What are you eating?

It is difficult to “go to the matt” with Pollan’s essay Unhappy Meals when it confirms a lot of my general beliefs about food, science and western culture.

He begins his essay by taking apart many of the assumptions we currently have about food and all the studies, statistics and science that we accept as truth. Just because its science, it doesn’t mean it is true and he illustrates this point repeatedly from citing the conflicting conclusions by the prominent organizations of The Institute of Medicine and Harvard, to the flawed data used in the federally financed Women’s Health Initiative and to science itself. He points out that “scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool (that) can mislead” and especially when taken out of context in complex organisms such as the human. Most things are often more than the sum of their parts and the simplified parts and pieces science of nutritionism has very limited value in meaning without context.

It is pretty clear that the western technological advances of man have far exceeded his physical and mental ability to evolve and keep up. We have solved the problem of feeding ourselves and now we can’t stop. Food is more than sustenance, it has become entertainment, a hobby, a TV network show (The Food Channel), an obsession. We have excelled at producing and extracting food, but haven’t physically evolved to handle it. With diabetics in my family the analogy by a nutrition expert, that “we’re in the middle of a “national experiment in mainlining glucose” “was a striking mental image for me. Diabetics need to stay away from sugar, so in order to enhance flavor, many sugar-free products compensate by increasing the fat content. Fat, by the way, gets turned into sugar in the body. But it said sugar-free.

Western culture in American has no historical food culture to fall back on. It’s too young a country; there are no rules or boundaries, everything is bigger and better and there is more of it. That is the mindset, that’s what we were built on and what people from other countries come here for. The traditional American meals ; bacon, eggs and potatoes for breakfast, hamburgers and fries for lunch and meatloaf and mash potatoes for dinner were meals for the working farmer family. We no longer physically work for our food, but it is our tradition to eat like we do. We need to make some new traditions.

I think Michael Pollan has some very fine rules of thumb about food and eating at the end of his essay, but they are still someone else’s rules. It has made me think even more about what I chose to eat and what I chose to believe. But ultimately in the end, after all this rhetoric, it is down to the individual, because really it’s up to you what you put in your mouth.

Pollan, Michael. "Unhappy Meals." The New York Times nytimes.com 28 January 2007. 11 January 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html.