IN D E F E N S E
OF F O O D
AN
E A T E R ' S
M A N I F E S T O
MICHAEL
A U
THE
1 II O
POLLAN
R
O M N I V O R E ' S
O
I
D I L E M M A
CANADA
$26.50
u.s. $21.95
Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it.
So w h y should anyone need to defend it?
Because most of what we're consuming today is not food,
and how we're consuming it—in the car, in front of the
T V , and increasingly alone—is not really eating. Instead
of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances"—
no longer the products of nature but of food science. M a n y
of them come packaged with health claims that should be
our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called
Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and
c o m m o n sense by confusion. T h e result is what Michael
Pollan calls the A m e r i c a n paradox: T h e more we w o r r y
about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.
But if real food—the sort of food our great grandmothers
would recognize as food—stands in need of a defense, from
w h o m does it need defending? F r o m the food industry
on one side and nutritional science on the other. B o t h
stand to gain m u c h from widespread confusion about
w h a t to eat, a question that for most of human history
people have been able to answer w i t h o u t expert help.
Yet the professionalization o f eating has failed to make
Americans healthier. T h i r t y years of official nutritional
advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining
countless numbers of meals.
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the ques
tion o f w h a t w e should eat that comes d o w n to seven
simple but liberating w o r d s : Eat food.
Not too
much.
Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he chal
lenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach—what
he calls nutritionism—and proposes an alternative way
of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology
(continued
on back
flap)
0 10 8
(continued
from front
flap)
of real, well-grown, and unprocessed food. O u r personal
health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of
the food chains of which we are part.
In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the d a u n t i n g
dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern super
market, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so,
most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn
which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate
our appetites, and return eating to its proper context—out
of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing
and eloquent manifesto shows us how w e can start mak
ing thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives,
enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring
pleasure back to eating.
Pollan's last book, The Omnivores
Dilemma,
launched a
national conversation about the American way of eating;
n o w In Defense of Food shows us h o w to change it, one
meal at a time.
M I C H A E L
P O L L A N
is the author o f four previous
books, including The
vores Dilemma
Omni
and The Botany
of Desire, both New York Times bestsellers. A longtime con
tributor to The New York Times Magazine,
he is also the
Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. To read more
of his work, go to www.michaelpollan.com
The
Penguin
Press
A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc
375 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10014
www.penguin.com | Printed in U.S.A.
PRAISE
THE
f OR
OMNIVORE'S
DILEMMA
"Thoughtful, engrossing . . . you're not likely to get a better explanation
of exactly where your food comes from."
- T H E
NEW
YORK
TIMES
BOOK
REVIEW
"An eater's manifesto . . . [Pollan's] cause is just, his thinking is clear, and
his writing is compelling. Be careful of your dinner!"
- T H E
WASHINGTON
POST
"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral
ramifications of our eating habits."
—THE
NEW
YORKER
"A brilliant, eye-opening account o f h o w we produce, market and agonize
over what we eat. If y o u ever thought 'What's for dinner?' was a simple
question, you'll change your mind after reading Pollan's searing indictment
of today's food industry."
- T H E
SEATTLE
TIMES
"I have tried on countless occasions to convey to m y friends how
incredible this book is. I have gone on endlessly about Pollan's brilliance in
finding a w a y to write about food—but it's not really about food, it's
about everything. . . . Well the point is, I have tried and failed to explain
it, so I just end up giving them a copy, and sooner or later they call
to say, 'You were right, it's fantastic."
- N o r a
Ephron,
THE
NEW
ISBN 978-1-59420-145-5
52195
781594"201455'
YORK
TIMES
IN DEFENSE of F O O D
A L S O BY M I C H A E L
POLLAN
Second Nature
A Place of My Own
The Botany of Desire
The Omnivores Dilemma
IN DEFENSE
of F O O D
AN EATER'S M A N I F E S T O
MICHAEL POLLAN
THE P E N G U I N PRESS
NewYoik «
2008
THE P E N G U I N PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. - Penguin Group
(Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson
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South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Michael Pollan, 2008
All rights reserved
A portion of this book first appeared in The NewYoikTimes Magazine under the title "Unhappy Meals."
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Pollan, Michael.
In defense of food : an eater's manifesto / Michael Pollan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-59420-145-5
1. Nutrition. 2. Food habits. I.Title.
RA784.P643 2008
613—dc22
2007037552
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9
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8 6 4 2
Designed by Marysarah Quinn
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
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FOR
ANN
AND
GERRY,
With gratitude for your loyal friendship
and inspired editing
CONTENTS
An Eater's Manifesto l
INTRODUCTION
I
THE AGE O F N U T R I T I O N I S M 17
ONE
– From Foods to Nutrients 19
TWO
– Nutritionism Defined 27
–Nutritionism
THREE
–Food
FOUR
–The
FIVE
Comes to Market
Science's Golden Age
32
36
Melting of the Lipid Hypothesis
40
six –Eat Right, Get Fatter 50
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
–Beyond
–The
–Bad
the Pleasure Principle
S3
Proof in the Low-Fat Pudding
Science
58
61
–Nutritionism's Children 78
I
I THE W E S T E R N D I E T A N D T H E
D I S E A S E S O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N 83
ONE – The Aborigine in All of Us 85
TWO – The Elephant in the Room 89
THREE
– The Industrialization of Eating :
What We Do Know 101
1 ) From Whole Foods to Refined 106
2 ) From Complexity to Simplicity 114
3 ) From Quality to Quantity 118
4 ) From Leaves to Seeds 124
5 ) From Food Culture to Food Science 132
III
G E T T I N G O V E R N U T R I T I O N I S M 137
ONE – Escape from the Western Diet 139
TWO – Eat Food: Food Defined 147
THREE
FOUR
– Mostly Plants : What to Eat 161
– Not Too Much: How to Eat 182
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 202
SOURCES 206
RESOURCES 229
INDEX 231
IN DEFENSE of F O O D
INTRODUCTION
«
AN E A T E R ' S M A N I F E S T O
E
at food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the suppos
edly incredibly complicated and confusing question o f what
we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning
o f a whole book devoted to the subject, and I'm tempted to
complicate matters in the interest o f keeping things going for
a couple hundred more pages or so. I'll try to resist, but will
go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recom
mendations. Like, eating a little meat isn't going to kill you,
though it might be better approached as a side dish than as
a main. And you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather
than processed food products. That's what I mean by the rec
ommendation to "eat food," which is not quite as simple as it
sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat,
today there are thousands o f other edible foodlike substances
in the supermarket. These novel products o f food science often
2
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IN
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c o m e in packages elaborately festooned with health claims,
which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece
o f advice: I f you're concerned about your health, you should
probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Be
cause 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 can see how quickly things can get complicated.
I started on this quest to identify a few simple rules about
eating after publishing The Omnivores Dilemma in 2 0 0 6 . Questions
o f personal health did not take center stage in that book, which
was more concerned with the ecological and ethical dimen
sions o f our eating choices. (Though I've found that, in most
but not all cases, the best ethical and environmental choices
also happen to be the best choices for our health—very good
news indeed.) But many readers wanted to know, after they'd
spent a few hundred pages following me following the food
chains that feed us, "Okay, but what should I eat? And now that
you've been to the feedlots, the food-processing plants, the
organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what
do you eat?"
Fair questions, though it does seem to me a symptom o f
our present confusion about food that people would feel the
need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or
doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question
about the conduct o f our everyday lives as humans. I mean,
what other animal needs professional help in deciding what
it should eat? True, as omnivores—creatures that can eat just
about anything nature has to offer and that in fact need to eat
a wide variety o f different things in order to be healthy—the
AN
EATER'S
MANIFESTO
"What to eat" question is somewhat more complicated for us
than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most o f human history, humans
have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us
we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food,
is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how
much o f it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and
when and with whom have for most o f human history been a
set o f questions long setded and passed down from parents to
children without a lot o f controversy or fuss.
But over the last several decades, m o m lost much o f her
authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and
food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance o f the two) and,
to a lesser extent, to the government, with its ever-shifting di
etary guidelines, food-labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids.
Think about it: Most o f us no longer eat what our mothers ate
as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as chil
dren. This is, historically speaking, an unusual state o f affairs.
My own mother grew up in the 1 9 3 0 s and 1 9 4 0 s eating a
lot o f traditional Jewish-American fare, typical o f families who
recently emigrated from Russia or Eastern Europe: stuffed cab
bage, organ meats, cheese blintzes, kreplach, knishes stuffed
with potato or chicken liver, and vegetables that often were
cooked in rendered chicken or duck fat. I never ate any o f
that stuff as a kid, except when I visited my grandparents. My
mother, an excellent and adventurous cook whose own menus
were shaped by the cosmopolitan food trends o f New York
in the 1960s (her influences would have included the 1 9 6 4
World's Fair; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; Manhattan res
taurant menus o f the time; and o f course the rising drumbeat
3
4
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IN
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o f food marketing) served us a rotating menu that each week
completed a culinary world tour: beouf bourguignon or beef
Stroganoff on Monday; coq au vin or oven-fried chicken (in
a Kellogg's Cornflakes crust) on Tuesday; meat loaf or Chinese
pepper steak on Wednesday (yes, there was a lot o f beef); spa
ghetti pomodoro with Italian sausages on Thursday; and on her
weekend nights off, a Swanson'sTV dinner or Chinese takeout.
She cooked with Crisco or Wesson oil rather than chicken or
duck fat and used margarine rather than butter because she'd
absorbed the nutritional orthodoxy o f the time, which held
that these more up-to-date fats were better for our health.
(Oops.)
Nowadays I don't eat any o f that stuff—and neither does
my mother, who has moved on too. Her parents wouldn't rec
ognize the foods we put on the table, except maybe the butter,
which is back. Today in America the culture o f food is chang
ing more than once a generation, which is historically unprec
edented—and dizzying.
What is driving such relentless change in the American
diet? One force is a thirty-two-billion-dollar food-marketing
machine that thrives on change for its own sake. Another is the
constantly shifting ground o f nutrition science that, depending
on your point o f view, is steadily advancing the frontiers o f our
knowledge about diet and health or is just changing its mind
a lot because it is a flawed science that knows much less than
it cares to admit. Part o f what drove my grandparents' food
culture from the American table was officiai scientific opinion,
which, beginning in the 1960s, decided that animal fat was a
deadly substance. And then there were the food manufacturers,
AN
EATER'S
MANIFESTO
which stood to make very little money from my grandmother's
cooking, because she was doing so much o f it from scratch—
up to and including rendering her own cooking fats. Amplify
ing the "latest science," they managed to sell her daughter on
the virtues o f hydrogenated vegetable oils, the ones that we're
now learning may be, well, deadly substances.
Sooner or later, everything solid we've been told about the
links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away
in the gust o f the most recent study. Consider the latest find
ings. In 2 0 0 6 came news that a low-fat diet, long believed to
protect against cancer, may do no such thing—this from the
massive, federally funded Women's Health Initiative, which
has also failed to find a link between a low-fat diet and the
risk o f coronary heart disease. Indeed, the whole nutritional
orthodoxy around dietary fat appears to be crumbling, as we
will see. In 2 0 0 5 we learned that dietary fiber might not, as
we'd been confidently told for years, help prevent colorectal
cancers and heart disease. And then, in the fall o f 2 0 0 6 , two
prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time
came to strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute
of Medicine at the National Academy o f Sciences found little
conclusive evidence that eating fish would do your heart much
good (and might hurt your brain, because so much fish is con
taminated with mercury), a Harvard study brought the hope
ful piece o f news that simply by eating a couple o f servings o f
fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil tablets) you
could cut your risk o f dying from a heart attack by more than
a third. It's no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to
become the oat bran o f our time as food scientists rush to mi-
>
7
8
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IN
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the grip o f a Nutritional Industrial Complex—comprised o f
well-meaning, i f error-prone, scientists and food marketers
only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional con
sensus. Together, and with some crucial help from the gov
ernment, they have constructed an ideology o f nutritionism
that, among other things, has convinced us o f three pernicious
myths: that what matters most is not the food but the "nutri
ent"; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible
to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding
what to eat; and that the purpose o f eating is to promote a
narrow concept o f physical health. Because food in this view
is foremost a matter o f biology, it follows that we must try to
eat "scientifically"—by the nutrient and the number and under
the guidance o f experts.
If such an approach to food doesn't strike you as the least
bit strange, that is probably because nutritionist thinking has
become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, histori
cally, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than
biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about com
munity, 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 o f the pleasure o f eating, which would be bad enough,
but paradoxically o f our health as well. Indeed, no people on
earth worry more about the health consequences o f their food
choices than we Americans do—and no people suffer from
AN
EATER'S
MANIFESTO
as many diet-related health problems. We are becoming a na
tion o f orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with
healthy eating.*
The scientists haven't tested the hypothesis yet, but I'm
willing to bet that when they do they'll find an inverse cor
relation between the amount o f time people spend worrying
about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is,
after all, the implicit lesson o f the French paradox, so-called
not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists,
who can't fathom how a people w h o enjoy their food as much
as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed
toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates o f
heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low-fat
diets. Maybe it's time we confronted the American paradox: a
notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and
diet and the idea o f eating healthily.
I don't mean to suggest that all would be well i f we could just
stop worrying about food or the state o f our dietary health:
Let them eat Twinkies! There are in fact some very good reasons
to worry. The rise o f nutritionism reflects legitimate concerns
that the American diet, which is well on its way to becom
ing the world's diet, has changed in ways that are making us
•Orthorexia—from the Greek "ortho-" (right and correct) + "exia" (appetite) =
right appetite. The term was first proposed in 1 9 9 6 by the American physician
Steven Bratman. Though orthorexia is not yet an eating disorder recognized
by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, academic investigation is
under way.
«»
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increasingly sick and fat. Four o f the top ten causes o f death
today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet:
coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.Yes, the rise
to prominence o f these chronic diseases is partly due to the
fact that we're not dying earlier in life o f infectious diseases,
but only partly: Even after adjusting for age, many o f the socalled diseases o f civilization were far less common a century
ago—and they remain rare in places where people don't eat
the way we do.
I'm speaking, o f course, o f the elephant in the room when
ever we discuss diet and health: "the Western diet." This is the
subject o f the second part o f the book, in which I follow the
story o f the most radical change to the way humans eat since
the discovery o f agriculture. All o f our uncertainties about nu
trition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic dis
eases that now kill most o f us can be traced directly to the
industrialization o f our food: the rise o f highly processed foods
and refined grains; the use o f chemicals to raise plants and
animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance o f cheap
calories o f sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and
the narrowing o f the biological diversity o f the human diet to a
tiny handful o f staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy. These
changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted:
lots o f processed foods and meat, lots o f added fat and sugar,
lots o f everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.
That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known
for a long time. Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group
o f doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that
AN
EATER'S
MANIFESTO
OI
wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way o f
eating and adopted the Western diet, there soon followed a pre
dictable series o f Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes,
cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. They called these the West
ern diseases and, though the precise causal mechanisms were
(and remain) uncertain, these observers had litde doubt these
chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet.
What's more, the traditional diets that the new Western
foods displaced were strikingly diverse: Various populations
thrived on diets that were what we'd call high fat, low fat, or
high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed, there have been tradi
tional diets based on just about any kind o f whole food you
can imagine. What this suggests is that the human animal is
well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet,
however, is not one o f them.
Here, then, is a simple but crucial fact about diet and
health, yet, curiously, it is a fact that nutritionism cannot see,
probably because it developed in tandem with the industrial
ization o f our food and so takes it for granted. Nutritionism
prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various
nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortify
ing processed foods rather than questioning their value in the
first place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology o f
the Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or
searching questions about it.
But we can. By gaining a firmer grasp on the nature o f the
Western diet—trying to understand it not only physiologically
but also historically and ecologically—we can begin to develop
11
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IN
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a different way o f thinking about food that might point a path
out o f our predicament. In doing so we have two sturdy—and
strikingly hopeful—facts to guide us: first, that humans his
torically have been healthy eating a great many different diets;
and second, that, as we'll see, most o f the damage to our food
and health caused by the industrialization o f our eating can
be reversed. Put simply, we can escape the Western diet and its
consequences.
This is the burden o f the third and last section o f In Defense of
Food: to propose a couple dozen personal rules o f eating that are
conducive not only to better health but also to greater pleasure
in eating, two goals that turn out to be mutually reinforcing.
These recommendations are a little different from the di
etary guidelines you're probably accustomed to. They are not,
for example, narrowly prescriptive. I'm not interested in telling
you what to have for dinner. No, these suggestions are more
like eating algorithms, mental devices for thinking through our
food choices. Because there is no single answer to the question
o f what to eat, these guidelines will produce as many different
menus as there are people using them.
These rules o f thumb are also not framed in the vocabulary
o f nutrition science. This is not because nutrition science has
nothing important to teach us—it does, at least when it avoids
the pitfalls o f reductionism and overconfidence—but because
I believe we have as much, i f not more, to learn about eating
from history and culture and tradition. We are accustomed in
all matters having to do with health to assuming science should
have the last word, but in the case o f eating, other sources
AN
EATER'S
MANIFESTO
IN
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understand." This reductionist way o f thinking about food had
been pointed out and criticized before (notably by the Cana
dian historian Harvey Levenstein, the British nutritionist Geof
frey Cannon, and the American nutritionists Joan Gussow and
Marion Nestle), but it had never before been given a proper
name: "nutritionism." Proper names have a way o f making vis
ible things we don't easily see or simply take for granted.
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
o f organizing large swaths o f life and experience under a set
o f 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.
In the case o f nutritionism, the widely shared but unex
amined assumption is that the key to understanding food is
indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the
sum o f their nutrient parts. From this basic premise flow sev
eral others.
Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and
therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to
the journalists through w h o m the scientists reach the public)
to explain the hidden reality o f foods to us. In form this is a
quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one
that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood.
For to enter a world where your dietary salvation depends on
unseen nutrients, you need plenty o f expert help.
NUTRITIONISM
DEFINED
IN
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influence over how we ate and thought about eating to sci
ence. Or what passes for science in dietary matters; nutrition
ism would be a more accurate term. "Premature or not," The
New York Times' Jane Brody wrote in 1 9 8 1 , "the Dietary Goals are
beginning to reshape the nutritional philosophy, i f not yet the
eating habits, o f most Americans."
s i x « EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER
I
n fact, we did change our eating habits in the wake o f the
new guidelines, endeavoring to replace the evil fats at the top
o f the food pyramid with the good carbs spread out at the bot
tom. The whole o f the industrial food supply was reformulated
to reflect the new nutritional wisdom, giving us low-fat pork,
low-fat Snackwell's, and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose
(yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. W h i c h turned
out to be quite a lot. Oddly, Americans got really fat on their
new low-fat diet—indeed, many date the current epidemic o f
obesity and diabetes to the late 1970s, when Americans began
bingeing on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the
evils o f fat.
But the story is slightly more complicated than that. For
while it is true that Americans p o s t - 1 9 7 7 did shift the bal
ance in their diets from fats to carbs so that fat as a percentage of
total calories in the diet declined (from 4 2 percent in 1977 to
EAT
RIGHT,
GET FATTER
3 4 percent in 1 9 9 5 ) , we never did in fact cut down on our
total consumption o f fat; we just ate more o f other things.
We did reduce our consumption o f saturated fats, replacing
them, as directed, with polyunsaturated fats and trans fats. Meat
consumption actually held steady, though we did, again as in
structed, shift from red meat to white to reduce our saturated
fat intake. Basically what we did was heap a bunch more carbs
onto our plate, obscuring but by no means replacing the ex
panding chunk o f (now skinless white) animal protein still
sitting there in the middle.
How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology
o f nutritionism deserves as much o f the blame as the carbo
hydrates themselves do—that and human nature. By framing
dietary advice in terms o f good and bad nutrients, and by
burying the recommendation that we should eat less o f any
particular actual food, it was easy for the take-home message
o f the 1977 and 1 9 8 2 dietary guidelines to be simplified as
follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is precisely what we did.
We're always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more o f
something (with the possible exception o f oat bran), and one
o f the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dis
pensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It's hard
to imagine the low-fat/high-carb craze taking off as it did or
our collective health deteriorating to the extent that it has i f
McGovern's original food-based recommendation had stood:
Eat less meat and fewer dairy products. For how do you get from that
stark counsel to the idea that another carton o f Snackwell's is
just what the doctor ordered?
You begin to see how attractive nutritionism is for all par-
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ties concerned, consumers as well as producers, not to mention
the nutrition scientists and journalists it renders indispensable.
The ideology offers a respectable rationale for creating and
marketing all manner o f new processed foods and permission
for people to eat them. Plus, every course correction in nutri
tionist advice gives reason to write new diet books and articles,
manufacture a new line o f products, and eat a whole bunch
o f even more healthy new food products. And i f a product is
healthy by design and official sanction, then eating Jots o f it
must be healthy too—maybe even more so.
Nutritionism might be the best thing ever to happen to the
food industry, which historically has labored under the limits
to growth imposed by a population o f eaters that isn't expand
ing nearly as fast as the food makers need it to i f they are to
satisfy the expectations o f Wall Street. Nutritionism solves the
problem o f the fixed stomach, as it used to be called in the
business: the fact that compared to other consumer products,
demand for food has in the past been fairly inelastic. People
could eat only so much, and because tradition and habit ruled
their choices, they tended to eat the same old things. Not any
more! Not only does nutritionism favor ever more novel kinds
o f highly processed foods (which are by far the most profitable
kind to make), it actually enlists the medical establishment and
the government in the promotion o f those products. Play your
cards right and you can even get the American Heart Associa
tion to endorse your new breakfast cereal as "heart healthy."
As I write, the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim
for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in
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polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption o f
saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovas
cular system. So can a notorious junk food pass through the
needle eye o f nutritionist logic and come out the other side
looking like a health food.
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W
e eaters, alas, don't reap nearly as much benefit from
nutritionism as food producers. Beyond providing a
license to eat more o f the latest approved foodlike substance,
which we surely do appreciate, nutritionism tends to foster a
great deal o f anxiety around the experience o f shopping for
food and eating it. To do it right, you've got to be up on the
latest scientific research, study ever-longer and more confusing
ingredients labels,* sift through increasingly dubious health
claims, and then attempt to enjoy foods that have been engi
neered with many other objectives in view than simply tasting
good. To think o f some o f the most delicious components o f
*Geoffrey Cannon points out that nutrition labels, which have become the
single most ubiquitous medium o f chemical information in our lives, "are
advertisements for the chemical principle o f nutrition."
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food as toxins, as nutritionism has taught us to do in the case
o f fat, does little for our happiness as eaters. Americans have
embraced a "nutritional philosophy," to borrow Jane Brody's
words, that, regardless o f whether that philosophy does any
thing for our health, surely takes much o f the pleasure out o f
eating.
But why do we even need a nutritional philosophy in the
first place? Perhaps because we Americans have always had a
problem taking pleasure in eating. We certainly have gone to
unusual lengths to avoid it. Harvey Levenstein, who has written
two illuminating histories o f American food culture, suggests
that the sheer abundance o f food in America has bred "a vague
indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run,
rather than to dine and savor." To savor food, to conceive o f a
meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence
o f effeteness, a form o f foreign foppery. (Few things have been
more likely to get an American political candidate in hot water
than a taste for fine food, as Martin Van Buren discovered during
his failed 1 8 4 0 reelection campaign. Van Buren had brought a
French chef to the White House, a blunder seized on by his op
ponent, William Henry Harrison, who made much o f the fact
that he subsisted on "raw beef and salt." George H. W Bush's
predilection for pork rinds and Bill Clinton's for Big Macs were
politically astute tastes to show off.)
It could well be that, as Levenstein contends, the sheer
abundance o f food in America has fostered a culture o f care
less, perfunctory eating. But our Puritan roots also impeded a
sensual or aesthetic enjoyment o f food. Like sex, the need to
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eat links us to the animals, and historically a great deal o f Prot
estant energy has gone into helping us keep all such animal
appetites under strict control. To the Christian social reform
ers o f the nineteenth century, "The naked act o f eating was
little more than unavoidable . . . and was not to be considered
a pleasure except with great discretion." I ' m quoting from
Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad, which recounts the campaign o f
these domestic reformers to convince Americans, in the words
o f one, "that eating is something more than animal indul
gence, and that cooking has a nobler purpose than the grati
fication o f appetite and the sense o f taste." And what might
that nobler purpose be? Sound nutrition and good sanitation.
By elevating those scientific principles and "disdaining the
proof o f the palate," Shapiro writes, "they made it possible
for American cooking to accept a flood o f damaging innova
tions for years to come"—low-fat processed food products
prominent among them.
So scientific eating is an old and venerable tradition in
America. Here's how Harvey Levenstein sums up the quasiscientific beliefs that have shaped American attitudes toward food
for more than a century: "that taste is not a true guide to what
should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one en
joys; that the important components o f foods cannot be seen
or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories;
and that experimental science has produced rules o f nutrition
which will prevent illness and encourage longevity." Levenstein
could be describing the main tenets o f nutritionism.
Perhaps the most notorious flowering o f pseudoscientific
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eating (and protonutritionism) came in the early years o f the
twentieth century, when John Harvey Kellogg and Horace
Fletcher persuaded thousands o f Americans to trade all plea
sure in eating for health-promoting dietary regimens o f truly
breathtaking rigor and perversity. The two diet gurus were
united in their contempt for animal protein, the consump
tion o f which Dr. Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist who bore
a striking resemblance to KFC's Colonel Sanders, firmly be
lieved promoted both masturbation and the proliferation o f
toxic bacteria in the colon. During this, the first golden age
o f American food faddism, protein performed much the same
role that fat would perform during the next. At Kellogg's Battle
Creek sanitarium, patients (who included John D. Rockefeller
and Theodore Roosevelt) paid a small fortune to be subjected
to such "scientific" practices as hourly yogurt enemas (to undo
the damage that protein supposedly wreaked on the colon);
electrical stimulation and "massive vibration" o f the abdomen;
diets consisting o f nothing but grapes (ten to fourteen pounds
o f them a day); and at every meal, "Fletcherizing," the prac
tice o f chewing each bite o f food approximately one hundred
times. (Often to the rousing accompaniment o f special chew
ing songs.) The theory was that thorough mastication would
reduce protein intake (this seems certain) and thereby improve
"subjective and objective well-being." Horace Fletcher (aka
"the great masticator") had no scientific credentials whatso
ever, but the example o f his own extraordinary fitness—at fifty
he could bound up and down the Washington Monument's
8 9 8 steps without pausing to catch his breath—while existing
on a daily regimen o f only 4 5 well-chewed grams o f protein
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was all the proof his adherents needed.* The brothers Henry
1
and William James both became enthusiastic "chewers."" "
Whatever their biological efficacy, all these dietary exer
tions had the effect o f removing eating from social life and
pleasure from eating; compulsive chewing (much less hourly
enema breaks) is not exactly conducive to the pleasures o f the
table. Also, Fletcherizing would have forcibly drained food o f
the very last glimmer o f flavor long before the hundredth con
traction o f the jaw had been counted. Kellogg himself was out
spoken in his hostility to the pleasures o f eating: "The decline
o f a nation commences when gourmandizing begins."
If that is so, America had little reason to worry.
America s early attraction to various forms o f scientific eat
ing may also have reflected discomfort about the way other
people eat: the weird, messy, smelly, and mixed-up eating habits
o f immigrants.* How a people eats is one o f the most powerful
* According to Levenstein, scientists seeking the secret o f Fletcher's exemplary
health scrupulously monitored his ingestions and excretions, "noting with
regard to the latter, as all observers did, the remarkable absence of odor"
(Levenstein, Revolution of the Table, p. 8 9 ) .
^William James wrote of Fletcher that "if his observations on diet, confirmed
already on a limited scale, should prove true on a universal scale, it is
impossible to overestimate their revolutionary import." Fletcher returned the
favor, assuring the philosopher that Fletcherism was "advancing the same
cause as Pragmatism" (Levenstein, Revolution of the Table, p. 9 2 ) .
* Americans were particularly disturbed by the way many immigrant groups
mixed their foods in stews and such, in contrast to the Anglo-American
practice of keeping foods separate on the plate, the culinary format
anthropologist Mary Douglas calls " 1A plus 2B"—one chunk o f animal
protein plus two vegetables or starches. Perhaps the disdain for mixing foods
reflected anxieties about other kinds of mixing.
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ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity,
which is exactly what you don't want in a society dedicated to
the ideal o f "Americanization." To make food choices more
scientific is to empty them o f their ethnic content and history;
in theory, at least, nutritionism proposes a neutral, modernist,
forward-looking, and potentially unifying answer to the ques
tion o f what it might mean to eat like an American. It is also a
way to moralize about other people's choices without seem
ing to. In this, nutritionism is a little like the institution o f the
American front lawn, an unobjectionable, i f bland, way to pave
over our differences and Americanize the landscape. O f course
in both ...
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