I happened to have the radio on in the kitchen this lunchtime and the BBC Radio 4 “The Food Programme” came on. They had a feature on Michael Pollan and his book “In Defence of Food”. Pollan argues that it’s time to take food back from the people in white coats. Food scientists, nutritionists, and the food industry have made us neurotic about what we eat and have created an epidemic of food-related diseases wherever they have triumphed over common sense.

I enjoyed his three precepts:

• Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food
• Don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients on the label
• Only eat at tables (a desk is not a table)

Or, in one sentence: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

In these post-Enlightenment days, questioning the people in white coats is as near to heresy as you can get. Pollan use the tools of the scientific method to show that much food science is bad science. But he also is a keen foodie too:

Food is … about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world and about expressing our identity. That eating should be first and foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and destructive idea - destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well.

There is an extract from his book in The Guardian - let’s see if it’s in the public library…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.