Americans have a curious relationship with food. Despite thinking drastically more about health and its relation to eating than citizens of other nationalities, the American finds his or herself increasingly less healthy. This is the American Paradox. Much like the nutritionist’s examination of the “French Paradox” or the Mediterranean Diet, Michael Pollan aims to examine the effect of “nutritionism” on American society and our health epidemic through, his book, In Defense of Food.

This all began for me back in 2006 as I sat in my dingy apartment across from University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Following the usual evening ritual, I was cooking some canned food or quick microwave item before sitting down to watch the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. This particular evening, Colbert has Michael Pollan as a guest. At the interview table, Pollan lays out corn, peanut butter, soda and a piece of meat claiming that all of the above was naught but corn. This was a grand hypothesis from my perspective and I immediately took to Amazon to order the book that discussed this Omnivore’s Dilemma. After quickly devouring the story of the path from producer to consumer, I was struck at how much I simply didn’t know about the things in my possession. Where they came from and who made them was a mystery and I had simply never thought about it because I had no need to. The reason for this failure of consideration was the fact that money is the great anonymizer, replacing relationships with cold hard digits as I would later learn from Charles Eisenstein in his book Ascent of Humanity. So as the 2008 New Year rang in, I was in the Dallas airport on my way to Austin for the American Astronomical Society conference when I saw In Defense of Food on the shelf. It’s been a busy and and only now in 2009 did I feel that I was ready to read it. Once again Pollan changes the paradigm for food through a complete and thorough dismantling of the nutritional mindset that has used the American populace as its ginuea pigs over the last 50 years. An experiment that is weakening its grip as claims like,  “fat is always bad for us” are being proven as having weak links to truth at best.

Nutritionism makes three fateful claims about the things we eat,

First: What matters most is not the food but the “nutrient” contained inside the food

Second: We need expert help in deciding what to eat because nutrition is incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, this is very similar to holding nutrition scientists as being little more than a ruling, mystical priesthood complete with its own esoteric and confounding initiation rituals through the “church” of the FDA

Third: The purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. Simply put, other cultures do not think of their food as a health item. The majority of the world’s citizens eat because they have well defined and very important cultural codes. Taboos and reasons that have developed over a very long period of time guide daily choices for eating. These mechanisms were developed because they work. The human species has adapted to a large number of foods, culture has encoded generations of information in this system.

The puritanical foundation for American society has long decried the pleasure of life, and eating was not spared from this mindset. The joy of eating has fallen to the wayside. We are told to exert willpower upon our “imperfect” bodies through drinking, “exactly X glasses of water a day” or through getting, “100% of our daily minimum allowance of vitamin A.” In a recent study by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin, Americans associated chocolate cake with nothing other than guilt, while the French remarked that it represented celebration.

Faced with epidemics of Western diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, a plausible solution is to embrace our cultural past. Only in the last 50 years has our species diverged from its original diet, a diet that we have adapted to over thousands if not tens of thousands of years, encoded in the cultural rituals mentioned above. In the early 1900s, Weston Price quit his job as a dentist in Ohio to explore the health of indigenous societies, finding them far healthier than their “wealthier” counterparts in “developed” nations. Price  watched the introduction of processed foods into these cultures and quickly saw that these tribes became obese and unhealthy in the same way we are. The problems for the natives resulted from the diet and the new culture being built around the habits of eating. Price’s observations were largely ignored because it was bad for business. Food companies, ever agglomerating, were looking to solve the “fixed stomach” problem: that demand for food is fairly constant with the growth of populations.

How could these food companies grow their market, attracting new investors that could promise of rapid profits? The method food corporations could grow their business was through processing food products, over and over. And this is exactly the route they pursued. Food companies propagated the ideals of nutritionism because they were profitable. As Gregory Scrinis wrote, “…if foods are understood only in terms of the various quantities of nutrients they contain, then even processed foods may be considered ‘healthier’ for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrient.” For the international food conglomerates, Pollan remarks: “How convenient.”

If the nutritional quality of an apple in 1940 is 3x that of a modern apple it just means Cargill and Monstanto can profit from our need to buy three times as much. The agricultural policies instituted during the Nixon era with Earl Butz as Secretary of Ag had respectable motives, increasing the access of food for everyone was a noble goal. But years of overproduction and increasing monoculture indicates that now is a a time to re-evaluate, not romanticize the past while falling into the ever growing black hole of Western diseases.

This situation reminds me of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, a humorous novel about the apocalypse. When the four horsemen arrive, Famine is a major food corporation executive, implementing business practices to ensure that people will consume more; more items that masquerade as food with increasingly less nutritional benefit from doing so. This parody has become reality. Food must be more than fuel.

The familiarity of the human with the life cycle of the plant or animal is so deeply tied to the maximum nutritional value that food can provide. When tomatoes can give their maximum benefit to us, they are most attractive, they call out to us by turning red and smelling ripe. So is the way of other plants. Processed food removes this tie to nature.

But there is hope, when Kerin O’Day took ten aborigines back from the confines of a modern diet to their native bush, after seven weeks of a hunter-gatherer diet, the diabetes that plagued the group dissipated. We can avoid many of the negative effects of the western diet by adhering to some simple principles that Pollan closes out the book describing. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Most important among his explanation of this mantra is the recommendation to, “shake the hand that feeds us” because only as we develop an intimate relationship with the substances constituting the sacred act of eating will we truly know what to eat and how to eat it. Deeply in agreement with my recent read of The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein, In Defense of Food is more rational as opposed to spiritual but still just as revolutionary.