I just finished Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I loved it. It was informative, engaging, funny, and inspiring. Everyone should read it.

* * *

In my day job, I am leading a plain language campaign. I seek out burueacratic language and jargon and try to uncover their secret meanings. I get a charge from revising things like, “we attained significant knowledge tranfer” to “we learned a lot.” Pollan uncovered one of his own: “‘The most intellectually demanding challenge in the field of nutrition,’ as Marion Nestle writes in Food Politics, ‘is to determine dietary intake.’ The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?”

* * *

Here’s another tidbit I found fascinating: “In one experiement, [Paul Rozin] showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. ‘Guilt’ was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt: ‘celebration.’”

And: “Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

* * *

So many people have been duped by the food industry. I’ve been a label reader for a long time, and I’ve always chosen real, high-fat foods over lower-fat imitations with their frightening ingredient lists. So a good amount of what Pollan talks about was a refresher for me. What was new for me, was the history that has led us to this point, and his emphasis on how we eat and our attitudes towards food, and that is something I want to change this year. Read it. That’s all.