Food visionary or naive do-gooder?
Michael Pollan (MP) is someone I have a lot of time for. His books (‘In Defence of Food’ and ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’) both make good reading and a lot of sense and he brought a healthy degree of sanity to the ‘Bladerunneresque’ madness of Food Inc. A simple, defining set of commonsense rules on what to, and not to, eat would seem to be a good idea. It is a good idea. Generally speaking, my main criticism is that he comes close to being a one trick pony. It is a good trick and leads into a labyrinth of tangential, more complicated, tricks. Specifically, I wonder whether his message won’t have a reactionary impact and rules such as don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food are quite the thing for the ‘now’ generation. There isn’t much in the way of grey - the message is in black and white and highly processed food is out. For me that is fine - pot noodles have never got passed the threshold into the temple that is my body. For my two teenage sons who, if they can’t have red meat, will head straight for the most highly processed item in the shop, I think MP is banging his head against a brick wall.
The message is ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ I like it because it fits in with the Riverford ethos which, broadly speaking, is ‘buy fresh and don’t muck about with it’. OK, I’m a butcher but that doesn’t mean that there has to be a steak at the centre of every plate. You can see why butchers are a dying breed because that is the world most of them live in. Meat has its place, both in farming and cooking but it isn’t, nor should it be, at the centre, and the mainstay, of our diet. All together MP lays down sixty-four rules the last of which is ‘break the previous sixty-three occasionally’. The sixty-three are all worth saying, ranging from ‘the whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead’ to ‘eat less’ and ‘at a table’. For £2.50 on Amazon, you can’t go wrong. I’m going to buy all our shop staff a copy for a bit of bedtime reading. But therein lies the problem: the converted will learn a few things and continue to feel righteous but will it swell their ranks? I don’t think so. What will? I don’t know - obese people dropping dead in the streets maybe? At the moment there is enormous pressure on young people to be thin and fit but unfortunately, until we grow up and start breeding, no one makes the link with healthy eating. There lies the challenge...
