 - Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food
 Aug 26, 10:24am  (10 reviews) nutrition, books, food, my-favourite-stumbles http://michaelpollan.com/indefense.php- UPDATE: I've now nearly finished this, and truly think it is a crucially important book, which, if read by more people, could help to bring about huge, and necessary changes in the modern industrial diet. An active audiobook torrent can be found here
I read through half of this today in Borders and it is a remarkably well-written book. The first section is a heavy critique of the 'nutritionism' which, paradoxically, may have played a large part in ruining the health of a nation of Americans in recent years. The argument is largely that modern nutritional advice is flawed for the following reasons:
1. The reductionist approach of modern science is very hard to apply to food. We never take nutrients in isolation. They are taken as part of a food, which is taken as part of a diet, in an individual person, in an individual environment. Pollan quotes one of the top nutritional epidemiologists who confessed to him in an interview that she doesn't take nutritional epidemiology seriouly any more, as it is in such a mess! The strange thing is that nutritionist recognise that their science is blindly groping in the dark, yet still expect us to jump every time they do an about face. And expect us to forget their sometimes huge mistakes. The 'lipid hypothesis' - that saturated fats are a major cause of heart problems in the west, has been debunked, though government and nutritionists are being very silent on the part they may have played in bringing countless dieters to an early grave.
2. The various trials used to assess effects of diet on health are flawed. How do you give a placebo for a piece of broccoli? Or who will be fooled into thinking that margarine is butter. And trials which rely on subjects reports of food intake struggle with the fact that people generally report wildly inaccurately. Furthermore, when so many people eat out in restaurants, who is really able to say with any accuracy what kind of food they've eaten in the last month?
3. Lobbying by the food industry makes government water down its advice - so in the 70s, 'Eat less meat and dairy' became 'Choose meats and dairy low in saturated fat'. The food industry has also encouraged a move away from real food to processed foods, as these can be filled with the next hyped nutrient - our margarine had vitamin A, then D was the rage, and now it is full of Omega 3s. When carbs go out of fashion, we make breads with proteins.
I've yet to get to the more constructive section of the book, but it seems to be about a return to traditional diets and good old-fashioned common sense.
"Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why 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 TV, 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. Many 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 common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become...
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
- Reading the Papers #2 | Enrique Vidal : PhotoBlog | Travel, Nature & Wildlife...
- Aug 26, 4:43am
 (1 review) photography, china http://enriquevidalphoto.com/photoblog/i... - Some interesting China photos here, and not the usual rice fields either.
'Reading the papers'...
Thanks MBMC!
- Michael Pollan Speaks In Defense Of Food | Building a Better Geek.
- Aug 24, 2:19pm (1 review) health, food http://www.health-hack.com/archives/2008...
- A one hour talk by Michael Pollan on the ideas in his new book.
- BBC iPlayer - Jimmy and the Wild Honey Hunters
- Aug 24, 11:16am (1 review) culture, food, nepal http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00...
- I'm a big fan of Jimmy Doherty's documentaries right now. In this one, he goes off to Nepal to collect wild honey, along with the villagers whose community has been doing this for thousands of years.
- Linux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Aug 24, 9:57am (3 reviews) linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux- Why God, why, did I ever buy an eee pc running linux, rather than just getting another Mac? Such an unintuitive operating system. I've literally spent about an hour trying to do something as simple as - installing, then being able to find, a piece of software so I can download torrents. The eee pc is also a buggy piece of shit! Sorry to say it but it's the truth! OS X is just a million times more logically designed, from the view of ease of use. Terminal windows are all very well, if you know what you're doing, but for a novice user there really need to be easier ways to get simple things done.
- http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o126/alice44_photo/MikeGal.jpg
- Aug 23, 7:53pm (39 reviews) photography http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o126/...
- China is ready for the Olympic tourists... - bigpictures posterous
- Aug 23, 3:09am (15 reviews) bizarre, china http://bigpicture.posterous.com/china-is...
- More 'Chinglish':
'Look up and down the isle twice before proceeding...'
- BBC iPlayer - Jimmy Dohertys Farming Heroes: West of England
- Aug 22, 1:22pm (1 review) agriculture, food, cooking http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00...
- The latest installment of 'Jimmy's Farming Heroes' - watch it while it's hot. The BBC only keep them online for a few weeks. This series has been a revelation to me, and is giving the due respect back to the noble farmer - the people responsible for keeping us all alive.
- YouTube - A Whiter Shade Of Pale - Procol Harum
- Aug 22, 11:25am (1 review) rock-music, video http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb3iPP-tHd...
- Great song. And the original video is just so bad it has to be seen.
- Wild Fermentation :: Economics of Fermentation
- Aug 21, 10:14am (1 review) nutrition, food http://www.wildfermentation.com/resource...
- Fascinating musings on the losses - social, epicurean, and healthwise - of our modern food production and distribution systems:
"food should not be primarily a commodity. Food is a gift of God's Good Earth, for which all religious traditions teach gratitude. To subject it to the economic regime of the lowest bidder is to desecrate the gift and insult the Giver. For most of human history, the sharing of food was a significant social act, cementing ties between friends and kin, showing welcome to strangers. Today it has become an anonymous act of commerce.
Other people in other times would no doubt have thought it exceedingly strange, if not downright obscene, for total strangers to grow, process, and even cook nearly all one's food.
The Proper Role of Money
That is not to say that food should never be bought. Money has its rightful role, even among friends, as an aid to fairness and a means of support. What I am saying, rather, is that the sharing of food should be part of a personal relationship. Money may be involved, but the profit motive should be secondary. In my economic relationships with the local farmers I know, I am happy to pay them a fair price, in hopes that they will be prosperous. My sentiment is partly selfish, because I know that if they are prosperous, they will continue to provide me with good food. But also I simply don't feel good about eating food that came through the devaluing of another human being's labor, especially when I know that human being personally. When a personal relationship exists between food supplier and food consumer, then bargaining becomes a process of each party coming to understand the other's circumstances to find a mutually fair price, rather than a heartless and shameless exercise of getting the best possible price, which in economics is called "maximizing utility" and in commonsense language is called greed.
Let me also add that the difference between food produced by someone you know and shared through means that respects both producer and consumer, and food grown, processed, and sold by strangers working for faceless corporations, is a difference you can taste. The body responds differently. Food given in fair and respectful exchange by someone you know and trust is more nourishing. I doubt anyone will ever discover a shred of scientific proof for this, but I invite you to verify it for yourself.
In working with my bacterial soda culture, I sometimes get the feeling that the bacteria itself doesn't want to be sold. Similarly, I feel that sauerkraut wants to live in a barrel in the basement. Before you dismiss this as a flight of fancy, consider the uncanny resistance of truly wholesome food to mass production and mass distribution. Most fresh foods, for example, have a limited shelf life, which can only be extended by killing the food through processing, or putting it in suspended animation by refrigeration or freezing. The former response diminishes its healthfulness; the latter has environmental costs. (Also I never have believed the freezing fully preserves the healthfulness of food. It tastes less vibrant, even if all the enzymes are supposedly intact.) Other preservation methods, namely dehydration and fermentation, might arguably work for mass production and distribution, but even here there are problems with storage and shelf life (food companies' use of preservatives and pasteurization is not entirely gratuitous). Besides, such foods cannot account for the bulk of one's year-round diet."
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