I’m sure many readers of this blog will be familiar with Michael Pollan and his work – especially the eminently sensible, and absolutely timely polemic In Defence of Food. For those of you who aren’t, his basic thesis is that the growth of nutritional science has made most of use confused about what to eat, and that the answer to all our worries is simply to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’. By ‘food’, he means real food made from recognisable ingredients, not the weird, high-tech ‘foodlike substances’ on sale in your local supermarket. He also suggests that our grandmothers knew much more about how to eat well than we did, because their brains were not addled by contradictory and often misleading nutritional advice, and because they took a similarly commonsense approach to feeding their families. I was reminded of all this by his latest piece in the New York Times. Continue reading…
