In Defense of Food - An expert's review

Each month I eagerly await, Carol Kenney's health and nutrition newsletter. It is always informative and witty. This month Carol expanded on the history of foods and systems. I know you'll all enjoy her insights. Carol is a Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner in New York City. Visit her at www.pathways4heath.com.

"Released at the start of this year, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food immediately climbed to the top of the New York Times’ Book Best Seller List. Amazing, really…a book about foods as “systems” reaching such heights. What can explain such success? Michael Pollan is funny and certainly his humor is a draw. But, I suspect his success goes beyond this.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Don’t you love it! Sometimes simple words work best to convey the most profound and most complex of ideas. Timing is everything, they say, and today these words seem to touch a common chord.

Some 30 years ago, Annemarie Colbin started describing foods as systems and our body as a system uniquely designed with just the right software to eat foods in their whole, not- fractured, form. This is the holistic lens: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; the whole, as a system, works in mysterious and powerful ways, never to be fully understood by science through the “reductionist” lens of the microscope. How can you appreciate the flavor, aroma, and life-force energy and essence of a plump, juicy vine-ripen tomato by the listing of its vitamins, minerals, and calories? And, a tomato is not like a television…we cannot strip it down to all its minute parts and then reassemble it in all its complexity. Nature hides this magic and gives us no instruction book.

Annemarie Colbin’s Book of Whole Meals and Food and Healing long ago carried this holistic message. It was a message ripe before its time. After all, back then the food and advertising industries were just clicking into high gear to spread before us a rich panoply of freshly-invented products, drawing us in with convenience, novelty, price, and long shelf-lives. With each year, cheap, fractured convenience foods allowed us to spend less and less of our income at the supermarket and less and less of our time in the kitchen.

In recent decades, we have grown to expect “new” products to be interesting, fun, and innovative. Today, food advertising budgets of $32 billion annually help support the introduction of some 17,000 new fractured, processed, fortified “foods.” In reality, these are just “retreads” made to look new. They are largely blends reconfigured from our three main agricultural surplus crops…wheat, corn, and soy. Hidden in a variety of forms in these packaged, convenience foods, corn, wheat, and soy contribute 1580 calories per person to our daily food supply. There is little room for much else.

But the pendulum can swing only so far before it reverses direction. How exciting this year to see Michael Pollan bring the concept of foods as systems to mainstream thinking. Perhaps we are using a new lens to cut through the hype surrounding fast foods and convenience products to recognize that something is missing at the supermarket in terms of quality and lifestyle. As we see our nation, and increasingly the world, suffering more and more from allergies, obesity, diabetes, and a variety of other chronic diseases, we consumers seem more and more ready and open to start to look for causes. They are not hard to find.

To name just two: Wheat, corn, and soy, of course, are major allergens. Corn and soy are also two of the key crops that are genetically manipulated: 60% of all corn and 85% of all soybeans grown today in the United States are genetically engineered.

In Defense of Food is a fun read. And, Food and Healing continues to offer timeless truths, incredible depth, and great health-giving wisdom for any era."