I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s (http://www.michaelpollan.com) new bestseller, In Defense of Food. It’s a simple, informative guide to eating well which also tells part of the story of how we came to eat so badly in the first place. Pollan wrote the 2005 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which raised awareness about the importance of local foodways.

The culprit in this book is the ideology of “nutritionism”, or the idea that foods are simply collections of nutrients, rather than complex biological systems whose combined effect is greater than the sum of their parts. If you subscribe to the philosophy of nutritionism, then you believe that the richness of whole foods can be replaced with chemical additives which put back the vitamins, macronutrients and micronutrients which have been lost to food processing and overworked soil.

The idea of nutritionism is convenient to large scale food conglomerates. Each time health researchers come out with evidence of the healthfulness of a specific nutrient, product developers simply figure out a way to infuse it into some processed food, and then tout its health benefits. Processed foods can then be marketed as the solution to our food woes, rather than the source of them.

Every author has to choose a scope for their work, and Pollan has eloquently focused on this paradigm which has grown so pervasive—and destructive—during the past forty years or so. But I was left with a hunger for something deeper. Food processing and its ruinous effect on our health didn’t just come about during the past forty years. Nutritionism isn’t the source of our collective eating disorder; it’s a symptom, one which the food marketing industry has ingeniously learned to exploit.

Our relationship with food changed dramatically with the Industrial Revolution, when most Western nations switched from agrarian to industrial economies. There was a widespread demographic shift from rural to urban living and city dwellers grew separated from the sources of their food. They became consumers buying products rather than neighbors finding sustenance. As our food production became increasingly centralized manufacturers needed to add more preservatives, to extend shelf life so items could keep during shipping and while they sat on the shelves of stores.

Of course we can’t go back to preindustrial times, and I doubt many of us would even choose to if we could. But we do seem to be collectively waking up from some of the insanity of consumer culture, and in the food world this transformation has been truly phenomenal. There are ten times as many farmers’ markets (http://www.pugetsoundfresh.org) in this country than there were thirty years ago. Organics have been the fastest growing segment of the food industry for fifteen years running although they, too, have become fodder for corporate marketing. Still, the trend is clear. We want real food, produced by real people, and we’re starting to learn how to have it again.

I don’t think Michael Pollan would disagree with any of this. His focus on nutritionism explores the latest chapter in the saga of food marketing and the toll it takes on our health. I’m just concerned that if we wake up to the pitfalls of nutritionism but replace it with another marketing phenomenon, we’ll just be starting down the same path all over again.