“Pollans verdienste is dat hij voedsel als onderwerp op de politieke en sociale agenda heeft gezet. Zeker in de VS, land van te dikke pizza’s en te zoete milkshakes, kan dat niet genoeg gedaan worden. Zijn ideeën zijn goed bedoeld; de meeste zijn niet nieuw, een klein aantal ervan is verstandig, maar een groot deel is wetenschappelijke onzin. Het resultaat is een aantrekkelijk, maar misleidend mengsel met hier en daar een vleugje demagogie. Leuk is het idee om van de tuin van het Witte Huis een moestuin te maken. Verstandig is zijn samenvattende stelling: eet niet te veel en vooral planten. Demagogisch is: eet niets waarin ingrediënten zitten die je niet kunt uitspreken. Of: eet niets wat je grootmoeder niet zou herkennen.”

Part 1: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Serious Eats, Michael Pollan Interview and Lecture:

“From online food show Cooking Up a Story comes this four-part interview and lecture with Michael Pollan during which he talks about eating real food instead of their imitations, the ideology of understanding food solely through its nutrients, learning how to eat from culture instead of science, and “voting with your fork” to influence food producers to make better food.”

Part 2: Nutritionism and edible food-like substances.

part 3: “There is wisdom in cuisine.”

part 4: “Voting with your fork is a very politically powerful thing to do.”

In dit kader ook vermakelijk: Foodlog, Ben jij een ethische eter?

Tegenlicht uitzending: De toekomst van ons voedsel: landbouw of laboratorium? (maandag 28 januari 2008, 21:00 Ned 2)

Extract 1/2: Consuming passion:

“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. The scientists haven’t tested the hypothesis yet, but I’m willing to bet that when they do they’ll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by Anglo-Saxon nutritionists, who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than others on elaborately engineered low-fat diets. No people on earth, by contrast, worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than Americans – and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems.”

Extract 2/2: How to get back to real food

“The first time I heard the advice to “just eat food” was in a speech by the nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you should eat food – what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River, refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with that title. “In the 34 years I’ve been in the field of nutrition,” she said, “I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world.” Taking its place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes – “products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge”.

Real food is still out there, however, still being grown and even occasionally sold in the supermarket. Here are a few rules of thumb to help you recognise it – and then make the most of it.”

In Defense of Food. An Eater’s Manifesto, Michael Pollan.

Morning Edition, ‘In Defense of Food’ Author Offers Advice for Health (interview):

“”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

(…)

The implication of Pollan’s advice, however, is that what we’re eating now isn’t food.”

Slate, The Holy Church of Food:

“There’s always been a streak of the willfully impractical in Pollan’s worldview. Like the other great, radical writers whose subject is the death grip of the food industry—Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser—he’s eloquent and persuasive; but come the revolution, he probably doesn’t belong on the tactics-and-logistics committee. What he likes best is spinning long, mesmerizing tales from his immense research, as he did in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that made him a star. It’s a beautifully handled polemic against modern agribusiness until you get to the last chapter, the one that’s supposed to bring it all home.”

LA Times, ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto’ by Michael Pollan

“The third section offers rules (rather, gentle suggestions) for how to “escape the Western diet.” Many are familiar, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to what you eat — for example, don’t eat packaged foods with lots of chemical ingredients. Some involve behavioral changes: Eat mostly plants, avoid supermarkets whenever possible, buy a freezer, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” pay more to eat less and don’t buy food where you buy gas. Some are more about how we eat than what we eat — for example, do all your eating at a table, don’t eat alone, eat slowly.”