Why can’t food just be food?

Feb 15 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

I FOUND myself shouting at the radio. The people in the car next to me on the Tyne Bridge must have thought I was either bonkers or having a major argument on the hands-free.

But surely you must have experienced that moment when someone so eloquently says exactly what it is you’d long known but couldn’t find the words to say. Listening to the interview on the radio, I’d found a new hero. He’s an American journalist called Michael Pollan who’s had the temerity to write a book called In Defence of Food.

I have long felt very uncomfortable about the official advice with which we’re constantly bombarded, includ- ing the “eat five a day” campaign and the mantra that fat, sugar and salt will kill you. After all, there’s an obvious irony in the fact that we’ve been told for years that fat is bad for us but at the same time we’re told that the nation’s getting fatter. Pollan attacks what he calls “nutritionism” – the reduction of food to mere nutrients or some basic component parts. The current traffic light labelling that we’re being forced to use at present concentrates the mind in the wrong way. So over the last few decades, rather than people being told to eat fewer burgers and chips, the official advice has been to cut back on fats and salt.

While junk food may not be good for you in excessive amounts, it stands to reason that low-fat junk food is probably still not that good for you. It’s still processed and sweet and salty and goodness knows how many other things. But people still eat too much of it.

He suggests it’s so much more easy to slap a health claim on processed foods sitting on shop shelves than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there not selling themselves. While nearby you have designer breakfast cereals “screaming their new-found ‘whole- grain goodness’ to the rafters”.

We seem to have been encouraged to believe that food is divided into two camps: one containing a set of nutrients that are bad for us and another that’ll make us live for ever.

It’s as if food has become medicine rather than a core part of our family and social lives where food should give us pleasure and what we eat is part of our culture.

As if to reinforce things, I’ve recently read the proclamation that beetroot juice will bring my blood pressure back down. Well hallelujah! So I’ll try living on beetroot juice for a while.

I agree with Michael Pollan that we’ve become too dependent on science and less reliant on cooking. “When you cook at home,” he writes, “you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated dyglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup.” In fact, he has a set of recommendations that include never eating anything that contains ingredients you can’t pro- nounce. So while I’m not planning on giving up carpaccio, I think he’s got a point.

Of course, he’s also a hero to me because following our Campaign for Real Food at Oldfields, he also says we should be eating real food rather than what he calls “edible food-like sub- stances”.

It seems so obvious to me but difficult to explain; the more we concentrate on the individual components of food, the less we’ll get a balanced diet. And we’ll only get a balanced diet if we stop listening to our legislators and start cooking for ourselves, for enjoyment. That, and make sure we can pronounce it.