I recently finished reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, which, like The Omnivore’s Dillema before it, proved to be a fascinating and insightful look at the inherent problems in the American food system. Once again Pollan managed to drive home a convincing argument in favor of sustainable agriculture and the value of whole foods.

In Defense of Food moves away from the esoteric meals set out in Omnivore, which seemed most likely to resonate with practicing locavores, foragers, and farm to table fanatics, and into the realm of practical advice for American eaters at large. Pollan takes a hard look at the correlation between the Western Diet and the diseases that have risen along side it. When cultures around the world begin to adopt the American practice of industrial eating – consuming mass quantities of highly processed food products – the incidence of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer rises. Pollan’s prescription for changing our habits and our health is simple: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”

One wonders how an entire book can be written with a premise that can be summed up in seven words. However, the genius of In Defense of Food is in defining exactly what food is. In the third section of the book, Pollan lays out five rules for identifying exactly what counts as food. The first, and my favorite is, “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”. Using bread as an example he shows how traditional bread – that made of flour, yeast, water, and a pinch of salt – is nowhere to be found among the pre-sliced, plastic-wrapped loafs lining grocery store shelves. Modern processed foods are full of ingredients that great-gran (or for that matter most of the modern day population) wouldn’t be able to identify – anyone up for some guar gum or artificial flavor?

While I had expected the information presented to cause me to vacillate between amusement and outrage, I did not expect to have my long held beliefs about nutrition thrashed to a pulp. Pollan makes a strong case against reductionist science and nutritionism. Science looks at an equation one part at a time, but food systems, like ecosystems, add up to much more than just the sum of their individual parts. The rules for proper nutrition change all the time as new “discoveries” are made. Pollan argues that science will never be able to fully understand the complete picture, and therefore any findings should be taken with a grain of salt.

My own evolving relationship with food is a prime example of the folly of applying reductionist science to the study of nutrition. In elementary school I was taught about the “four food groups”, and by the time I got to high school, nutrition was all about the new “food guide pyramid”. In my early twenties I started reading food and health magazines, and I latched onto the idea that it was the individual nutrients that mattered, not necessarily the foods that contain them. I believed in low-fat, I didn’t think twice about sugar, I ate margarine and high fructose corn syrup without blinking. In the span of less than 25 years my understanding of what food I should be eating morphed through a dizzying array of contradictory rules. In recent years I have begun thinking more in terms of actual foods than nutrition as a whole, but never before did I have such a well reasoned argument to justify my newly adopted position.

Of all of the food movement books I have read, In Defense of Food seems like it could have the widest appeal. Michael Pollan lays out rules that are clear, and well justified, if not always easy or convenient. I highly recommend that all American eaters pick up a copy of In Defense of Food.