The author of the NYT editorial I wrote about on August 4th brought up this idea:
“Domestically, a power company can earn credits by, say, helping farmers capture methane emitted by animal waste ponds or cultivate land in ways that help absorb carbon.”

I’ve read a few articles about these “black lagoons” (term borrowed from NYT article linked below) of animal waste created by farms, specifically pig farms. Recently, I started wondering whether people really understand what these farms are like. If you haven’t ready anything like The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, you could live on not knowing what kind of atrocities there are out there that are connected to producing your food.

The animals raised on large lot farms are kept in close quarters, and can’t be near each other’s waste because it would make them sick. (Which is quite understandable. It would make me sick too.) So the waste needs to be trucked out of the animals’ barns and deposited somewhere, often on one big piece of land on the same farm. This turns the land into a black lagoon of animal waste that contaminates the soil, possibly the groundwater, toxic gas emission, and tons of other issues that affect the environment and the health of humans.

For further reading, check out:

• NYT article
• More on the environmental impacts
• Methane to produce electricity

Image credit:
Flickr user friendsoffamilyfarmers

As promised, though a bit late, here are some general guidelines for buying and consuming food as suggested by Michael Pollan in the ending chapters of In Defense of Food.

He covers a lot of ideas while giving some advice and I will summarize here some of the ones I think are key. I really recommend reading the book for some great stories, examples, and information in addition to more detailed advice!


1. “Eat food.”
When it comes to eating, humans have evolved to eat natural plant and animal products. A vast amount of the food found in markets and on shelves, however, have been processed past the point of recognition. Pollan suggests eating things that your great-grandparents would still be able to identify as food. He makes the point that all the whole foods tend to be on the outsides of the supermarket (in the produce, meat, and dairy sections). So stay away from those boxed goodies that big companies spend all that advertising to get you to buy it!


2. “Mostly plants.”
Humans have also evolved to be mostly herbivorous. We still don’t fully understand what processed foods do for our health, and we won’t know for a long time. There is that quote that supposedly a Japanese person said where they would wait to see what happens to the Americans with their Western Diet before trying it, much like a nutrition/health experiment.

Though many processed foods are claimed to be full of nutrients and other things good for our health, the nutrients and other things did not occur naturally in the food product. They were somehow injected or supplemented in the product. We can’t be sure that this way these nutrients are being brought into our body are actually efficient or beneficial. We should stick to what we are sure of, which are the plants and combinations of them in certain cuisines that have proven to be good for our bodies.


(On a side rant, plants have really gotten a bad rap in American culture. Plants have become the side dish to increasingly unhealthy entrees of meat. It will be difficult to work plants out of the negative stigma that many people have, but there is progress being made. HOWEVER, I’m tired of people asking me if I am a vegetarian just because I like to eat mostly plants. Just because my meal is NOT 80% meat, does not mean that I’m a hippy, veggie-loving vegetarian or vegan, though a part of me might be. It should not be the alternative lifestyle to eat more plants than meat. It should be THE lifestyle.)


3. “Not too much.”
Portions are out of control in this country. It has become somewhat of an expectation among Americans that for a small buck you can get a plateful of fried food. Studies have suggested that Americans eat until there is none left in the bag, on the plate, etc., instead of assessing their physical state of fullness. Some European cultures have been shown to be better at this, while they also tend to enjoy their food in meals that are take more time and are more social. Taking more time to eat means the body has more time to realize it is receiving food, and also makes food a more cultural experience.

Thanks for reading! Comments are welcome, as always!

“Helps lower cholestorol.”
“Natural source of antioxidants.”
“Low fat.”
“Made with all natural ingredients.”

You’ve probably seen them all. All these are health claims you might come across in any typical grocery store. The natural instinct for the consumer is to trust these types of statements. They are often backed by a government agency, after all. But what does it mean to be a “qualified” health claim.

Here is a quote from Michael Pollan, on page 156 of In Defense of Food,

“The FDA’s own research indicates that consumers have no idea what to make of qualified health claims (how would they?), and its rules allow companies to promote the claims pretty much any way they want – they can use really big type for the claim, for example, and then print the disclaimers in teeny-tiny type.”

The FDA rules were changed in 2003 to allow for several degrees of certainty for health claims. Some may think that this allows for more flexibility for ill-founded claims by food makers, and others may think that this makes more information available to the public. Considering that the important information is usually in the fine print that hardly anyone reads, leads me to side with the first group.

Much of the evidence for health claims is only marginally supportive. There is hardly anything that we know for certain or understand about the nutrients and chemical make-up of food products or what our body does with them. In nature, many of the compounds may only helpful to our body in combination with other naturally found compounds. There is still a lot unknown about what it is about healthy food that is good for us.

One thing that we can rely on is that eating plants is generally good for human health. Our bodies have evolved alongside these plant species that we like to eat, so that now our digestive systems are well equipped to handle them. Something that we can now see is that our bodies are not as well equipped to handle highly processed plant products, like high-fructose corn syrup. Perhaps after a few more thousand years in our diet, our bodies will process it just as well as we process plants now.

From the food producing companies’ perspective, getting the right health claim printed on your product’s packaging seems like the golden ticket in the food industry nowadays. You also need to keep up with the times, because, just as quickly as one fad enters the scene, another one could take over with a new clinical study.

Health claims are in some ways the food industry’s way of pandering to the paranoia of some members of society to “be healthy,” while still working towards the goal of selling more calories. A large portion of marketing resources goes into making sure that your product is viewed in a positive light. Misleading and deceptive statements on the part of the food producer is a common way to do this.

But, from the consumer’s perspective, health claims are supposed to be helpful guidance for what kinds of choices are available. When these can’t be trusted for their face value, and the fine print is written in such a way that would require interpretation to gather real meaning, what’s the average shopper to do?

One piece of advice from Pollan is to look at the number of ingredients going into a food product. The more numerous the ingredients, the farther it is likely to have gone down the processing line. In general, processed foods are not as good for you as “whole” foods. He also suggests staying away from products that have too many hard-to-pronounce ingredients.

For more suggestions and guidance on how to approach shopping for food, my last entry about In Defense of Food is posted here and includes a summary of some of Pollan’s suggestions and a few personal observations.

Image credit:
Flicker users {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester} and cafemama

One main point that Michael Pollan brings up is the general shift from complexity to simplicity. He means that nutritional quality is eventually sacrificed because the complex interactions and combinations of nutrients are being simplified by industrializing and processing food.

Biological and ecological interactions that culminate in the plant and animal products that we consume are very complex and difficult to imitate. But this seems to be the ultimate goal for food science, as exemplified by the several trends in fortifying processed foods with the ever evasive “magic nutrient” that is essential for good health.

To quote Pollan (page 115), “Chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants.”

These ideas make me question the true feasibility of vertical farming. Reductionist research has brought this concept to where it is today, but what if all of this is in vain because of our lack of understanding? Specifically, our understanding about the complexity of interactions and nutrients that create our food and nourish our bodies?

The foods themselves are being chemically simplified the more they are processed, but also we are eating fewer and fewer different types of living things.

Think about it. How many different types of vegetables do you buy each week? How many of them are available year-round? Even when looking in the organic section of the market, the produce most likely has traveled there from a large industrial organic farm.

Species diversity has diminished with industrialization, to make all processes smoother within the global machine that distributes the food products. While our ancestors used to eat several dozens of different plants when they were in season, we have transitioned to a culture that relies on staples of broccoli, lettuce, potatoes, etc. (Not that there is anything wrong with these vegetables. I myself enjoy them very much.)

Nature does what it does better than anything that we can. I would now be hesitant to put a lot of our chips on vertical farming for just that reason. Plants also don’t grow in monocultures in nature because they have developed as parts of species diverse ecosystems over evolutionary time.

Maybe the best thing to do is to let Nature continue to do it and protect those processes with what little power and resources we have. However, the way the food industry is set up now, there is little help in way of making any sense of all this on your own as a consumer in the supermarket.

Pollan points to the increasing popularity of farmer’s markets as a generally good direction to go, but how can our entire nation take advantage of that? Where do we go from there?


Image credit:
Flickr user: romanlily, “The Christmas Spread”

A good quote from page 62 of In Defense of Food:

“The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science,” points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, “is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.”

Whole foods are so complex chemically and biologically that there is no way that we could recreate its nutritional value in processed foods.

More on this later.

I just started reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma about a year and a half ago and found it very perspective-changing so I am looking forward to what this book will have to say.

The first few chapters have focused on discussion of the ideology behind “nutritionism.” Pollan points out that this is not a scientific term, though there is “food science” that is involved.

Nutritionists and food scientists seem to have an unusual amount of power over the thoughts, perceptions, and actions of the general public. The pervading misconception is that the key to understanding food is to look at the nutrients and break it down in a reductionist manner, or, as Pollan puts it, that “foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.”

This has manifested itself in the excessive amounts of specific and confusing labeling for processed food products in the supermarkets. Things like “omega-3” and “no-trans fat” grace the covers of all kinds of products, but do consumers really understand what they are getting? And is it their fault if they do not?

The industry would have us think that any thing that they sell is “healthy,” ever since the fear of eating unhealthily struck the nation. With things being said to be linked to heart disease and obesity, it is hard to avoid letting that line of thinking slip into our subconscious.

The reality is that the science rarely supports these claims with strong enough evidence to advise any type of change in dietary preferences. The evidence may be suggestive, but the consumer doesn’t pick that up in the translation (which relates to the scientific literacy issue, not enough people understand the process of science).

Pollan describes the history of changes that occurred to bring nutritionism to its current status. One point he makes that I agree with is that the industry has made it a battle between “good” and “bad” nutrients. Somehow, eating certain food items could reduce a “bad” nutrient, or provide a “good” one. Food scientists usually don’t know enough about any one nutrient in a food product to be able to say for certain that it is good or bad, but they can usually say that a type of food is good or detrimental for one’s health.

For instance, it is good for humans to eat a lot of vegetables, but to eat less meat. We’ve known that for ages. That is why we are omnivores. We can say we need the protein, the vitamins, etc. in meat and vegetables, but we really can’t say for sure what else we are getting from eating whole foods. Our knowledge is not yet complete.

One example is the infant milk formula. It still is not perfected, because there are things in natural human milk that we have not been able to find or replicate (antibodies or other things).

We tend to think we know what we need, or that we can trust the professionals to tell us what we need, but that is very naïve of us.

I’m looking forward to reading more of the book! Take a look at it some time to hear more of Pollan’s ideas and I will for sure be posting more entries about it.

Image credit: michaelpollan.com