Michael Pollan in Madison: The Need To (Re)Gain Control Over Our Food Supply

From the October 2009 issue of the Sustainable Times

On Thursday, September 24, Michael Pollan spoke before 8,000 people at the Kohl Center in Madison. The author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among others, was here as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Go Big Read program. He also spoke at the Food for Thought Festival. Here is what he said.

The fact that an author attracts 8,000 people to the Kohl Center in Madison to hear him speak about nutrition, health and our food system is both disturbing and encouraging.

It is disturbing because it is an indication of how estranged we have become to food and naturally feeding ourselves. It is disturbing because it shows that even though we are at the top of the food chain physiologically, we are also at the bottom of the food chain mentally: Not to put too fine a point on it, we are too dumb to feed ourselves.

But it is also encouraging. It is encouraging because it shows that many people are aware that something is wrong with the way we feed ourselves and that they want to learn more about it. It is encouraging because it is a sign that things might change for the better.

This possibility of change for the better, however, threatens some powerful special interests in their ways of business as usual, namely big agro-business and the processed food industry.

Leading up to Michael Pollan’s talk at the Kohl Center, they and their allies in the government agricultural bureaucracy put out enough disinformation to convince a number of farmers that Michael Pollan was against them and wanted to put them out of business. In spite of the fact that even only a casual reading of his books shows that the opposite is the case (Michael Pollan himself put out the slogan “Eat food, be healthy and thank a farmer”), some farmers bought the lies and staged protests.

If anything, however, it is big agro-business and the processed food industry that are anti-farmer and they have the record to prove it by having put tens of thousands of family farms out of business or having forced them into economic serfdom. To serve their commercial interests they have also housetrained a majority of members of Congress in Washington and over the decades infiltrated every relevant federal and state administration.

The “crucial conversation” (dixit Michael Pollan) that is now taking place about our food system aims to change the food supply chain. It will not be easy. The entrenched economic powers are formidable opponents and they will do whatever it takes to preserve their interests, including hijacking the bandwagon.

To connect the dots between health and food, Michael Pollan started his talk with a trip to the supermarket. In fact, he had brought some common goodies to the Kohl Center, Froot Loops among them:

“This [the Froot Loops] is essentially a sugary cereal, with 44 percent sugar by weight. It is mostly sugar and it is being sold as a health food. There is information about the fiber and there is something really curious here: The ‘Smart Choices’ check mark. This is a new program that was started by 12 giant food conglomerates and the American Nutrition Association with the goal of trying to help us with our confusion when we walk down the aisle in the supermarket and are being assaulted by health claims on unhealthy foods. And so they got together and tried to come with some standards that would help us navigate the treacherous landscape of the modern American supermarket. I don’t know how exactly they worked out these standards. I can guess. But if Froot Loops qualify, it’s just astounding. Someone asked the head nutritionist, an active nutritionist, a man who should treasure his self-respect, how could they possibly justify calling Froot Loops in effect a healthy food? And his answer was ‘Well they are better for you than donuts’.
I don’t disagree, but that suggests to me a better labeling scheme, a more honest labeling scheme. And that would simply say ‘Better than donuts’. Let’s be honest about it.”

The ‘Smart Choices’ checkmark is part of the rising number of functional foods, a market that in 2007 was worth already $78 billion worldwide, and that is expected to grow to $128 billion by 2013, according to the consultancy Pricewaterhouse-Coopers. Functional foods include food items such as eggs enriched with omega-3 fatty acids, bacteria-enriched yogurts and Splends with fiber. It is what the British weekly newsmagazine The Economist calls the food industry’s “unnatural response” to the popularity of natural food.

“At the other end of the caloric spectrum is the KFC Double Down sandwich. You may not have heard of it yet. It has just been introduced in a few markets, but it is coming your way. KFC has reinvented the concept of a sandwich. Feeling that there is no way you’ll get enough calories in two slices of bread, they have replaced the bread with two slabs of fried chicken that are kept apart by several slices of bacon, two kinds of cheese and a big dollop of secret sauce. So it is really challenging out there.
We are assaulted by that kind of marketing and I think that it is part of our problem with health and we are forced to make ourselves experts on this subject on nutrition. It is amazing to think how much biochemistry we are all carrying around in our heads right now to help us navigate.
Everybody knows what saturated fat is, what antioxidants are, or we think we do, we don’t really know what they are. Who knew that we needed so much science to make a simple purchase?
We obsess about nutrition and yet have really lousy nutritional health.”

The American Paradox

“I call that the American paradox: A people that worries constantly about nutritional health and yet has very high levels of obesity, type-two diabetes, heart disease. It’s a little like the French paradox, except that’s the one you want to have. The French are a people that eats all sorts of supposedly lethal foods, lots of saturated fats, foie gras, triple crème cheeses, washed down with red wine and they are healthier than we are.
But we are stuck with the American paradox and I want to try and figure out how we got here, how we got to this deep confusion about food. Because I think it has implications for our health and it has implications for our agriculture.
In ‘Defense of Food’ I spent some time trying to figure out where this confusion comes from and I came to the conclusion that it is the American ideology of food that really is at the root of our problem.
Ideology is a fancy word for really just the unexamined assumptions that control our thinking about something without us even being aware of it.
The ideology we bring to food I call nutritionism. It sounds like a science about nutrition, but it’s not a science, it’s an –ism, it’s an ideology.”

According to Michael Pollan, nutritionism has four premises:

“The first premise of nutritionism: The key to understanding any food is the nutrients it contains.”

Foods are just delivery systems for nutrients and essentially just the sum of their nutrient parts.

“That doesn’t seem to be very controversial, but as soon as you accept that, you find yourself on a train to three other premises.
Nutrients are invisible; they are not available to our senses. So the next premise is that we need experts to tell us how to eat. We can’t do it ourselves because we don’t understand nutrients. It’s a little like religion. We have become reliant on a priesthood to tell us how to eat. It is quite remarkable when you consider how many other peoples, how many other species manage to feed themselves without experts.
Third premise: Like almost any other ideology, nutritionism divides the world into good and evil. At any given point in our dietary history there is a satanic nutrient we are trying to drive from our food supply. “

Examples: transfats, cholesterol, saturated fats, sugar, high fructose corn syrup.

“On the other side, every one of these evil nutrients has its Doppelgänger, its companion nutrient, the blessed nutrient, that if we could just get enough of these we would be healthy and quite possibly live forever.”

Examples: antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, fiber.

“The secret of health then is to navigate between the good and the bad nutrients, and that is how many of us are eating today.
The fourth premise is that the whole point of eating is health, and that every time we’re eating we are doing one of two things: we are either ruining our health or redeeming our health. That is the spectrum. There are meals for ruining and there are meals for redeeming. Now, there are many cultures that regard this as bizarre and there have been many other perfectly legitimate reasons to eat throughout history and around the world: pleasure, community, to establish identity.
Now the question is, how did we get this ideology, where did it come from? I thought it was a recent creation, but in fact it goes back further in American history. Back in the 1850s and ‘60s we find a lot of talk about scientific eating, that eating according to your tradition or culture or pleasure was not good enough. You should eat according to the best knowledge of nutrition science. I think it has its roots in our puritan background, actually. As people descending from Puritans we have trouble doing all the things that animals also do. Food, sex, all these things that animals do, we have trouble taking pleasure in. I think that that is in the DNA of our difficulty in enjoying food.
It is interesting how the identity of good and evil nutrients changes over time
Over a hundred years ago protein was the evil nutrient and carbohydrates, even refined carbohydrates, were the blessed nutrients. That’s why we have breakfast cereal, to Kellogg’s desire to get animal proteins out of our diet. The identity of nutrients is changing now. The next evil nutrient I predict will be omega-6 fatty acid.”

He dates the beginning of the modern history of nutrionism to the 1970s and the low-fat campaign.

“In 1977 George McGovern chaired a Senate select committee on nutrition and he held hearings about the epidemic of heart disease. The rate of heart disease in the United States had skyrocketed after World War II. He was trying to figure out why and held hearings. The scientific consensus at the time was that animal fats, saturated fats, were responsible. So he issued a set of dietary goals for the United States. It was the first time the government endeavored to change the eating habits of the entire population.”

One piece of advice was “eat less red meat”.

“Whether it was a good idea or not, that was the advice based on the science. Well, the food industry was up in arms that the Senate would dare tell the people to eat less American beef or any food. That was just not permissible, and the industry came out to McGovern, came on him with all their lobbying power, and they actually forced him to withdraw the dietary goals of the United States, and rewrite them in consultation with the industry. And so that sentence ‘eat less red meat’ – simple, clear language – was rewritten as follows: ‘Choose meats that will reduce your saturated fat intake’.
This is 1977 and nobody really knows what saturated fat is. So this sentence has the considerable virtue of being really obscure and mushy to most people.
So that’s the first thing about dietary advice: It should not be clear. And it should not be written in simple language.
The second thing is that the message should be affirmative, positive: eat more chicken – an eat-more message. Since that day, the government has never been permitted to tell us to eat less of anything, not even sugar.
Third point: When you go from ‘eat less red meat’ to ‘saturated fat intake’ you’re no longer talking about food, you’re talking about nutrients.
In the wake of that the food industry reengineered the American food supply. We moved into low-fat and no-fat products of all kinds. The industry discovered that talking about nutrients was a really good way to sell more food. So what happened? We got really fat on our low-fat campaign. It’s one of the great historical ironies. Since 1980 the average American, correcting for age, is about 17 pounds heavier than they were when we started this low-fat campaign.
How could this possibly be? Well, two theories suggest themselves. One is that we didn’t really cut down and that by demonizing the one nutrient, saturated fat, we gave a free pass to all the other nutrients, specifically the carbohydrates. And that is what happened. We began binging on carbohydrates because they had no fat. Soda has no fat, so it must be okay.”

It was the era of SnackWells, ingeniously engineered no-fat junk food, in which the lack of flavor through fat was compensated by prodigious amounts of sugar and salt.

“Now, people felt that if eating a couple of these SnackWells was so good for you because they had no fat, a whole box must be even better. We gorged on carbohydrates and since then we have eaten about 300 calories more per person per day.
It is the result of the mistaken belief that if we eat the right nutrients we can eat a lot more. Nutritionism thus becomes a way to sell us more food and we need to be aware of that.
The other potential explanation of how this could happen is that maybe the science wasn’t so good. Maybe saturated fats weren’t quite as evil as what we replaced them with.”

Indeed, replacing butter with margarine, i.e. saturated fat with polyunsaturated vegetable oils that were hydrogenated, turned out not to be good idea.
Transfats that resulted when you hydrogenated vegetable oils turned out to be truly lethal, a lot more dangerous than saturated fats. And the government has figures for how many hundreds of thousands of heart attacks are the result of this wholesale introduction of transfats into our food supply. It is a public health disaster for which, I think, we are owed an apology.
Now they are beginning to see that fats are not as bad as they thought. Now they are talking about good fats and bad fats. There were no good fats and bad fats back then. It turns out that most of the bad fats are ones that we invented and that the fats in real food are not so bad.
How can they be so wrong? Let me be sympathetic to the nutritionists: it is really hard to do the science. It’s not like studying the effects of a drug; you can’t do a double-blind study. There is no placebo for broccoli or bacon.”

Nutritional science studies, including the ones done over several decades, are basically surveys that rely on people’s honesty and memory in filling out ‘food frequency questionnaires’. The data they collect is inevitably very sketchy.

“It is very hard to find out what people are eating because you would have to follow them around with a camera and be invisible, because they wouldn’t eat the same things if they knew you were there watching.”

Nutritionists acknowledge that the calorie count in those surveys is off by 20 to 30 percent - a big error margin. The scary thing is that that’s what we base our nutritional guidelines and advice on.

“There is so much we still need to understand. We don’t know what’s going on deep in the soul of the carrot. We know it’s healthy. We know that people who eat lots of vegetables have less cancer. For a long time we thought it was beta-carotene, and we thought that if we could take that out we would have a magic bullet that would help us against cancer. So we took beta-carotene out, made it into pills, put them through double-blind tests (you can do that with pills) and guess what? They didn’t do anything! Except if you were a Finnish drinker, then they made you sick. There is something about carrots that is more than the sum of its carotenes. We don’t really understand; it’s a wilderness in that carrot.
On the other side we have the human digestive tract which we once thought was a pretty simple mechanism. But it turns out to be very complex, with all sorts of signaling mechanisms. There are as many neurons in our digestive tract as there are in our spinal cord. What are they thinking? We don’t know.
The point is that there are still fundamental mysteries in the food chain. Nutritionism may figure it out, but, to be charitable, today the nutrition science that we listen to and read about in the newspapers is a young science. It’s kind of where surgery was in 1650. Really promising and interesting to watch, but are you ready to get on the table? I don’t think I am ready to organize my life based on their conclusions.
The question then is: Why does this nutrition-based understanding of food persist? As suggested earlier, the first reason is that it’s a great way to sell food, a great marketing trap. It also gives manufacturers of processed foods, that is the most profitable foods, an edge over real food, an edge over cheese, an edge over avocados. Because those real foods have much more trouble changing their nutritional stripes than the Froot Loops. They can change their formulation whenever they want, wherever the trend is. They can go low-carb or they can go high-carb. Thinking about food this way is a huge boost to the processors. That’s where you make money in food, in adding value, in processing. Ninety percent of the money goes to the marketers and the processors.
It is good for the business model and it fits our agricultural model to a t, because much of American agriculture is about growing lots of cheap commodities, lots of big packs of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, breaking them down and putting them back together into all of these products. That is what these products are: rearrangements of soy and corn. Very, very clever, but very little of the money reaches soy and corn farmers.
When you have an agriculture based on huge monocultures and commodity crops it really works for this idea of processing food to reflect the latest nutrient.”

So, what do we know about food?

“I would suggest there are two all-important facts we do know about food: The first is, and this is the problem nutritionists arose to solve, the elephant in the room: Western diet, the way we eat in America and increasingly throughout the west, highly processed foods, lots of calories, very little fresh produce, very little whole grain, lots of meat, that diet, with its refined oils and refined carbohydrates, that diet we have known for more than a hundred years, makes people sick. It leads to cardiovascular disease, obesity, type-2 diabetes. This has been known since the turn of the last century. Nobody disputes this. In fact, all the storms of controversy around nutrition, about fat, carbohydrates, fiber, are all efforts to explain that link, to find the problem, the one bad nutrient in the western diet, so we can fix it and go on our merry way.
The other fact, also discovered around the same time, is that people eating a tremendous range of different traditional, pre-western diets stay remarkably healthy. There is no one ideal guide. We are omnivores. We can do well on a great many different foods. Indeed we can do well on what nature has to offer on all continents.”

Food at the Root of the Healthcare problem

It makes you think. What a remarkable achievement of our civilization to have come up with the one diet that makes people sick!
So, what do we do with these two facts? We are at a fork in the road in the way we eat here in America. We can go one of two ways: We can either adapt ourselves to the western diet and what it does to our bodies or we can change the way we eat.
We are going down the path of adaptation and eventually we’ll get used to it. It will take a whole lot of generations and a whole lot of pain and suffering before that happens.”
But we are already getting used to it in more ways than one.
We are getting used to it in our medical system. We are medicalizing these diseases. We have a diabetes culture now. We are moving to a time when there will be dialysis centers on every corner, next to the payday check-cashing store. And there is a huge amount of money to be made doing that. When you look at the $2.3 trillion we are spending on healthcare, three quarters of that is going to treat what the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] calls preventable chronic diseases. Not all are related to diet. Smoking is there, alcoholism is in there, but most of them are related to the way we eat. That is what this healthcare crisis is about. It is a euphemism for the catastrophe that is the American diet. That is one path, a path of pain and bankruptcy.
The other path is more practical, economical and beautiful. It is the path of getting off the western diet. We have a lot of research that shows that people who get off the western diet, even only briefly, can roll back many of the effects of the western diet.
We can get off this diet; even in the modern American supermarket, there is plenty of real food. We just need to be able to distinguish real food from the edible food-like substances that increasingly are taking over the supermarkets.
If I am not going to accept the nutritionists as my guides, whom am I going to accept? Even though we give prime place to science, there are other tools for navigating our relationship with nature, with our bodies. Culture has been dealing with these questions for a very long time.”

If It Doesn’t Look Like Food …

“Culture can help us. It comes down to the simple words that are on the cover of the book [In Defense of Food]: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. It’s really simple. The difficult part is to distinguish real food from the edible food-like substances. And that is where some rules come in:
Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients.
But the industry adapts; it adapts by creating products with five ingredients and markets them as such. It is very clever that way.
The campaign against high-fructose corn syrup for instance has led a number of companies to market the hell out of the fact that they have replaced it with cane sugar. That now makes cane sugar look like a health food, when it really isn’t.
Therefore another rule is not to buy any food that is advertised on television. Indeed, more than 94 percent of all food ad budgets are for highly processed foods.
The challenge is to stay ahead of an industry that turns any criticism into a health claim.
It’s not just what we eat, but also how we eat: Do we eat alone or together? Do we eat in the car?
Portion size: We eat until we are full; many other peoples don’t: they stop eating when they are not hungry anymore – which is not the same thing.
If we changed our diets from processed foods to real food, it would revolutionize our agriculture. We would move away from monoculture. We would diversify our diet and as a result diversify our farms.
Many problems of American agriculture trace to monoculture. You can’t expect farmers to simply give up monocultures if that’s the system they operate in, if that’s what the government subsidizes them to do. That is very powerful. But if consumers began to demand more real food, nothing would do more to help farmers diversify their crops and help them recover more of the American consumers’ food dollars.
In 2007 we spent as a country $881 billion on food. Of that, $59 billion went to the farmers, $717 billion went to the processors and the marketers, and $69 billion went to the packagers, the people who make the packages with the health claims on them - $10 billion more than the farmers got.
So you see how radical it would be if we could just start eating food. Our health and the health of our farms are intimately linked, and what stands between those things is the industry that buys cheap agricultural commodities and turns them into high-value added processed foods. We need to reconnect the consumer to the farmer. We need to eat real food, traditional foods, grown with care and minimally processed.
The health of our soils and the health of our farms are intimately linked to our health. Health is not a matter of nutrients; health is a matter of the entire food chain.
We cannot be healthy eating from an unhealthy soil; the diet of the animals that we eat affects our health – it is all connected.
Our personal health is linked to the health of the whole food chain of which we are a part. The concept of health extends to our families and communities, too. We think about our health in the narrowest terms, about just our bodies, what our doctors tell us, what pills we are taking. How we eat, where we shop matters as much as what we eat.”

When we shorten the food chain we take back control of our food and keep more money in our communities.”