In Defense Of Food

What are the big ideas?

1. The Age of Nutritionism and its Unintended Consequences: This book argues that the dominance of nutritionism as an ideology has led to unnecessary confusion, anxiety, and even diminished enjoyment of food. It offers a unique perspective on how this focus on nutrients over whole foods and traditional eating practices has contributed to the rise of diet-related diseases.
2. The Role of Industrialization in Changing Dietary Habits: Unlike many nutrition or health books that primarily discuss individual choices, this book explores the historical and ecological contexts of food systems, revealing how industrialization has influenced our diets and led to deficiencies and excesses of certain nutrients.
3. The Importance of Traditional Food Cultures: The book highlights the wisdom found in traditional food cultures that is often overlooked in contemporary nutrition research. It encourages readers to learn from these practices and adapt them to improve their own health and happiness.
4. A Holistic Approach to Eating: Rather than focusing solely on physical health, this book emphasizes the importance of pleasure, community, and cultural practices in food consumption. It promotes a more mindful and deliberate approach to eating that can lead to better overall wellbeing.
5. Reconnecting with Food Production: This book offers unique insights into the benefits of being involved in food production, such as gardening or cooking from scratch, which can foster a deeper appreciation for the work that goes into providing nourishment and encourage healthier food choices.

Chapter Summaries

INTRODUCTIONAn Eater’s Manifesto

Takeaways

• The Age of Nutritionism: nutrition science and the food industry have created unnecessary complexity around eating, resulting in confusion and anxiety about what to eat for optimal health.
• Food and eating should be understood as cultural practices, not just biological necessities.
• Nutritional myths perpetuated by nutrition science, the food industry, and the media include: focusing on nutrients rather than food, requiring expert guidance, and prioritizing physical health over pleasure and community.
• The Western diet is a major cause of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. It is characterized by processed foods, refined grains, added fat and sugar, and a lack of whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
• Historical diets have shown that humans are adapted to a wide range of diets, not just the Western diet.
• To improve our health and happiness as eaters, it's essential to escape the Western diet by focusing on whole, real foods and traditional ways of eating. This can be done through personal rules of eating that prioritize pleasure, community, and cultural practices, as well as understanding the historical and ecological contexts of food.

Quotes

“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 are what you eat eats.”

“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”

“But human 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 nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.”

“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.”

“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 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-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

I THE AGE OF NUTRITIONISM

Takeaways

• Nutritionism, an ideology that holds that optimal health can be achieved by eating specific combinations of nutrients as determined by "scientific" research, has dominated American food culture for several decades.
• The rise of nutritionism was influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including the emergence of processed foods and the changing role of women in society.
• Key nutritional theories, such as the lipid hypothesis and the anti-fat craze, were based on flawed or outright incorrect scientific evidence and led to confusion and anxiety around eating.
• The food industry, journalism, and government all played a role in amplifying the influence of nutritionism by marketing processed foods based on health claims, reporting sensational dietary studies, and issuing official dietary advice, respectively.
• Nutritionism has left Americans with a diminished ability to enjoy food without guilt or neurosis, and has failed to make us healthier.
• To move beyond nutritionism and find a new way to think about eating, we need to rediscover the pleasures of real food and the wisdom of tradition and common sense.

Quotes

“The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather--all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.”

“Watch out for those health claims.”

“How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history;”

“You are what what you eat eats.”

“Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.”

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”

“Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.”

II THE WESTERN DIET AND THE DISEASES OF CIVILIZATION

Takeaways

• The Western diet is characterized by a high intake of processed foods, refined carbohydrates, and unhealthy fats, and a low intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats.
• The shift from a food chain based on leaves to one based on seeds has had far-reaching consequences for human health. It has led to deficiencies in essential nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids and an excess of omega-6 fatty acids, which contribute to inflammation and a host of chronic diseases.
• The Western diet has also resulted in the displacement of traditional food cultures and the reliance on science and nutritionism for guidance on what to eat.
• The rise of fast food and processed foods has contributed to the global pandemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other diet-related diseases.
• Efforts to adapt to the Western diet through medical interventions and treatments may not be sustainable in the long term due to their high costs and limited effectiveness.
• Preventing diet-related diseases requires addressing the root causes: the industrialization of our food system and the loss of traditional food cultures.
• A shift towards a more plant-based, whole foods diet can help improve public health and reduce the burden on healthcare systems.

Quotes

“Cancer and heart disease and so many of the other Western diseases are by now such an accepted part of modern life that it’s hard for us to believe this wasn’t always or even necessarily the case. These days most of us think of chronic diseases as being a little like the weather—one of life’s givens—and so count ourselves lucky that, compared to the weather, the diseases at least are more amenable to intervention by modern medicine. We think of them strictly in medical rather than historical, much less evolutionary, terms. But during the decades before World War II, when the industrialization of so many aspects of our lives was still fairly fresh, the price of “progress,” especially to our health, seemed more obvious to many people and therefore more open to question.”

“the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.”

“The dinner we have eaten tonight,” he told his audience in a 1928 lecture, “was a part of the sun but a few months ago.” Industrial food both obscured these links and attenuated them. In lengthening the food chain so that we could feed great cities from distant soils, we were breaking the “rules of nature” at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods.”

“The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them. ”

“What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?”

“At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification”

“Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.”

“You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).”

“Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy.”

“A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.”

“food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eats, in a futile—but highly profitable—quest for the absent nutrient.”

“The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.”

“Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.”

III GETTING OVER NUTRITIONISM

Takeaways

• Eating all meals at a table and avoiding snacking between meals can help reduce overall calorie intake.
• External visual cues, such as portion sizes and container sizes, play a significant role in determining how much we eat.
• Slowing down and deliberate eating, as promoted by the Slow Food movement, can help us become more aware of our food and its sources, leading to healthier and more mindful eating habits.
• Involvement in food production, such as gardening or cooking from scratch, can foster a deeper appreciation for the work that goes into providing nourishment and encourage healthier food choices.
• Traditional cuisines offer wisdom about diet and health that cannot be found in nutrition journals or journalism.
• Cooking from scratch allows us to control every aspect of our meals, including what goes into them and how they are prepared.
• Gardening provides opportunities for physical labor, mental work, and connection with nature, all while contributing to a healthy diet.

Quotes

“Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.

Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"

Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.

Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.”

“Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.”

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

“DON’T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GREAT GRANDMOTHER WOULDN’T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD.”

“What would shopping this way mean in the supermarket? Well, imagine your great grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles. You’re standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes—and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is it a food or a toothpaste? And how, exactly, do you introduce it into your body? You could tell her it’s just yogurt in a squirtable form, yet if she read the ingredients label she would have every reason to doubt that that was in fact the case. Sure, there’s some yogurt in there, but there are also a dozen other things that aren’t remotely yogurtlike, ingredients she would probably fail to recognize as foods of any kind, including high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, carrageenan, tricalcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavors, vitamins, and so forth.”

“Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup”

“Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.”

“But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

“SHOP THE PERIPHERIES OF THE SUPERMARKET AND STAY OUT OF THE MIDDLE.”

“Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet.”

“Shake the hand that feeds you.”

“[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.”

“Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and “value” or they can nourish a food chain organized around values—values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.”

“Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.”

“The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.”

“Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.”

“American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.”

“While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187”

“Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.”

“DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE. No, a desk is not a table.”

“When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more.”

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”

“I could certainly eat more of this, but am I still hungry?”

“At least until we learn to eat more slowly and attend more closely to the information of our senses, it might help to work on altering the external clues we rely on in eating on the theory that it's probably better to manipulate ourselves than to allow marketers to manipulate us.”

“When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous 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 gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.”

“The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but “health” is simply not one of them, because it is given.”

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