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...

It’s easy to eat sustainably, right? Just buy all organic foods when you go to the store. Actually, it’s not that simple anymore. Like so many other green products, organic foods have become a mixed blessing as they’ve gone mainstream. As large, corporate conglomerates have caught on to the fact that we want foods grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, they’ve been using the term "organic" in ways that have little to do with the wholesome ideals which fueled the movement during its early days. More...