In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is Michael Pollan’s follow-up to his immensely popular and influential book,The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which documented his own personal journey as he discovered the ins and outs of various food systems in the United States, including corporate agriculture, confined animal feeding operations, small pasture-based livestock farms, foraging and hunting.

I have to be up front and say that I, like nearly everyone else in the known universe, loved The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Not only did I think that the points Pollan makes throughout the book are valid and useful, and I am thrilled to see it as widely read as it has been and continues to be, but I was also vastly entertained by his personal ruminations on his research, as well as the way in which he related his experiences in various settings. As a former farm girl and all-around country mouse, I was particularly amused by his thoughts and feelings as he did some of the nastier work involved in food-raising and gathering such as butchering chickens and field dressing a wild hog. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the city feller’s antics, but even as I snickered, I was cheering him on in his discoveries as he pushed his personal limits and stretched the boundaries of his life farther and farther in the search for a more authentic and honest relationship with food.

That said, I have to very sadly admit that I didn’t think much of In Defense of Food.

I appreciate that it is meant to be a more practical book that deals with the question raised by many readers after they finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “What, then, do we eat?” Pollan answers this question in seven simple words. “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” right at the beginning of the book, and then goes on to expand upon that statement for the next two hundred pages or so.

And that is fine and good. I agree with Pollan on that point. We should eat food, which he defines as whole foods which would be recognizable to our grandmothers, and we should eat less than we do, and we should eat less meat than we currently eat, though it is not necessary to give up all of it if we do not want to.

He advocates eating local, sustainably grown and produced foods, preferably organic, and I can’t say that I disagree with any of that.

In fact, the reason why I didn’t love this book has nothing to do with whether I think Pollan is right or wrong; I happen to agree with him on most of his major points.

It has to do with the fact that the book is not cohesive and reads like two separate smaller books melded together into one longer book.

Or, more accurately, it reads like two long, investigative magazine articles (which is where his seven-word thesis statement first appeared–in an article published a year ago for the New York Times Magazine, which I read when it came out) somewhat clumsily edited together. The truth is, the other theme of the book, that America’s dietary issues are part and parcel of the ever-changing nutritional advice we are given by scientists, a practice which he calls, “nutritionism,” is also from the same article in the New York Times Magazine. (In fact, for the first couple of chapters, I kept thinking, “I’ve read this before. Where?” By the third chapter, I figured it out. and looked it up online and found the article in question.)

However, in the article, these two themes were more elegantly woven together into a cohesive whole.

When the ideas were expanded into this small book, however, the weaving began to unravel, and what could have been a deftly written, fascinating look at why American’s obsession with health and nutrition may not in fact be healthy, and what to do about it, becomes instead a clumsy, rushed attempt to get a sequel to The Omnivore’s Dilemma out to the reading public as fast as possible.

I can understand the appeal of this approach. When Pollan wrote his New York Times Magazine article, entitled, “Unhappy Meals,” he made a concise, cogent argument that we should stop listening to the nutritional advice of the experts who use reductive science to study foods, which result in a plethora of theories which seem to be adopted and then discarded with dizzying speed, leading to great confusion on the part of consumers. He said we were better off ignoring any processed food which had health claims on its packaging and should instead go back to eating whole foods, which we cook for ourselves. He advocated ignoring the center aisles of the grocery store as much as possible, and only shopping on the edges, where the produce, dairy, meat and eggs are displayed, and we should reject any food which our grandparents would not recognize. (Of course, the problem with that advice is that all of the very traditional Chinese food I eat would have been a mystery to my grandmothers–but I am sure that a Chinese peer of my grandparents would recognize my Cantonese and Sichuan foods readily. Thus, I figure I can “grandfather” those foods into my diet and still follow the spirit, if not the actual words of Pollan’s dictum.) (And yes, that pun was intentional.)

That was a great article, and I can understand why Pollan would want to get those words out to as many people as possible, not just the folks who read the New York Times.

The problem is that he had to expand on that article to make a whole book, and that is where he got into trouble.

I don’t think that the expansion was very well done. I think it was rushed, and he ended up putting too much emphasis on the evils of nutrition science and its ties to the food processing industry, and wrote too little about what it is we should be eating instead, with practical advice on how to change the typical American’s lifestyle, shopping and cooking habits. The fact is, he could have made his point about “nutritionism” in one chapter, and then spent the rest of the book formulating answers for the difficult question of exactly how one is to change everyone’s relationship to food when not everyone has access to farmer’s markets and inner city folk don’t even always have access to real grocery stores.

To me, these are more pressing issues, although I will admit that I may be a special case in that I have been reading critically about nutrition science for quite some time, and have always been somewhat cynical about such spurious claims like margarine being more healthy than butter. (Which, of course, it isn’t: artificially hydrogenating liquid vegetable fat to make is solid introduces trans-fats which are more unhealthy than naturally solid animal fats.)

In other words, all through the majority of the book, where Pollan reiterates his indictment of “nutritionism,” I was bored to tears.

Also, I noticed that while he tells us to eat less, he makes little to no mention of exercising more. Much like Nina Planck in her book, Real Food, Pollan mentions that humans can exist on any number of diets: all meat, mostly meat, some meat, all plants, mostly plants, no plants. However, like Planck, he tends to downplay the fact that in human societies where people eat these rather extreme sounding diets, they always are more physically active than we modern Americans are.

I am of the firm belief that it is as much our couch-potato/desk-jockey lifestyle which contributes to our expanding waistlines and declining health as it is the typical processed crap food American diet.

To have both Planck and Pollan downplay this rather large elephant in the room is curious.

The other thing I missed while reading In Defense of Food was Pollan’s personal touch. This is a much less personal work, and so there are no engaging stories and anecdotes about Pollan’s discoveries and adventures. Those are my favorite parts of all of his books, and in this one, they were completely lacking.

But it need not have been that way. If he had spent longer researching this book, rather than rushing it to press, he could have done more exploration on the question of how to get more fresh, whole food to more people in this country, and I think that the book could only have benefited from that treatment.

That said, while I don’t really like the book–I think it has many good solid points.

However, all of those points are available online in the better written, more concise, “Unhappy Meals,” which is free, instead of being $21.95.

And then, you can dash off to the grocery store or farmer’s market and spend that cash you saved on some good food that someone’s grandma somewhere would recognize as wholesome and tasty.

I know that quite a few of you don’t have babies or children of your own.

But you may well have nieces or nephews, or a number of friends who have decided to procreate, or heck, maybe even a neighbor or co-worker is about to have a baby.

What is the perfect gift for a foodie to give to a baby in order to open new eyes to the world of food?

Well, other than a ringside seat in the kitchen with the highchair pulled near the stove so that the scents, sights and sounds of cooking enter their consciousness from day one? And other than a taste, smell and touch of every ingredient in your kitchen? And other than a personal guided tour of all of your coffee-table cookbooks with lavish photographs of food in exotic locales?

I think the perfect gift for any food in training (pants) are the little picture board books of Amy Wilson Sanger in her “World Snacks” series.

Sanger is a paper collage artist, and her work is filled with color, energy and a vivacious joy that is irresistible to kids and adults alike. The first of her books I ever saw were Yum Yum Dim Sum, and My First Book of Sushi, which were at one of the gift shops at the Smithsonian when we had gone back to visit a few years ago. I was pregnant at the time, and so we bought them along with a pair of tiny child’s chopsticks and a little rice bowl decorated with painted kittens all over it. I was heartbroken, of course, when that pregnancy ended in miscarriage, but while the sight of the little bowl and chopsticks were too much for me to bear, the rhymes of those two little books still made me smile, if a bit wistfully. (My very favorite rhyme is from My First Book of Sushi: “Miso in my sippy cup, tofu in my bowl/Crab and avocado fill my California Roll.”)

So, even though I wasn’t sure if I would ever get pregnant again, I kept those two little books on my shelf, little testaments to the hope that one day I would have a chance to share them with a little one of our own.

In the meantime, I bought other copies of them, along with the other titles in the series, and sent them along to my nieces when they were born, and to Zak’s newly born cousins. Let’s Nosh, which introduces such Jewish delicacies as gefilte fish, noodle kugel, and hamentaschen, was a great favorite among them, though I, myself was partial to A Little Bit of Soul Food, which features southern goodies like fried chicken, collard greens and biscuits and gravy–the food I grew up on.

When Kat was born, I was thrilled to round out the collection with Hola Jalapeno! which covers delicious Mexican foods like enchiladas and turkey mole, and Mangia! Mangia!, which tells all about Italian favorites such as spaghetti with polpettini (meatballs), risotto and gelato. I also cannot wait for the release of the newest in the series, Chaat and Sweets, which will cover the foods of India.

I think that we can all agree that reading to babies is important; it helps them develop a love of language, learning and reading if they are read to from picture books (and other books–I used to read to Morganna from Tennyson and Tolkien when she was a baby) from a very early age. The sound of written language, especially poetry, helps babies learn to recognize and try to emulate the rhythms of spoken words. Kat shows this when she looks at these books, and babbles, her voice naturally taking on the sing-song, up-down rhythmic quality of the rhymes she has heard us repeat for these books over and over.

Recognition of colors, shapes, and representational art are all important developmental stages assisted by reading to babies and toddlers from picture books. They learn to understand drawings and photographs as representing something else, and they learn to recognize and vocalize colors by having physical representations shown to them from an early age. With the many shapes and colors of the foods presented in these books, babies are exposed to a myriad of forms which is not only stimulating aesthetically, but intellectually as well.

Not only do Sanger’s books, like all picture books, help with literacy development, and intellectual stimulation, they also help introduce worldwide cultures through the foods typical to that culture. They introduce both the diversity of food and dining habits, but also the universality of them. They give children an imaginary taste of foods and ways of life that may at first seem very different to them, but after being read these books over and over, what once might have been strange will seem familiar and comforting.

In a rapidly shrinking global community, where the United States is even more of a melting pot than it ever has been before, I think that this introduction to culture via food is extremely important and valuable, and I only hope that more parents use these books to help their kids become good global citizens from an early age.

I just wonder what Sanger’s next project in the series will be? French food? Scandinavian? African?

How about Arab foods? Personally, I think that the last choice, while it might be seen as too controversial, would be quite welcome and useful in helping to dispel some of the untrue stereotyping of Arabic culture that the US media has perpetuated over the past several years.

I have a lot of food-related news you can use today, from sources far and wide.

First up, a major study from the University of Michigan has found that organic farming has the potential to feed the world, because it can provide up to three times as much food in the same amount of land as conventional agriculture in developing countries. In developed countries, the yields of organic agriculture were comparable to the yields using conventional agriculture.

This is good news for those of us who care about the ecological and human impact of pesticide use on our environment.

National Public Radio featured Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, on their show, Speaking of Faith, where the topic was “The Ethics of Eating.” There is a lot of material on this link: podcasts of the interview, reader/listener reactions, and a complete transcript of the show. Enjoy!

The New York Times’ Minimalist, Mark Bittman, brings us 101 ideas for eating at home fast, without resorting to fast food or takeout. He promises that these “recipelets” take ten minutes or less each, but, after having read them, I rather doubt that. Some of them look more like they would take twenty minutes or so–but really, what is a minute or two or ten between friends?

His ideas are still useful and good for those who are in a hurry to feed themselves, their friends or –gasp– their families nutritious food that doesn’t require hours to prepare. In other words, the article is a great boon to parents and other busy folks who still care about good food.

Finally, here is an article about the possibility of an Asian bee parasite being at least partially behind the mystery of colony collapse disorder.

Thank you to Heather for pointing out the NPR story to me.

Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite writers.

Her prose is graceful, eloquent and spare; she is the master of poetic description punctuated with the occasional baldly-stated observation of ugly, yet undeniable truths.

With her training and background in evolutionary biology, Kingsolver cannot help but report on both the incredible beauty the natural world offers as well as the realities of life: blood, excrement and death. She does so in a prose style that is by turns lyrical and plainspoken; her voice is inextricably tied to the Appalachian farmlands of her Kentucky childhood and her current home in Virginia.

In her newest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she brings her storytelling skills and incisive viewpoint to the chronicle of her family’s experience of spending a year (2005, to be precise) eating locally. What food they did not grow, preserve, process and butcher themselves, they bought from farmers within their home county, with the exception of flour, salt, coffee, cocoa and spices.

Far from being a narrative of deprivation, the book is a goldmine of gems gleaned from an authentic life well lived. Kingsolver is such a good writer, she can make even the most mundane and odd of topics, such as the mechanics of natural (meaning, unassisted by humankind) turkey reproduction a tale of hilarity worthy of a stand up comic. Her ruminations on the prolific nature of zucchini squash and an overabundance of tomatoes at the height of summer are also funny, while also being instructive. (Lesson: don’t plant so darned many summer squashes next time.)

But it isn’t all farming tales of adventures in animal husbandry and gardening woes; Kingsolver and her family also delve into the arts of cooking, food preservation and cheesemaking. Yes–cheesemaking.

Kingsolver herself allows as to how cheesemaking is generally considered beyond the pale for even the most “back to the land” foodies of the world, such that she notes, “If the delivery guy happens to come to the doore when I am cutting and draining curd, I feel like a Wiccan.” Meaning of course, she feels as if she is engaged in something esoteric, alchemical and somewhat, shall we say, eccentric.

Eccentric as cheesemaking and the daily baking of bread may be to most Americans, Kingsolver’s family, who also raised their own chickens for eggs and meat, and turkeys and made sausages from some of their birds, as well as growing and preserving all of their own fruits and vegetables, did quite well. Her narrative is punctuated by asides describing the ecological and health impacts of processed foodstuffs, industrial agriculture the cultural and political fallout of same and written by her biologist husband, Steven Hopp, which greatly enhance the month-by-month story Kingsolver weaves.

Camille Kingsolver, her elder daughter, also joins the writing team, outlining seasonal recipes for each chapter, using the bounty the land created at each step of the harvest, while also bringing her own unique vision to the year-long project.

While not as factually dense and argumentative as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle deserves to be read just as much, if not more, because it takes Pollan’s ideas and extends them over an entire year of meals, not just four. Kingsolver also shows the effects of her family’s experiment not only on herself, but on each of her family members, as well as friends and community members, which, I believe makes for a more interesting and enlightening narrative. Through her eyes and prose, we can see how important it is for us to know where our food comes from and how it is produced, as well as how a mostly urban family -can- actually raise a significant portion of one’s own food, not only ethically and healthily, but inexpensively as well.

A good read, one that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Now, I am not so sure.

I wrote a review of her book, Real Food, when it came out in hardcover last year, and although I noted it was not perfect, I mostly agreed with her premise and information. I did and still do have reservations about some of her facts, because some of them come from outdated sources, but in general, I agree that the best diets for humans include mostly unprocessed whole foods, with emphasis on fresh vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts with some pastured dairy, meat and wild-caught fish.

But, I have to say that her diatribe against vegan parenting from the May 21 edition of the New York Times Op Ed pages is not only mean-spirited and filled with scare-mongering opinions, she plain old gets many of her facts wrong. Prompted by the sentencing of two vegan parents in Atlanta for the murder of their six week old infant whom they fed on soymilk and apple juice, Planck goes on the warpath against vegan parents, using this case of obvious parental neglect and abuse as an excuse to vent her ex-vegan spleen against a group of people, who on the whole, do their best to feed their families ethically and well.

And as far as I am concerned, that is just uncalled-for, in large part, because the fact that these parents were vegans was not the issue. The fact was that they had no clue how to feed an infant was the issue, and they starved him to death. Even the prosecutor in the case said, “No matter how many times they want to say, ‘We’re vegans, we’re vegetarians,’ that’s not the issue in this case. The child died because he was not fed. Period.”

The prosecutor knew the truth, which is that no responsible vegan parent in the world would feed an infant, who was born three months premature, a diet of apple juice and soy milk. (Note–have you ever looked at a carton of soy milk? Somewhere on every carton of soy milk I have run across is a statement something like the following: “Not to be used as an infant food.” One cannot easily misunderstand that, unless of course, one is illiterate, stupid, or a murderer.)

The prosecutor got it, but Nina Planck did not, and she used this tragic case of parental ignorance, neglect and cruelty, to step up on her soapbox and paint all vegan parents as irresponsible kooks.

In her essay/article/screeching rant, entitled, “Death by Veganism,” she states in her final sentence, “Children fed only plants will not get the precious things they need to live and grow.”

She also said, “A vegan diet is equally dangerous for weaned babies and toddlers, who need plenty of protein and calcium. Too often, vegans turn to soy, which actually inhibits growth and reduces absorption of protein and minerals. That’s why health officials in Britain, Canada and other countries express caution about soy for babies. (Not here, though — perhaps because our farm policy is so soy-friendly.)”

Actually, let’s hear what the ADA, The American Dietetic Association, has to say about the suitability of a vegan diet, which can include soy formula for babies who are not breastfed, straight from their own website.

The ADA’s official position on vegetarianism reads thusly: “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.…This position paper reviews the current scientific data related to key nutrients for vegetarians, including protein, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin D, riboflavin, vitamin B-12, vitamin A, n-3 fatty acids and iodine. A vegetarian, including vegan, diet can meet current recommendations for all of these nutrients. In some cases, use of fortified foods or supplements can be helpful in meeting recommendations for individual nutrients. Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence.

Did you notice that the ADA website specifically mentions that the Dietitians of Canada concurred with their position? So, uh, which Canadian health officials are expressing caution against the use of soy in infant diets?

We’ll never know, because Planck doesn’t cite her sources.

And that, my friends, is why I am pretty well steamed, even if I am not a vegan.

I am steamed, and I stand with all those steamed vegan parents who are rightfully huffing about Planck’s opinion piece, because she is not only not a nutritionist or a pediatrician, she is stating her opinions as facts, and is not backing up her assertions.

She is not an authority on nutrition or health, so her argument, unless she appeals to a qualified authority, is unsupported.

When she does appeal to authority, such as the unnamed British and Canadian health officials, she does not cite her sources, so we can do some fact checking, in order to see if they really said what she says they said.

If you go to her website, Planck does tell us that talked with “many sources” in order to write her op-ed piece.

But she gives us no names; instead, she says, “Some readers asked about my sources. Among many sources for this piece, I interviewed a family practitioner who treats many vegetarian and vegan families. The doctor’s comments were useful but too long for the Times. Here they are:

‘The most significant issue with vegan infants is growth. I have seen cases of severe anemia and protein deficiency in vegan infants resulting in hospitalization and blood transfusion. Most breast-fed vegan children will do okay until solids are introduced, as long as the vegan mother is well nourished. Most commonly you see Vitamin B12 and iron deficiencies in vegan children. Vegan families must place close attention to protein sources, calcium, Vitamins D and B12, and iron. Often this can be achieved via fortified foods, but I’ve seen that not all vegan parents want to choose these types of foods. Most vegan families I’ve met don’t understand the importance of fat intake in the cognitive development of the baby.’ The doctor also reiterated what informed parents know: that soy milk is ‘completely inadequate’ for babies.”

This unnamed physician could be a great source of information; he could have done research that has been written up in a peer-reviewed journal that supports Planck’s assertions. However, we have no way of knowing that, because he is not named. We cannot look him up and see if he really is on the up and up, or is just some quack whom Planck happens to know.

In fact, we don’t know how many of her “many sources” she talks about are really qualified authorities.

In fact, we don’t even know if they are real or not; we just have to take her word for it.

I’m sorry, but since she has made one blatantly fallacious statement, which is the crux of her argument, that being that a vegan diet is completely inadequate to feed infants, I am not going to just give her the benefit of the doubt on the existence of her sources.

I mean, if a writer is going to go against the ADA’s official stance, it behooves her to get her facts straight on the issue she is on her soapbox about.

The fact is, Planck is full of it on this issue. She is making it sound like -all- vegan parents are as misinformed, incompetent, negligent and cruel as the parents of Crown Shakur, the baby who starved to death in Atlanta. She is making it sound like all vegan parents are feeding their babies soy milk from cartons which specifically state that it is not a proper infant food. She is making it sound like all vegan parents are criminally negligent, just like the two who have been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, when the truth is, most vegan parents go out of their way to feed their infant children the best food in the world for them: breastmilk.

What does the first sentence on the Vegan Society’s webpage on infant feeding say?

“Breast is best.”

Not, “Apple juice and soy milk is the way to go.”

Apple juice and soy milk don’t even make it to the second sentence, or the third, fourth of fifth. The next best choice cited by the Vegan Society is soy-based infant formula, which is also deemed an acceptable second-best to breastfeeding by none other than the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The fact is this: no responsible parent, vegan or omnivore, would feed their infant child a diet consisting of apple juice and soy milk. Such a diet is not recognized by anyone as adequate or preferable, so why is Planck trying to scare the New York Times readers into thinking that vegan parents are a bunch of irresponsible dimwits who don’t know how to feed their kids?

Well, I hate to say it, but she probably did it to sell more copies of her book, which is coming out in paperback next month.

Okay, maybe I am being too cynical.

Maybe Planck really believes that there are a bunch of vegan parents out there starving their kids to death and she wants to warn everyone to be on the lookout for babies being fed on diets of soy milk and apple juice. Maybe she thinks she is doing some good by giving the people who may never have met a vegan in their lives the idea that they are all baby-killers. Maybe she thinks some vegan parents will read her work and see the light and stop eating such a kooky, faddish diet.

Or, maybe, she is just a bit of a kook herself.

I think I will go back to my first, albeit cynical, thought because I don’t like to think that she is a kook or a vegan-hating bigot.

Planck is just out to sell some books by engaging in a provocative bit of yellow-journalism by slinging some mud at an easy target.

The problem is–at least in my eyes–is she aimed mud at the vegans, but splattered herself thoroughly in her own muck by not citing sources for her “facts” and for stating easily discovered fallacies as truths.

I hate to say it, but I don’t think that I will be reading her next book, Baby Food, which she is researching now, on the subject of real food for babies, a subject which all of my readers -know- I am interested in.

I’d love to read it, but I just don’t think I could stomach it.