Parting Thoughts On "In Defense of Food"

Wow. This was a great book. (Yes, it took me a long time to read it. I do have four children and not much discretionary time to read!) I would love to reprint so many good nuggets of information here for you to digest. (I'm so funny today.) BUT... it's a book, so you can read it yourself. I highly recommend it. And I was happy to see that Michael Pollan mentioned Joel Salatin at the end of the book. (I linked these two names in a previous post when I heard Mr. Salatin speak at Liberty.)

Overall, what I loved best was Mr. Pollan's defense of food as food; stripping away the nutritionism and exposing the way we look at foods (high fat, low fat, low calorie, protein, starch, etc.). Good food is just FOOD. This is so simple we miss it. It is also why so many traditional diets work so well, despite the fact that they don't follow the rules that nutritionists tell us to follow. I'm fascinated by looking at traditional diets and recognizing that God has always provided for His people. He provided different things for different people, but He sustained them well. (Eskimos eat whale and are healthy; Japanese eat sushi and are healthy; Greeks eat goat cheeses and saturated fats and are healthy...) This is linked with Weston Price's findings.

I also enjoyed Mr. Pollan's discussion of industrialization of food. Exposing what has happened to our food sources, to our grocers and growers and processors is intensely helpful to me in shaping my views of food.

The book included a call to buy locally, to know where your food comes, to grow your own foods, to cook and to eat as a family. This is what our family has embraced.

I hear so many people lamenting that it is "so expensive" to eat healthfully. I'm not very sympathetic, for while I agree that it does cost money to eat well and that it may, in some instances, seem more expensive than choosing the cheaper, processed, on-sale food items. . . in the long run, eating healthfully is vastly less expensive. On this, Mr. Pollan states: "Is it just coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on healthcare." (p 187-188)

Mr. Pollan in his final chapter, states: "To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts" (p. 200).

I find myself so subversive these days.