# In Defense of Food  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Michael Pollan]] - Full Title:: In Defense of Food - Category: #books ## Highlights > Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=91)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Today in America the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented—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 of nutrition science that, depending on your point of view, is steadily advancing the frontiers of 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. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=130)) > 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. In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. From this basic premise flow several others. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=365)) > This brings us to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism, though it is a feature certainly not troubling to all. When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or, to be precise, the recognized nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear. “[If] foods are understood only in terms of the various quantities of nutrients they contain,” Gyorgy Scrinis wrote, then “even processed foods may be considered to be ‘healthier’ for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrients.” How convenient. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=412)) > Nutritionism had become the official ideology of the Food and Drug Administration; for all practical purposes the government had redefined foods as nothing more than the sum of their recognized nutrients. Adulteration had been repositioned as food science. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=465)) > Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=504)) > By breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain. ([Location 1162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1162)) > Whatever the advantages of the new industrial system, it could no longer meet the biochemical requirements of the human body, which, not having had time to adapt, was failing in new ways. ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1163)) > What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1185)) > Health depends heavily on knowing how to read these biological signals: This looks ripe; this smells spoiled; that’s one slick-looking cow. This is much easier to do when you have long experience of a food and much harder when a food has been expressly designed to deceive your senses with, say, artificial flavors or synthetic sweeteners. Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet. ([Location 1209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1209)) > We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again. Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it. ([Location 1342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1342)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Simplification of the food chain occurs at the level of species diversity too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in today’s supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high-yielding (and usually patented) varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing. ([Location 1344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1344)) > Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy. It’s hard to believe we’re getting everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat. ([Location 1366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1366)) > 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. ([Location 1419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1419)) > The sheer novelty and glamour 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. ([Location 1544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1544)) > In order for natural selection to help us adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. Also, many of the chronic diseases caused by the Western diet come late in life, after the childbearing years, a period of our lives in which natural selection takes no interest. Thus genes predisposing people to these conditions get passed on rather than weeded out. ([Location 1564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1564)) > Food safety didn’t become a national or global problem until the industrialization of the food chain attenuated the relationships between food producers and eaters. That was the story Upton Sinclair told about the Beef Trust in 1906, and it’s the story unfolding in China today, where the rapid industrialization of the food system is leading to alarming breakdowns in food safety and integrity. 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. Only when we participate in a short food chain are we reminded every week that we are indeed part of a food chain and dependent for our health on its peoples and soils and integrity—on its health. ([Location 1838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1838)) > Thomas Jefferson probably had the right idea when he recommended using meat more as a flavor principle than as a main course, treating it as a “condiment for the vegetables.” ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1904)) > Meat offers a good proof of the proposition that the healthfulness of a food cannot be divorced from the health of the food chain that produced it—that the health of soil, plant, animal, and eater are all connected, for better or worse. ([Location 1909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1909)) > YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO. ([Location 1912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1912)) > In Latin America, corn is traditionally eaten with beans; each plant is deficient in an essential amino acid that happens to be abundant in the other, so together corn and beans form a balanced diet in the absence of meat. ([Location 2003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2003)) > Similarly, corn in these countries is traditionally ground or soaked with limestone, which makes available a B vitamin in the corn, the absence of which would otherwise lead to the deficiency disease called pellagra. ([Location 2004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2004)) > The ancient Asian practice of fermenting soybeans and eating soy in the form of curds called tofu makes a healthy diet from a plant that eaten almost any other way would make people ill. ([Location 2008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2008)) > Soy isoflavones, found in most soy products, are compounds that resemble estrogen, and in fact bind to human estrogen receptors. ([Location 2027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2027)) > *L. I. Lesser, C. B. Ebbeling, M. Goozner, D. Wypij, and D. S. Ludwig, “Relationship Between Funding Source and Conclusion Among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles,” PLoS Medicine, Vol. 4, No. 1, e5 doi:10.1371/journal. pmed.0040005. †Wendell Berry put the problem of monoculture with admirable brevity and clarity in his essay “The Pleasures of Eating”: “But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases.” ([Location 3375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=3375)) # In Defense of Food  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Michael Pollan]] - Full Title:: In Defense of Food - Category: #books ## Highlights > Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=91)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Today in America the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented—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 of nutrition science that, depending on your point of view, is steadily advancing the frontiers of 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. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=130)) > 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. In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts. From this basic premise flow several others. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=365)) > This brings us to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism, though it is a feature certainly not troubling to all. When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or, to be precise, the recognized nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear. “[If] foods are understood only in terms of the various quantities of nutrients they contain,” Gyorgy Scrinis wrote, then “even processed foods may be considered to be ‘healthier’ for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrients.” How convenient. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=412)) > Nutritionism had become the official ideology of the Food and Drug Administration; for all practical purposes the government had redefined foods as nothing more than the sum of their recognized nutrients. Adulteration had been repositioned as food science. ([Location 465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=465)) > Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=504)) > By breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain. ([Location 1162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1162)) > Whatever the advantages of the new industrial system, it could no longer meet the biochemical requirements of the human body, which, not having had time to adapt, was failing in new ways. ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1163)) > What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in systems we call food chains, or food webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1185)) > Health depends heavily on knowing how to read these biological signals: This looks ripe; this smells spoiled; that’s one slick-looking cow. This is much easier to do when you have long experience of a food and much harder when a food has been expressly designed to deceive your senses with, say, artificial flavors or synthetic sweeteners. Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet. ([Location 1209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1209)) > We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again. Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it. ([Location 1342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1342)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Simplification of the food chain occurs at the level of species diversity too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in today’s supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high-yielding (and usually patented) varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing. ([Location 1344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1344)) > Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy. It’s hard to believe we’re getting everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat. ([Location 1366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1366)) > 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. ([Location 1419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1419)) > The sheer novelty and glamour 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. ([Location 1544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1544)) > In order for natural selection to help us adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. Also, many of the chronic diseases caused by the Western diet come late in life, after the childbearing years, a period of our lives in which natural selection takes no interest. Thus genes predisposing people to these conditions get passed on rather than weeded out. ([Location 1564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1564)) > Food safety didn’t become a national or global problem until the industrialization of the food chain attenuated the relationships between food producers and eaters. That was the story Upton Sinclair told about the Beef Trust in 1906, and it’s the story unfolding in China today, where the rapid industrialization of the food system is leading to alarming breakdowns in food safety and integrity. 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. Only when we participate in a short food chain are we reminded every week that we are indeed part of a food chain and dependent for our health on its peoples and soils and integrity—on its health. ([Location 1838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1838)) > Thomas Jefferson probably had the right idea when he recommended using meat more as a flavor principle than as a main course, treating it as a “condiment for the vegetables.” ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1904)) > Meat offers a good proof of the proposition that the healthfulness of a food cannot be divorced from the health of the food chain that produced it—that the health of soil, plant, animal, and eater are all connected, for better or worse. ([Location 1909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1909)) > YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO. ([Location 1912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=1912)) > In Latin America, corn is traditionally eaten with beans; each plant is deficient in an essential amino acid that happens to be abundant in the other, so together corn and beans form a balanced diet in the absence of meat. ([Location 2003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2003)) > Similarly, corn in these countries is traditionally ground or soaked with limestone, which makes available a B vitamin in the corn, the absence of which would otherwise lead to the deficiency disease called pellagra. ([Location 2004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2004)) > The ancient Asian practice of fermenting soybeans and eating soy in the form of curds called tofu makes a healthy diet from a plant that eaten almost any other way would make people ill. ([Location 2008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2008)) > Soy isoflavones, found in most soy products, are compounds that resemble estrogen, and in fact bind to human estrogen receptors. ([Location 2027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=2027)) > *L. I. Lesser, C. B. Ebbeling, M. Goozner, D. Wypij, and D. S. Ludwig, “Relationship Between Funding Source and Conclusion Among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles,” PLoS Medicine, Vol. 4, No. 1, e5 doi:10.1371/journal. pmed.0040005. †Wendell Berry put the problem of monoculture with admirable brevity and clarity in his essay “The Pleasures of Eating”: “But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases.” ([Location 3375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMFDR2&location=3375))