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

 Those simple words, which constitute the opening line of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food could revolutionize the way we eat. Pollan’s book is a manifesto against the modern Western Diet and its companion ideology, which he calls “Nutritionalism.”

The latter term itself was coined not by Pollan but by the sociologist Gyorgi Scrini, who defined it as the belief “That we should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their chemical constituents and requirements – the assumption being that this is all we need to understand.” Pollan quotes historian Harvey Levenstein, who sums up the attitudes which have shaped American attitudes towards food for more than a century: “That taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernable only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition which will prevent illness and encourage longevity.” In Defense of Food is a merciless attack on both the modern Nutritional-Industrial Complex and its accompanying ideology.

For more than a century now, scientists have known that whenever a people take up Western habits of eating, the so-called Western diseases follow. The best-known examples include obesity, diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, stroke, and cancer, but the list also includes appendicitis, diverticulitis, tooth decay, varicose veins, ulcers, and hemorrhoids. All of these diseases are extremely rare in populations that still eat as their ancestors did for centuries.

Pollan traces the beginning of the modern Western Diet to the 1870’s, when the invention of steam-driven iron rollers enabled the mass production of white flour that was cheap, non-perishable – and which had almost no nutritional value. Around the same time, techniques were perfected which enabled the mass production of refined corn meal and polished rice. Widespread and devastating epidemics of pellagra and beriberi were to follow.

In the early twentieth century, scientists discovered vitamins, and by the 1930’s the food industry began “enriching” refined grain products with a few of the nutrients lost in processing. Of course, “enriching” by no means restores the product to its original nutritional value, but it was enough to prevent devastating nutrient-deficiency diseases – a success which led to the enthronement of nutritionalism as the reigning ideology.

But the Modern Western diet began to assume its most virulent form in the late 1970’s. Spurred on by Nixon-era policies that urged them to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” farmers produced a titanic output of wheat, corn, and soybeans, all at federally subsidized low prices for the food-processing industry to turn into a dizzying variety of packaged products consisting mainly of white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, and soybean oil. Federally-subsidized corn and soybeans were also fed to pigs and chickens and cattle to ensure an abundant supply of cheap meat.

Not everything got cheaper. Adjusted for inflation, the price of fruits and vegetables has gone up 40% since 1980.

And, oddly enough, this flood of cheap calories camouflaged the fact that the American diet was becoming poorer, both in terms of variety and nutritional quality. Historically, humans have made use of 80,000 different varieties of edible plants. A huge portion of the American diet is based on just three – the holy triad of wheat, corn, and soy. And processing of these commodities pretty much always reduces their nutritional value.

To the rescue came the food scientists and their nutritionalist ideology. Pollan quotes Gyorgi Scrini, who said, “If foods are understood only in terms of various quantities of nutrients they contain, then even processed foods may be considered healthier for you if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrients.”

“How convenient,” Pollan remarks.

After all, the big money is in processing foods, not in growing them in the first place. This is what has led to an avalanche of products such as vitamin-fortified soft drinks, “organic” soda pop and snack foods, artificial sweeteners, and fake fats, not to mention such absurdities as low-fat sour cream, low-carb pasta, and my personal favorite, those God-awful Snackwells They taste exactly like cardboard, and they’re just as high in calories as regular cookies, but by God they’re fat-free, so they must be good for you. Right?

Pollan shreds the idea that food scientists know everything they need to know to be able to tell the rest of us what we need to be eating. The ideology of nutritionalism is based on an absurd reductionism. Pollan cites a study performed by researchers who had noted that people who eat lots of foods (such as carrots) that are rich in beta-carotene have lower rates of cancer. Aha! The boffins figured that all they had to do was extract the beta-carotene from plants, and its salubrious benefits could be made available in the form of an easy-to-swallow pill.

Uh, not so fast. In fact, their studies found that people who were taking beta-carotene supplements were more likely to die of cancer than the control group.

Oops.

What went wrong? Even the simplest food, such the humble carrot, contains thousands upon thousands of chemical compounds. How do all these compounds interact with each other, and with your body? The fact is, we don’t know.

Another example: in the seventies, there was evidence (sketchy and equivocal, as it turned out, but never mind that for now) that people who ate more meat and dairy products had higher rates of coronary heart disease. Aha! Since meat and whole milk products are high in saturated fat, it was obvious to researchers that saturated fat is what causes CHD, and reducing saturated fat intake would reduce its incidence. Spurred on by this advice, millions of people switched from butter to margarine. Many of them went to an early grave.

What went wrong? Most brands of margarine contained hydrogenated vegetable oil, a substance made by blasting hydrogen gas through vegetable oil in the presence of a platinum catalyst. (Mmmm -- just like mother used to make? Maybe -- if your mom was a chemical engineer.) The process led to the formation of trans-fats, substances which are not found in nature and which are far more dangerous than saturated fats.

Again: oops.

We live in an era in which nutrition labels are ubiquitous, in which foods are fortified with vitamins, antioxidants, omega-3-fatty acids, and whatever other miracle nutrient the food scientists and the media are obsessing over this month. With all this obsession over health and nutrition, you might think we should be the healthiest people on the planet, but clearly we are not. We’re fatter and sicker than we were thirty years ago.

Pollan suggests it is time to take back control of our diet from the food processors and food scientists. His starting point: eat food. Not as easy as it sounds, given the glut of highly processed, edible food-like substances flooding the supermarket, so he backs up his proposal with some ancillary rules, like Never eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food, and Avoid anything with ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number, or contain high-fructose corn syrup.

Why food? Well, because for millennia, that’s all our ancestors had to eat, and it would be very strange if we had not evolved the ability to thrive on it. Our bodies didn’t evolve to handle the glut of over-processed, nutritionally barren glop which surrounds us.

Pollan suggests we return food to its proper place, treating it with the respect it deserves. He recommends that you do all your eating at a table (not at a desk or in a car) and you try not to eat alone. He also advances a truly radical proposal: restoring the family dinner as an institution. “It is at the dinner table that we socialize our children, teaching them manners and the art of conversation. At the dinner table parents can determine portion sizes, model eating and drinking behavior, and enforce social norms about gluttony and waste. Shared meals are about much more than fueling bodies: they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and the thing we call culture.”

Recently scientists have been making much of the so-called “French Paradox,” the fact that the French people clearly enjoy their food more than we do, and yet they are healthier than we are. Only an American food scientist would regard this as a paradox.

People can thrive on the traditional French diet, just as they can thrive on the traditional Mediterranean diet, or the traditional Japanese diet, or the traditional Hawaiian diet, or the traditional Native American Diet, or the traditional Australian Aborigine diet. People can thrive on an enormous variety of diets – but they’re not thriving on a diet of highly processed food-like glop.

When you think about it, it seems strange that we are the only species that feels the need for expert advice on what to eat. The fact is, scientists know how to prevent nutrient deficiency diseases, but they don’t know what kind of diet is best for health. And what exactly does the word “health” mean, anyway? Does it mean maximizing lifespan, or minimizing time lost from work due to sick days, or optimizing athletic performance, or something else altogether? Could it perhaps mean the ability to live life to the fullest, to partake maximally of life’s pleasures, of which sharing good food and wine with family and friends is such an important part?

I’m so glad I discovered Michael Pollan and his work. In his book The Care Of The Soul, the author Thomas Moore wrote, “I have a very strong resistance to making cholesterol the be-all and end-all of my relationship with food.” For the word “cholesterol” you could substitute “saturated fat” or “glycemic index” or “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons” and the statement would be equally on target. Deep in my gut, I knew Thomas Moore was right, but I could not articulate why. Now I can.

Recently we were treated to the spectacle of Sean Hannity throwing a hissy fit because President Obama ordered his burger with “spicy mustard” instead of a big glob of sticky-sweet ketchup laced with high-fructose corn syrup.

From the way Hannity was carrying on, you’d think the President was committing a subversive act. And you know something? He was. So was the First Lady when she planted a garden on the White House Lawn and incurred the wrath of the pesticide industry.

Let’s all commit a subversive act today. Go to farmer’s market and purchase some locally grown fruits and vegetables and cook a delicious meal and enjoy it in the company of friends or family. Now that’s subversive.