I just finished reading one of Michael Pollan's bestselling and information packed books
In Defense Of Food. To summarize, Pollan finds nutritionism to be an overly simplistic attempt at taking food apart into elements which may or may not ever add up to give us the same quality and genuine nutrition as the original whole food contained. He focuses on our culture's struggle with obesity and diabetes, seeing it as a bi-product of at least three major trends:
- Companies whose job it is to profit off of our eating habits, with no regards to what would actually be good for us to eat
- Policies started in the 1980's which subsidize corn (including corn syrup) and soy - helping to make processed high-calorie/low nutrition snacks considerably cheaper than their whole food counterparts
- Our desire to survive, which over thousands of years has trained us to seek out high-calorie sweet foods as a source of nourishment in a world where attaining nourishment was once a major challenge
But I wanted to include here an excerpt from the very end of his book, in which he highlights things that we can do to take control of our eating habits, and our overly-elaborate food chain, namely, through growing your own food:
"To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting process of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy: that food is a product of an industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion, with other people as well as with other species -- with nature.
The work of growing food contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it, of course, but there is something particularly fitting about enlisting your body in its own sustenance. Much of what we call recreation or exercise consists of pointless physical labor, so it is especially satisfying when we can give that labor a point.
To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry and science, is not small thing: indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualifies as subversive acts. And what these acts subvert is nutritionism: the belief that food is foremost about nutrition and nutrition is so complex that only experts and industry can possibly supply it. When you're cooking with food as alive as this - these gorgeous and semi-gorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh - you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the Gardner or the farmer who grew it, this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere
thing but a web of relationship among a great many living beings, some human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight."
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