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. More...

If you suddenly awakened from a twenty year sleep and walked into one of today’s supermarkets, you’d probably be amazed at the number of organic products available. Every section from dairy, to spices, to frozen food now offers items proudly bearing organic labels. But today’s organic food industry is nothing like the idealistic, fringe movement of twenty years ago. That’s great news in the sense that we can buy plenty of products grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But it’s sobering to scratch beneath the surface and see that many of these products use the same destructive agricultural practices as conventional products, minus the chemical fertilizers and pesticides. More...

I’d planned a pilgrimage to the Farmer’s Diner, a place I’d read about in the New York Times and also in Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. They serve traditional diner food, but almost all of their ingredients are locally produced. When I mentioned it to various family members, I found that they hadn’t heard of the place, even though they lived nearby and I’d read about it repeatedly thousands of miles away. I said that they based their menu on local foods, and consistently heard the response, "Lot’s of places around here do that." More...