Great comments on “Food Rules.” I actually never even looked at a copy because it sounded like it was just Cliff Notes for In Defense of Food. So, much like my comments on Mark Bitterman’s book “Salt,” here I am commenting on a that book I haven’t read

I think Michael Pollan has been a victim of his own trajectory and the modern media machine. He wrote The Botany of Desire and Second Nature. His thinking on these books sent him down the road that produced The Omnivores Dilemma. I found The Omnivore’s Dilemma to be beautifully written, well balanced, and overall factually correct. More importantly, it raised awareness of a set of issues around food safely, health, and so on, that other important thinkers had failed to popularize. He got many people thinking about their food choices and how those choices impact their bodies, communities, and planet – people who had never considered those questions before. I especially appreciated the fact that he did NOT espouse vegetarianism, didn’t promote the ridiculous “raw food” movement, etc.

But this is America and while he was convincing us to stop drinking Kool-Aid (r), he was drinking the Kool-Aid of the American media machine. Can’t you just hear his publicist saying, “Michael, this is hot, hot, hot. You’ve got to get another book out right away!” . [I don’t know Michael – this is pure speculation on my part.] So he wrote In Defense of Food. I enjoyed this book, but it was inconsistent and there were contradictions. It clearly wasn’t as well researched, well thought out, or well-crafted as Dilemma. But I read it with what I will call “Omnivore’s Dilemma” eyes. I read between the lines, finding his underlying message to be quite moderate – eat food, enjoy your food, be aware of what you are eating, and yes, eat less processed food.

Of course, paying attention to what you are eating is more trouble than most Americans are willing to go to, and requires more education about ingredients than most Americans have. Yes, I know that agar-agar, xanthan gum, etc., etc., are fine. But Pollan’s book would have been a crashing failure if he had written page after page of discussion of each of the ingredients in the modern food scientist’s arsenal. So he gave his readers some rules of thumb, like “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” It’s not a bad rule of thumb, except that my grandmother wouldn’t recognize a durian as food. She also wouldn’t consider crickets to be food, though they are critical sources of protein for a lot of people in the world, and American’s would probably be healthier if we started eating them [I’ve never managed to eat more than a few termites myself.] If you treat it as a “rule of thumb” it works well. If you treat it as a “RULE,” it has some serious problems.

Unfortunately, Pollan now had a following of groupies who took his rules as dogma, and again the media machine, hungry for sound-bites, grabbed the rules and not the surrounding, moderating logic. Then along came the publishers, agents, and publicists – so Pollan put out The Omnivore’s Dilemma for Kids, followed by Food Rules, in which he apparently published not only his own rules, but rules submitted to him by others. I can’t blame him. I would probably have done the same thing. “Wow,” I would have thought, “people love this. I love this. More, more, more.” How could one not be intoxicated? No doubt he was criss-crossing the globe on publicity tours, so, to keep the momentum going he collected a bunch of “rules” (American’s, living in the “land of the free,” love rules,) and put them in this book. Now he’s collecting more rules for an expanded edition. OK. Hopefully he will add some moderating rules. We shall see…

Someone once said (and boy do I wish I could find the actual quote,) that every great idea starts out as a notion, becomes a movement, and is ultimately co-opted and destroyed by a massive hierarchical power structure that is more interested in its own preservation than the original idea (e.g. every major religion, every country on earth, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Levi’s, etc.) So, I still love Michael Pollan and his books, despite their faults, and despite the fact that he is a human being. He raised awareness of food issues in America, which was a terribly important thing to do. I doubt I could have done better.

Andrew