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SugarMyChurro -> RE: In Defense of Food (4/3/2008 7:40:43 AM)
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I was rereading some of the comments and found that some people seemed to be missing the bigger picture.
The point of Michael Pollan's observations about food is simply that over-processed foods appear to be killing us for a whole variety of reasons. The solution is to take a greater role in preparing your own food from more basic constituent elements or whole foods. And this isn't about vegetarian versus meat eater at all - and although I do think that too much reliance on meat is a bad thing, the bigger issue is to eat a greater variety of whole foods more generally. A whole food is simply an apple instead of what could be highly processed apple sauce (and that's just one example).
The grandmother quote led to some confusion, so here it is again (possibly slightly restated): "Avoid anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize." I think Pollan is simply thinking of someone that was living around 70-80 years ago and would have had to make meals from basic elements. I'm not a food historian but I suspect that meals were built up around fresh vegetables, meats, dairy, breads, grains, legumes, some canned items, and spices. The canned items would have been basic vegetables and fruits with very few added ingredients beyond salt or sugar as a brine and preservative ingredient. When my grandmother once made me chicken and noodle soup I actually had to watch her make noodles from scratch (flour, egg, water, etc) and butcher a live chicken (wringing its neck, plucking, gutting and segmenting it). This took her maybe an hour. Now we don't have to go to those extremes precisely, but we can certainly get back to making meals from the more basic food elements that are not heavily processed. It's not hard. It's fun. And I think making food a focus in a home is a great way to encourage together time and build a strong sense of family. Food is the culture of a home as much as the music people listen to or the books they read or whatever else a family may do.
If the great grandmother statement has a flaw it might be to overly focus on one's own actual grandmother. This is a conceptual grandmother and not your actual grandmother that was meant - especially if your actual grandmother was all about Campbell's Soups, Kool-Aid, and Jell-O.
The point is to avoid processed foods in favor of whole foods. That's a hard message to argue against in my view.
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