The Michael Pollan Prescription: How to Eat Better and Avoid the Industrial Diet

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Michael Pollan is the author of four excellent books, including his most recent, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Penguin Press, 2008). Alia Malley

He may make his living from a computer keyboard and a classroom lectern, but Michael Pollan — author of the best-selling books The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and, most recently In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto — will tell you he’s happiest where the worlds of humanity and nature collide. In particular, he’s happiest at the intersection of dirt, the food that springs from it, and the humans who eat that food.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan explored how what we eat — whether produce, meat, seafood, sweetener or grain — gets to our plates. Perhaps more importantly, he examined what the consequences are to our bodies, our planet and our ethics when we consume the type of food that makes up most of what’s offered on supermarket shelves.

In In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which he sub-subtitled “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants,” Pollan goes a step further and deconstructs what used to be so simple just one or two generations ago … eating.

Furthermore, he points out, the concept of better living through chemistry has backfired on us at the dinner table. The butter that our grandmother served? Turns out it’s better for us than the partially hydrogenated oils used in margarine, once touted as a wondrous — and healthier — substitute.

The same argument can be made, Pollan says, for limited amounts of sugar versus corn syrup for sweetening, as well as old-fashioned mashed potatoes versus what comes out of a box.

In fact, Pollan advises, there are three general rules that most folks concerned about their eating habits can use whenever they’re in a grocery store:

1. If it says it’s vitamin-enhanced, chances are it’s so incredibly processed that all semblance of the original nutrients were removed.

2. If your grandmother wouldn’t know what it is (Go-Gurt, anyone?) it’s not really food.

3. If it has more than five ingredients on the side panel, skip it.

Mother Earth News caught up with Pollan to talk about his newest book as he was coming off a standing-room-only book tour, relishing the return of warm weather and intent on “landscaping” his front yard with new lettuce seedlings.

The (Apparently) Difficult Act of Eating

Food is critical to life and ought to be one of the simpler acts we’re faced with every day. When did the act of eating become so complex?

I think one of the key moments was back in the '70s when the government decided that we were eating badly and they wanted to change the way we eat. The episode that I describe in the book — when McGovern issues his dietary goals for the United States — was a really big deal because the government had never endeavored to change the way the whole country eats before. They first wanted to tell people to eat less red meat but when that message ignited a firestorm, they retreated to the phrase “choose meats that will reduce your saturated fat intake.” It really put us on the path of obsessing about nutrients, which is to say the path of confusion and complexity and anxiety.