The seven words that sum up Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, “Eat food – not too much – mostly plants”, reveals three basic guidelines for every eater:
- Eat food.
- Don’t eat too much food.
- Eat mostly plants.
Pollan first asks you to eat food. And by “food”, he means things that your great-grandmother would recognize as food. Next he suggest that you don’t eat too much of it. That’s pretty self-explanatory. Finally, he suggests that you eat mostly plants.
I like the simplicity of these guidelines. After suffering through countless books and television shows and commercials and newspaper advertisements telling us what food is or isn’t good for us, Pollan’s seven words ease in like a warm breeze. I didn’t know it was so simple – hang on while I get my coat – I’m going to the market right now. Thanks, Mike.
We have been pushed into an unfortunate situation where we can’t rely on knowledge passed down through our families to help guide us in our eating habits, food choices, and meal preparation. Industrial foods usually don’t resemble vegetables, grains or animals – and the ones that do often can’t be trusted anyway because they have been modified or changed in subtle but potentially harmful ways. Great-grandma can’t tell you if you should eat that breakfast bar, or why those apples are so perfectly red and clean and shiny. So instead we have to rely on strangers to explain, assure and instruct us. We rely on people who are not deeply interested and invested in our health, families and communities but rather in their wallets and their employers’ financial health. We rely on people who lie.
In the face of such challenges, I think it is important that we get beyond Michael Pollan’s seven words, and into a few deeper guidelines. I think we can all handle a little more complexity – it is after all our health and our bodies we are talking about here. Pollan obviously gets into more detail in his books and other writings and appearances, but I’d like to stop the Pollan monopoly, the Pollanopoly if you will, and let another more mature and equally respected voice have his say on what we need to do about our food. For those of you who don’t know who Wendell Berry is, he is a writer from Kentucky who published his first novel in 1960. He is also a farmer. I’ve read several of his essay collections and books, almost always learning something or find a new challenge to my stubborn beliefs along the way. The following suggestions are taken from his essay “The Pleasures of Eating” which I first read as part of the essay collection The Art of The Commonplace:
- Participate in food production to the extent that you can.
- Prepare your own food.
- Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.
- Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.
- Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.
- Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
- Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
There you have it. Add these 7 to the 3 from Pollan and you have a total of 10 suggestions to remember. Think of them like the ten commandments of eating. Taken in small steps, they can change your life.
Berry also has a few priceless observations in his essay, including this one concerning the specialization of consumption (my notes in italics):
The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach. (BJ – And I would add “with a tube running from your wallet back to their bank”)
Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much.
And at one point he answers his critics and the defenders of the industrial food production and consumption system who say that it is on balance a benefit to us and improvement to our lifestyles:
It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of the old household food economy. But one can be thus liberated only by entering a trap (unless one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege, as many people apparently do). The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out. How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy.
The concept of responsibility is the most important here. We must eat responsibly, and that has nothing to do with counting calories. I am thankful that here in the St. Louis area we continue to see more farmers’ markets and local, small-scale agriculture, as well as organizations focused on encouraging and supporting these efforts. I can’t wait until spring when the markets come back to life.
