UW-Madison’s Go Big Read program and Humanities Without Boundaries brought Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food, to the Kohl Center Thursday.
Pollan lectured to 7,000 students, faculty and members of the Madison community- an awesome turnout for an event about a book.
Michael Pollan is a writer, teacher and lecturer who spreads the word about the dangers of the industrial food system and offers ideas and solutions to our food problem.
He talked on a range of issues, from eating Froot Loops to cooking to farming, with health at the center of every topic.
According to Pollan, farmers are key to 3 gigantic issues: the health care crisis, the climate change crisis and the energy crisis. If we can revolutionize the way we eat, we will make great progress on all three issues.
So what’s the problem with the way we eat?
Pollan says it is the “American paradox,” where we constantly obsess about nutrition in our food, yet we have poor nutritional health.
And why does he think we have poor nutritional health?
Because the American diet makes people sick. In fact, the way we eat is the direct cause to some of the biggest health problems in America: obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. He states that 3/4 of the money Americans spend on health care is linked to the way we eat. And so, he says, we need to connect the dots between problems of health and the diet of Americans and get off the western diet.
He then offered 3 remedies to our diet problem: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
And by food, he means “real” food– not Froot Loops (which he calls an “edible food-like substance.”) Real food—meaning natural, unprocessed food.
But in today’s food industry, this is not an easy task. So Pollan offers a suggestion to navigate through the “treacherous landscape of the modern American supermarket”: Don’t buy food you see advertised on television. An unlikely mission, perhaps, but definitely ambitious.
Pollan also says that it’s not just what we eat, it’s how we eat. These days most Americans grab a pop-tart and run out the door, eat in the car on the way to work or while sitting on the couch watching television. He says we should enjoy our food together as family, as friends, as enemies with conversation, laughter, and celebration.
In conclusion he argued that health is not a matter of good nutrients and bad. Health is a matter of the whole food chain from the soil, the plants, the animals, the farmer and the eater. But because we think about health in very narrow terms, we tend to only think about what we put into our own bodies. Pollan says we need to broaden our perspectives and to think about the health of our families and communities.
It was a great lecture from a fantastic writer and thinker. Check out his books if you are interested!
Here’s a short blurb about the book:
“In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Soltuion”
Real food-the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize as food- is being undermined by science on one side and the food industry on the other, both of whom want us to focus on nutrients, good and bad, rather than actual plants, animals and fungi. The rise of "nutritionism" has vastly complicated the lives of American eaters without doing anything for our health, except possibly to make it worse. Nutritionism arose to deal with a genuine problem- the modern Americna diet is responsible for an epidemic of chronic diseases, from obesity and type II diabetes to heart disease and many cancers-but it has obscured the real roots of that problem and stood in the way of a solution. That solution involves putting the focus back on food and food chains. It turns out that our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the soil, plants, and animals tha tmake up the food chains in which we take part. In his talk, Pollan explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters, and he looks at the growing national movement ot renovate the food system.
