Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food can really be read in two ways. First, you could read it as a diet book – a diet book to replace all other diet books, with a simple message, only eat food (I’ll get to his simple but effective definition of “food” later. Secondly, it can be read, equally powerfully, as in indictment of what he calls “nutritionism” – the professional and political approach to food that has misdirected our government policies over the past few decades.
On the later, he dates a major misdirection to 1977, when the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs prepared a document “Dietary Goals for the United States”. It was based on the (we now understand mistaken) assumption that consumption of fat and dietary cholesterol was responsible for rising rates of heart disease. The committee recommended Americans consequently cut down red meat and dairy consumption.
In the way of lobbyist-driven American politics there was an immediate, enormous furore (Senator McGovern was to lose his seat at the next election as a result), and this was changed to “choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.” Politicians learnt a strong lesson: “Speak no more of food, only nutrients… in the revised guidelines, distinctions between entities as different as beef and chicken and fish have collapsed… Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves. Now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless – and politically unconnected – substance that may or may not lurk in them called saturated fat.” (p. 14)
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