes that are so out of sync with friends and relatives that the real family dinner is an endangered ritual.

Food