I fell in love with...., post by Sarah

I fell in love with Michael Pollan as soon as I came to know about him.  

Why am I able to say that, and why was Simone Weil able to say the same about St Francis?  For me, it was because Michael Pollan spoke truth, and I recognized it immediately as the truth.  That truth relieved suffering.  What joy it brings to follow the one who speaks truth that can relieve our suffering!  I realized in my reflection that I was not simply a reader of Pollan, but that I became his disciple as I applied his writings to my life.

I still remember the first time I heard Michael Pollan.  It must have been around the time his bestseller In Defense of Food was released in 2009.  I had attended the Cardinals game with my sister and was hoping I could make the hour drive home without getting too sleepy.  I am not much of a nighttime NPR listener, but I tuned in that evening and began listening to the re-broadcast of St Louis on the Air (not one of my favorite shows, but I serendipitously gave it a chance).  Don Marsh was interviewing Michael Pollan, and I was hooked immediately.

I have not had a tortured relationship with food, but I’ve certainly experienced bumps in road.  I remember putting myself on severely calorie restricted diets as a teen to try to be healthier – though I clearly had no idea what that meant!  With shame I can remember forcing myself to throw up so I would not gain weight.  It makes me sad to see old photos with a puffy jawline, evidence of what I was doing to my past self.  Though I had left those habits behind years ago, I had not yet internalized a holistic view of food.

Michael Pollan has a simple mantra for us regarding food, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”.  His book, In Defense of Food, explores the three components of that mantra.  He is a food journalist by trade, and his writings examine the problems with the American food system from all angles – our health, the health of the planet, the treatment of food workers, food policy, etc…  I have foggy recollections of what I learned in his books versus what I’ve gathered from other sources, but he effectively boiled down a complicated topic into a mantra that is easily remembered and applied to food choices.

The most important part of his mantra is the first, “eat food”.  Pollan talks about our great confusion with food because of (imagine this) Madison Avenue.  He describes how the generation prior to World War II wouldn’t even recognize much of what is currently sold in the grocery store.  He calls many of the components in the modern diet “food-like substances” and encourages readers to go back to basic food sources instead of worrying about nutrients.  He throws out all the complications of label reading, because he encourages us to eat food that has no labels!

Food and diets are complicated, and they are a big industry.  It is incredible that we have a food system that simultaneously has large numbers of people with health problems due to unhealthy eating, soil and water problems because of over-farming of single crops (mono-culture), foreign policy that has required us to prop up rogue governments so we can get cheap sugar and other commodities, meat-processing plants full of poorly treated migrant workers to keep meat cheap along with a “border crisis”, fad diets that rotate at least every decade and cost billions, and the list of bizarre contradictions could continue endlessly.  In an earlier book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan explored the origins of four meals in great detail, and he exposed many of the serious problems created by the food industry.  He also gave painful examples of the food industry trumping science when the FDA sought to release important health information that would harm profits.  In that book, Pollan also introduced me to the work of Wendell Berry, and the movement to integrate our food system with a love for the land.

Our personal decisions regarding what we eat include so many factors – individual likes and dislikes, time available to commit to food preparation, access to food, and affordability.  It can be overwhelming to make these choices on a weekly basis and to have the knowledge to make good choices.  Pollan convinced me to change my lifestyle to invest more of my time in food cultivation and preparation by speaking a compelling truth about food, and brought to me a sense of peace in that process.