Food really does grow on trees, you know

Feb 1 2008 by Valerie Hill, Liverpool Daily Post

EATING food is no longer the norm in the Western World, according to a new book.

So much so that author Michael Pollan feels obliged to call his book In Defence of Food, his next published course after The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

The upshot is that he believes the act of eating food has to be explained and justified to a modern audience.

Much of what is consumed in modern America (and which we will therefore follow in a few years? hence, natch) is not technically food as he defines it.

Once upon a time, what we ate was food. There was no choice. Now, thanks to big industrial corporations all sorts of other food-like products fill the groaning supermarket shelves. (Shortly before filling up stomachs and causing further groaning.)

It is an irony that supermarket sales-lore dictates all fresh fruit and vegetables are displayed just inside the entrance.

These plants, which should form the bulk of our diet, mutely call out to be consumed for our greater benefit.

Yet, millions march past these natural and health-giving treasures to get to the man-made food-products brightly shining on the further aisles.

These are the rather creepily defined "edible food-like substances" that emerged (almost certainly from a test-tube) in the 1970s and 1980s.

Such products that Pollan cites include "Go-Gurt Portable Yoghurt tubes, non-dairy creamers, cheese-like foodstuffs, cake-like cylinders complete with cream-like fillings"

The latter is exemplified by the Twinkie, an American "hostess cake", whatever that is. No doubt it’s indispensable in the salons of Manhattan society matriarchs. Not.

The Twinkie’s chemical composition ensures a shelf-life so long that it makes the half-life of nuclear waste look like it’s not trying.

More shocking still than successfully peddling cleverly packaged and highly-priced rubbish to the public is their often wildly exaggerated health benefits.

There’s all the all-too familiar claims of low fat, low salt and no cholesterol.

But it is a scandal, writes Pollan, that rather than being dismissed by the medical and nutritional experts these food products are instead endorsed. Pollan clearly can’t stand the diminishing of food to what he describes as "mere nutrients".

I’m afraid this is another big business-cum-cowering government scam, as, more than 30 years ago, the trend of talking about nutrients was devised.

This meant that officials and politicians didn’t have to offend food-processing corporations by talking about individually recognisable kinds of food.

By advising the population on what nutrients to eat, the powerful food lobbyists would not be offended (and therefore not pull the plug on their political funding).

You only have to look at the ballooning size of many Americans and Britons to realise that nobody in charge bothered pushing the message that they should ease up on the burgers and chips.

Instead, as the citizenry bloated up, they were told to eat less fat. This was entirely spurious and meaningless advice. Switching to low-fat junk food doesn’t alter the fact you’re eating junk food.

Besides, this flies in the face of evidence that some fats, such as those in oily fish, should be consumed in bigger quantities.

"Nutritionism" opened the gates of hell for increasingly novel and profitable quasi-foods pandering to a public now looking for "nutrients", says Pollan.

As a great aficionado of TV cookery shows, I realise that most of them are devised so you can snack on a Pot Noodle while being shown the real thing.

So it’s good to be encouraged by Pollan, who eulogises the pleasures of cooking, and to be reminded of some basic truths.

"When you cook at home, you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated dyglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup," he says. "The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals has a great many worries, but ‘health’ is simply not one of them because it is a given."

The final advice given by Pollan encapsulates it all: "Don’t eat anything your great- grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food."

Providing she wasn’t an "American hostess", of course.

* IN DEFENCE of Food, by Michael Pollan, Allen Lane, £16.99