Post 1: Response to Michael Pollans In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, highlights many delusions American food companies try to portray. The main delusion that Pollan focuses on is the delusion of nutrients vs. food. On the cover of Pollan's book it says "eat food. not too much. mostly plants." The first part of his book talks about the first part of that phrase: "eat food." What Pollan means when he says "eat food," is that a healthy omnivore should eat real, actual food. This portrays the idea that the food that most Americans eat today is not real food and mainly processed food or food injected with things that we undoubtedly as normal.

What Pollan does in the first few sections of his book is to explain how we got to this problem. He says that when obesity rates and chronic diseases related to food began rising, a committee was set up to set dietary goals for the United States. What they found was that certain foods were causing all of these problems. However, when they brought this to the public's attention, there was an uproar from the food companies. This is why when the committee redid their report of dietary goals, they used wordings such as "limit saturated fats" instead of eat less animal fats.

I also thought an interesting point that Pollan pointed out was that one can never use the phrase "eat less" of some food when informing the public on healthy eating. I thought of all of the countless medical journals floating around in our country and how we use ideas of substituting a certain food group rather than "eating less" of it.

The only way for me to justify Pollan's words was for me to apply them to my own life. I realized that when I have to go shopping for food, I am also tricked into telling myself that I am responsible when it comes to my eating by looking over the nutritious facts. The act will clear my conscience until the next time I am dragged to the supermarket to get more food. I found that many of the products I buy are mainly bought because of the phrases like "good source of fiber" or "full of antioxidants" which sets my conscience at ease. (See New York Times article for more recent meaningless phrases on food labels.)

Overall, I think Pollan makes a lot of good claims in the first part of In Defense of Food. He seems to back up most of his ideas with findings from reasonable sources. However, I think I will have to read on to be completely convinced.