Pollan's Back, and I Disagree As Usual

For some reason I climb the wall reading Michael Pollan. In his most recent piece,,
entitled "Unhappy Meals", he attacks "nutritionism" and preaches: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I don't have a problem with the bottom line content, but I do with the argument. It seems to me to combine unhealthy amounts of vaguely left-wing paranoia over exploitation of consumers and romantic nonsense that carries over from the 1960's granola days. (I say this as someone who claims to be a populist and whose mother was fervently interested in organic food in 1950, probably before Mr. Pollan was born.)

Quotes from the article in italics, my comments follow:

"Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket." Nice snide innuendo there, making a distinction between "food" (good, wholesome) and "edible foodlike substances" foisted on us poor consumers by the evil nutritionists and the food industry, abetted by journalists.

"you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat." Again, the distinction. Of course, Mr. Pollan is a fellow-traveler of the organic interests (I can use innuendo and smears too, :-) ) which is notable for its health claims.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. For some reason, consumers and their needs play no role in the history of the last 30 years or so. I'd suggest that reading Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid"
would be a fine corrective. For one thing, he uses a Life picture from 1951 as front and endpapers. It shows a family of four and all the food they would eat in a year. What's striking is that it's "food", not "meals" (which is really what Pollan is dealing with). The mother spent hours in the kitchen converting the food into meals. Bryson cites a figure of 5+ hours a day, which seems a bit excessive. (On the other hand, my wife spends significant time cooking our evening meal.

The big changes in American cuisine over the last 55 years have been the change from eating at home to eating out (that's now almost half of every food dollar), from cooking raw food to eating prepared meals and processed foods (i.e., microwavable foods) and in the variety of the cuisine.
The first two are correlated with women's lib and the higher proportion of women in the workplace. All three are correlated with our greater wealth. And, despite the obesity and diabetics increases, they are also correlated with our better health and longer life. None of them were foisted on us by nutritionists, the food industry, or even journalists.

I could go on--Pollan romanticizes the past: one of my great great grandmothers would have recognized potatoes, oatmeal, and milk as foods, and not much else while another would have focused on cabbage and turnips; we eat 4 times the amount of green leaves now as we did in 1950 (iceberg lettuce, anyone?). But, I'll save my energy for the next Pollan text in the Times. Leftist thinkers can and should do better.