This weekend I finally got around to reading a book serialisation that I’d been tearing out of The Guardian last week. But on reading the first seven words of the introduction I began to wish that I’d saved my energy (all that tearing can be so tiring).
The offending words, out of which the author had managed to fashion three whole sentences, were: ‘Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ This apparently is his guiding philosophy.
But isn’t that just totally obvious? How did he manage to make a book out of that? Surely that’s what everyone does? Well, maybe he’s got a point about not eating ‘too much’, but ‘eat food’?
Anyway, I persevered and am now very happy to eat my words. What Michael Pollan has managed to do for me in those few short extracts from his book, In Defence of Food, is to sum up everything that’s wrong with the so-called ‘food’ that we eat in the 21st century, and then suggest a few simple ways to put things right.
Now you may think that you’ve heard it all before, and so did I. But the power of this work is that he really does nail down his arguments in to conclusions of inescapable truth. He argues that much of what we eat nowadays is so heavily processed that it’s difficult to actually describe as ‘food’ – certainly not what our grandparents would have recognised as something to eat. So he wants us to eat more real, simple, and ideally homegrown, food.
But what really struck me were his comments on the demise of food, and the rituals of preparing and eating food, as a significant part of our daily lives – rituals which for generations have bound together human beings. His solution to this problem is characteristically short: ‘eat at a table’. And very fine advice it is, too.