ROBERT LESLIE FIELDING
Be kind to everyone you meet.
You may never see them again.

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 Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly

incredibly complicated and confusing question of what

we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning

of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I’m tempted to

complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for

a couple hundred more pages or so. I’ll try to resist, but will

go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recommendations.

Like, eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you,

though it might be better approached as a side dish than as

a main. And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather

than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation

to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it

sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat,

today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances

in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often

come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims,

which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece

of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should

probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because

a health claim on a food product is a strong indication

it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

You can see how quickly things can get complicated.

I started on this quest to identify a few simple rules about

eating after publishing The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2006. Questions

of personal health did not take center stage in that book, which

was more concerned with the ecological and ethical dimensions

of our eating choices. (Though I’ve found that, in most

but not all cases, the best ethical and environmental choices

also happen to be the best choices for our health—very good

news indeed.) But many readers wanted to know, after they’d

spent a few hundred pages following me following the food

chains that feed us, “Okay, but what should I eat? And now that

you’ve been to the feedlots, the food- processing plants, the

organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what

do you eat?”

Fair questions, though it does seem to me a symptom of

our present confusion about food that people would feel the

need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or

doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question

about the conduct of our everyday lives as humans. I mean,

what other animal needs professional help in deciding what

it should eat? True, as omnivores—creatures that can eat just

about anything nature has to offer and that in fact need to eat

a wide variety of different things in order to be healthy—the

 “What to eat” question is somewhat more complicated for us

than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans

have navigated the question 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 have for most of human history been a

set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to

children without a lot of controversy or fuss.

But over the last several decades, mom lost much of her

authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and

food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance of the two) and,

to a lesser extent, to the government, with its ever- shifting dietary

guidelines, food- labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids.

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.

This is, historically speaking, an unusual state of affairs.

My own mother grew up in the 1930s and 1940s eating a

lot of traditional Jewish- American fare, typical of families who

recently emigrated from Russia or Eastern Europe: stuffed cabbage,

organ meats, cheese blintzes, kreplach, knishes stuffed

with potato or chicken liver, and vegetables that often were

cooked in rendered chicken or duck fat. I never ate any of

that stuff as a kid, except when I visited my grandparents. My

mother, an excellent and adventurous cook whose own menus

were shaped by the cosmopolitan food trends of New York

in the 1960s (her influences would have included the 1964

World’s Fair; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; Manhattan restaurant

menus of the time; and of course the rising drumbeat

of food marketing) served us a rotating menu that each week

completed a culinary world tour: beouf bourguignon or beef

Stroganoff on Monday; coq au vin or oven- fried chicken (in

a Kellogg’s Cornflakes crust) on Tuesday; meat loaf or Chinese

pepper steak on Wednesday (yes, there was a lot of beef); spaghetti

pomodoro with Italian sausages on Thursday; and on her

weekend nights off, a Swanson’s TV dinner or Chinese takeout.

She cooked with Crisco or Wesson oil rather than chicken or

duck fat and used margarine rather than butter because she’d

absorbed the nutritional orthodoxy of the time, which held

that these more up- to- date fats were better for our health.

(Oops.)

Nowadays I don’t eat any of that stuff—and neither does

my mother, who has moved on too. Her parents wouldn’t recognize

the foods we put on the table, except maybe the butter,

which is back. Today in America the culture of food is changing

more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented—

and dizzying.

What is driving such relentless change in the American

diet? One force is a thirty- two- billion- dollar food- marketing

machine that thrives on change for its own sake. Another is the

constantly shifting ground of nutrition science that, depending

on your point of view, is steadily advancing the frontiers of our

knowledge about diet and health or is just changing its mind

a lot because it is a flawed science that knows much less than

it cares to admit. Part of what drove my grandparents’ food

culture from the American table was official scientific opinion,

which, beginning in the 1960s, decided that animal fat was a

deadly substance. And then there were the food manufacturers,

which stood to make very little money from my grandmother’s

cooking, because she was doing so much of it from scratch—

up to and including rendering her own cooking fats. Amplifying

the “latest science,” they managed to sell her daughter on

the virtues of hydrogenated vegetable oils, the ones that we’re

now learning may be, well, deadly substances.

Sooner or later, everything solid we’ve been told about the

links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away

in the gust of the most recent study. Consider the latest findings.

In 2006 came news that a low- fat diet, long believed to

protect against cancer, may do no such thing—this from the

massive, federally funded Women’s Health Initiative, which

has also failed to find a link between a low- fat diet and the

risk of coronary heart disease. Indeed, the whole nutritional

orthodoxy around dietary fat appears to be crumbling, as we

will see. In 2005 we learned that dietary fiber might not, as

we’d been confidently told for years, help prevent colorectal

cancers and heart disease. And then, in the fall of 2006, two

prestigious studies on omega- 3 fats published at the same time

came to strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute

of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences found little

conclusive evidence that eating fish would do your heart much

good (and might hurt your brain, because so much fish is contaminated

with mercury), a Harvard study brought the hopeful

piece of news that simply by eating a couple of servings of

fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil tablets) you

could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than

a third. It’s no wonder that omega- 3 fatty acids are poised to

become the oat bran of our time as food scientists rush to mi-

croencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly

all- terrestrial foods as bread and pasta, milk and yogurt and

cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, spout fishy

new health claims. (I hope you remember the relevant rule.)

By now you’re probably feeling the cognitive dissonance of

the supermarket shopper or science- section reader as well as

some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few

words of this book. Words I’m still prepared to defend against

the shifting winds of nutritional science and food- industry

marketing, and will. But before I do, it’s important to understand

how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion

and anxiety. That is the subject of the first portion of this

book, “The Age of Nutritionism.”

The story of how the most basic questions about what to

eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional

imperatives of the food industry, nutrition science,

and—ahem—journalism, three parties that stand to gain much

from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental

question an omnivore confronts. But humans deciding what

to eat without professional guidance—something they have

been doing with notable success since coming down out of

the trees—is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, a

definite career loser if you’re a nutritionist, and just plain boring

if you’re a newspaper editor or reporter. (Or, for that matter,

an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, that you should “eat

more fruits and vegetables”?) And so like a large gray cloud, a

great Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity has gathered around

the simplest questions of nutrition—much to the advantage of

everyone involved. Except perhaps the supposed beneficiary

of all this nutritional advice: us, and our health and happiness

as eaters. For the most important thing to know about the

campaign to professionalize dietary advice is that it has not

made us any healthier. To the contrary: As I argue in part one,

most of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half

century (and in particular the advice to replace the fats in our

diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and

considerably fatter.

My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and

happiness as eaters. To do this requires an exercise that might

at first blush seem unnecessary, if not absurd: to offer a defense

of food and the eating thereof. That food and eating stand in

need of a defense might seem counterintuitive at a time when

“overnutrition” is emerging as a more serious threat to public

health than undernutrition. But I contend that most of what

we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at

all, and how we’re consuming it—in the car, in front of the

TV, and, increasingly, alone—is not really eating, at least not in

the sense that civilization has long understood the term. Jean-

Anthelme Brillat- Savarin, the eighteenth- century gastronomist,

drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of

animals, which “feed,” and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice,

he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to

biology.

But if food and eating stand in need of a defense, from

whom, or what, do they need defending? From nutrition science

on one side and from the food industry on the other—and

from the needless complications around eating that together

they have fostered. As eaters we find ourselves increasingly in

the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex—comprised of

well- meaning, if error- prone, scientists and food marketers

only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus.

Together, and with some crucial help from the government,

they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism

that, among other things, has convinced us of three pernicious

myths: that what matters most is not the food but the “nutrient”;

that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible

to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding

what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a

narrow concept of physical health. Because food in this view

is foremost a matter of biology, it follows that we must try to

eat “scientifically”—by the nutrient and the number and under

the guidance of experts.

If such an approach to food doesn’t strike you as the least

bit strange, that is probably because nutritionist thinking has

become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically,

people have eaten for a great many reasons other than

biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community,

about family and spirituality, about our relationship to

the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long

as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as

much about culture as it has been about biology.

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a

relatively new and, I think, destructive idea—destructive not

just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough,

but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, 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. We are becoming a nation

of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with

healthy eating.*

The scientists haven’t tested the hypothesis yet, but I’m

willing to bet that when they do they’ll find an inverse correlation

between the amount of time people spend worrying

about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is,

after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so- called

not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists,

who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much

as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed

toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of

heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low- fat

diets. Maybe it’s time we confronted the American paradox: a

notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and

diet and the idea of eating healthily.

I don’t mean to suggest that all would be well if we could just

stop worrying about food or the state of our dietary health:

Let them eat Twinkies! There are in fact some very good reasons

to worry. The rise of nutritionism reflects legitimate concerns

that the American diet, which is well on its way to becoming

the world’s diet, has changed in ways that are making us

*Orthorexia—from the Greek “ ortho- ” (right and correct) + “exia” (appetite) =

right appetite. The term was first proposed in 1996 by the American physician

Steven Bratman. Though orthorexia is not yet an eating disorder recognized

by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, academic investigation is

under way.

increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death

today are chronic diseases with well- established links to diet:

coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Yes, the rise

to prominence of these chronic diseases is partly due to the

fact that we’re not dying earlier in life of infectious diseases,

but only partly: Even after adjusting for age, many of the socalled

diseases of civilization were far less common a century

ago—and they remain rare in places where people don’t eat

the way we do.

I’m speaking, of course, of the elephant in the room whenever

we discuss diet and health: “the Western diet.” This is the

subject of the second part of the book, in which I follow the

story of the most radical change to the way humans eat since

the discovery of agriculture. All of our uncertainties about nutrition

should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases

that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the

industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods

and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and

animals in huge monocultures; 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. These

changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted:

lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar,

lots of everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known

for a long time. Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group

of doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that

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 call high fat, low fat, or

high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed, there have been traditional

diets based on just about any kind 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 tinker 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

first 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 thinking 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: first, that humans 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

like eating algorithms, mental devices for thinking through our

food choices. Because there is no single answer to the question

of what to eat, these guidelines will 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 overconfidence—but because

I believe we have as much, if not more, to learn about eating

from history and culture and tradition. We are accustomed in

all 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 first time 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 kind 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 all your own food. It would have been the manifesto

of a crackpot. There was really only one kind 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 linked.

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.

 

http://www.michaelpollan.com/in_defense_excerpt.pdf