Pollan agrees with me...really!

Read the second sentence in Michael Pollan's recent New York Times article, Rules to Live By.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Did you see that? Pollan agrees with my assertion on the stupidity of Spenda with Fiber. He even mentions me by name.

Okay, so maybe not. But still! This was one of my very first posts almost one year ago!

Book Club

It's time for another book review, and keeping in line with my first book club post, I'm reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Between his revealing exposé of the corn industry and his brutally honest critique of what he calls 'industrial organic', Michael Pollan again strikes literary gold.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is the precursor to In Defense of Food and I'm loving it as much, if not more. Pollan has this uncanny way of, oh, I don't know, making sense! While our government continues to subsidize cheap corn and harm both us and the corn growers themselves, Pollan is a bold, refreshing voice of truth about the unfortunate state of our agricultural system. I tend to avoid political statements here, but I'll indulge for a moment. If Obama was serious about making veritable changes, he would have picked Pollan as his Agriculture Secretary and not Vilsack, once again buying into Iowa cornfields.

But I digress. Now get ready to fall in love once again:

So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an american supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question "What should I eat?" could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: "What am I eating" And where in the world did it come from?" Not very long ago an eater didn't need a journalist to answer these questions. The face that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose prevenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.

When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain--the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal--I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains (which is to say, at the very beginning), I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt.

This man continues to amaze me. He is spot on in every way.

Book Club

I.am.in.love.with.this.book. Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is spot-on accurate. I'm only about half-way through and will update as I get through the rest. How have we become so lost as to give up common sense entirely and rely on 'food science' or 'nutrition science'?

Let me be clear: Drinking diet soda is not a great way to pat yourself on the back and pave your way to health. If you aren't willing to drink the 200+ calories that are found in the average glass of soda, then I think you need to comprehend that your body won't be able to miraculously confuse diet soda with water. Your body can't process empty calories. It sends it on an eating frenzy and only serves to make you more hungry. And no, please do not think that you can add vitamins to make your beloved Diet Coke a health drink. If you need more proof of food 'nutrition' gone bad then take a look at my post regarding Splenda with fiber. Still fake. Still bad for you. (Yes, I know the diabetics disagree and can argue the virtues of Splenda. I understand that. I get it.)

I digress, but I highly-- read, HIGHLY-- recommend getting your hands on this book. Check out the preview on Amazon and I'll guarantee you'll be hooked if you're anything like me.

If you need more enticement to read Michael Pollan's latest and greatest, then peruse this excerpt:

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it--in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone--is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances"--no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy... The result is...[t]he more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

Rock on, Michael Pollan. Rock on.