www.Lint-Magnet.com

Despite my best intentions, workplace and other responsibilities have sucked up my energy to write for the last few weeks. Now that some of the turmoil has subsided, I can talk a little bit about a topic that has piqued my interest lately.

About a month ago, I had the good fortune of receiving a copy of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. This book was the focus of media attention for a short time while Pollan was on his book tour. Though the book’s novelty  has since worn off (and thus, its wide attention from the mainstream), the issues it raises remain just as pressing.

When I picked up the book, I expected to read an in-depth examination of the nutritional degradation of American processed foods. That was only a portion of what this book exposes. Pollan goes one step further from the obvious–that fast food is bad, that too much red meat is unhealthy, and that Americans have high rates of diabetes and heart disease from being overindulgent fatasses who can’t exercise portion control.

Pollan is a journalist, not a scientist, though he references numerous scientific studies in the course of his research. Because of this, his particular focus is the, “Why?” behind the horrors of the American food supply. Why is it so much cheaper to eat McDonalds than to shop at an organic farmer’s market? Why is high fructose corn syrup in almost every food product that comes in a box? Why are there so many foods that have an expiration date of almost-never because even vermin won’t dare touch it? The answers Pollan provides has three main themes.

The first is an alarmingly consolidated and highly profitable agribusiness industry. Through several decades of mergers and acquisitions that have all but stamped out family farms, our food supply has been overtaken by a small handful of corporations. These corporations have cleverly disguised their ubiquity through countless subsidiaries and well-funded marketing departments. The marketing practices of the food industry have pervaded our (pseudo-)scientific wisdom about nutrients in an astonishing, yet remarkably subtle way. Pollan calls the cozy relationship between science and agribusiness “nutritionism,” which belies more of an ideology than actual scientific credibility.

Big agribusiness would certainly never have been able to reach into the pantries and onto the plates of Americans were it not for the number two thing that Pollan mentions: government policy. It is pretty well known at this point–broached from time to time in mainstream political debate–that farmers who grow certain crops like corn and soy are heavily subsidized by the government. What politicians fail to convey to Americans is that there are some big reasons for this, and their names are Monsanto, Philip Morris, Dean Foods, Con Agra, and… well, you get the point. Big agribusiness has figured out all kinds of novel ways to use corn and soy. They repackage those heavily subsidized crops as thousands of different “foodlike” products with suspiciously long shelf lives. The questionable or unscrupulous things that agribusiness does would take up an entire book in itself, so that’s not really the main point of Pollan’s work. Instead, he focuses on the disturbing collusion between big corporate food companies and government officials. It spans from millions of dollars spent on lobbying Congress to the revolving door between FDA/USDA officials and high-level stakeholders in agribusiness companies.

These two components describe the deeply entrenched interests that have overtaken our food supply–a food-industrial complex, if I may use that terminology. Certainly, these two things are fundamental to understanding many of our economic and health problems in this country. It explains, for instance, how each year, we adopt several new nutrition fads just as science debunks some previous pearl of food wisdom. For this explanation alone, the book is worth reading (and rather than rely on my cursory summary, I really encourage you to do so).

Instead of placing the burden entirely on government and corporations–the “big guys” who are easy targets for members of the frustrated masses like me–Pollan hits on a third point in In Defense of Food. While on one hand, there are certainly some people making huge returns on potentially dangerous “food” products, the ethos behind the current system ultimately lies with our cultural values as a nation. Beyond the lobbyists and the money and the food science and the corporations is a singular question: why do we accept that food should be be cheap, abundant, and practically immortal?

The book touches on this question throughout Pollan’s discussions about the political side of food. He does a pretty decent job of getting to the ethical core of industrialized societies like ours. His point is that we have become so far removed from where our food comes from that we often overlook what would have been readily apparent to our great grandparents. Industrialization has obscured the way we value one of the most basic elements of human life. True, a lot of people really don’t care, and there’s only so much to be done about utter apathy. But I also suspect that many people would be pretty disgusted at what they allow to pass for food if they truly knew the wonders of fresh food.

I consider myself to be pretty conscious of what I eat, both health-wise and ethics-wise. I see my choice to eat a vegetarian diet as a reflection of my consciousness. But (and at risk of sounding cheesy) reading this book really did help me see food in a new, even spiritual way. The junk food that would have appealed to me as a 10-year old just doesn’t have the same effect. What we eat is our connection to the earth, to our bodies, and to other human beings. When I look at a vegetable or a fruit now, I really do marvel at its beauty. I often think when I see the brilliant colors of plants, “Wow, nature makes that!”  Cooking together with others and sharing food helps me feel this connection even more deeply. Though it is more difficult in an industrialized society, I believe we should all stop to appreciate the earth, which provides delicious, nutritious food in an amazingly complex cycle of life.