Author Michael Pollan returns to Cornwall for talk, book signing

CORNWALL — Nutrition and farm-to-table guru Michael Pollan came home to Cornwall Saturday, beginning his visit (appropriately) at the farmers market, where he signed copies of his many books. Then it was off to Cornwall Consolidated School, where he packed the gymnasium for a Cornwall Library fundraiser.

Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts for the hot day, he appeared at ease. He accepted from First Selectman Gordon Ridgway a 4H T-shirt and a jug of maple syrup — his “pay� for the day. Ridgway noted that Pollan interrupted a California vacation to come back to Cornwall. This is the place he still thinks of as home — and people here clearly still think of him as their neighbor.

“It hurt a little,� Pollan said of being referred to in promotions for the event as (correctly) a former resident; Pollan now lives in Berkeley, Calif. “I still feel like a resident. I just don’t live here.�

Looking around at the expansive gymnasium, Pollan said it was the first time he had been in it, but that he believes he voted for it seven times.

He then held up a package of Twinkies, creating a shocking paradox of an image.

“In exchange for the shirt, I’m giving Gordon the Twinkies,� he said. “They’re a prop, but they’re real. You can eat them.�

Then, with more emphasis: “I dare you.�

He went on to confess that he had not planned to bring them, but when Cornwall friend Jim Terrall spotted them recently in Pollan’s kitchen, the renowned author had some explaining to do. Later in his talk he did indeed use them as a prop, talking about how he kept the sweets on his desk for a couple of years, poking them whenever he got distracted, to see if they were still soft, and, technically, edible.

It was a good example of one of the “rules� for eating he is collecting for an upcoming book: Don’t eat anything that will not rot.

“Even the bacteria and fungi don’t want to eat the Twinkies. They are more in touch with their nutritional instincts than we are.�

With humor and common sense, Pollan presented information on how America eats. He spoke as if the audience was full of about 400 of his closest friends (which was, kind of, true).

His approach to good nutrition isn’t based on people eating what they should eat; people already know what they should be eating, he said. His message is more like a DARE program for eating: Here’s what to say no to, and why.

In researching his latest book, “In Defense of Food,� Pollan changed his initial assumptions about what people think they know and about the scientific information that is available. It’s all, he said, too black and white. There are too many rules, too many things to remember.

After a year-and-a-half of research, he said he was able to reduce it all down to a seven-word mantra: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Books, not bumper stickers

That lesson came just a few minutes into his talk, at which point he invited audience members who felt they could truly follow that simple but profound maxim, to leave and go to the beach.

No one left.

But even with an audience so overwhelmingly committed to whole and locally grown foods, he said  he feels he is tossing that mantra up against a mountain of marketing and “scientificâ€� study.

That’s why he writes books, instead of bumper stickers, he said. Americans in particular, he said, are deeply confused about what they should eat.

Pollan, apparently, is not, and he shared his opinions on what he feels are false food claims.

Some television commercials he saw recently astounded him, for example. Breakfast cereals are promoted as preventing heart disease and improving children’s focus in school, he said. Then there’s Splenda, now with fiber.

“They’ve taken fake sugar and added fake fiber. It’s health in a packet,� Pollan said. “Anyone willing to eat fake sweetener with fake fiber is pretty distanced from knowing what’s nutritious.

“Nature has packaged fiber. It’s called an apple or an orange.�

Too much emphasis on health

“In Defense of Food� is basically a guide to choosing food.

He spoke of four premises of nutrition that lead people down a path of confusion. We no longer eat for the many peripheral reasons audience members later named, such as for pleasure (to much applause), community and socializing around the table, and identity, such as to express religious or cultural beliefs.

“We have put all of those reasons aside and made it about health,� he said.

The first premise is that the key to understanding any food is to know the nutrients it contains.

Accepting that makes the second premise a given: Nutrients are invisible and tasteless and we need experts to tell us how to eat.

The third premise is that food is divided into good and evil, lists that change just as we seem to be getting a grasp of them. A hundred years ago, Pollan said, the experts were worried about too much protein in our diets. That research was done in Battle Creek, Mich.

“That’s why Kellogg invented breakfast cereal.�

The evil nutrients now include trans fats, sugar and high fructose corn syrup. The opposite, or the “blessed� nutrients in the “nutritional priesthood,� include omega-3 fatty acids and fiber.

As an aside, Pollan said fiber is losing its prestige.

“It won’t flip over and be evil, but it doesn’t solve all of life’s problems.�

(And then there’s the cold war between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, but that’s another story).

The fourth premise prompts an examination of not what we eat, but why.

“If you have accepted the first three premises, then you have to believe the whole point of eating is health; that when you’re eating, you’re either ruining or redeeming health. We’re either courting death or courting eternity.�

How did this happen?

Pollan has taken the time to look at the roots of human eating habits.

In the ideological sense, he believes America’s puritan traditions may still have a foothold.

“We’ve always had trouble as a people deriving pleasure from doing the same thing animals do.�

Then there is the hodgepodge of cultures in this country that have undermined any sort of staple diet.

The greatest influence, Pollan believes, began in the 1970s with two events.

In 1973, an obscure law was repealed by the Food and Drug Administration. Known as the “imitation rule,� it was designed to protect Americans from adulterated food. Its repeal made foods such as margarine legal.

“At one time margarine had to be dyed purple so it wouldn’t be mistaken for butter.�

The repeal, like much of what has followed in the regulatory world pertaining to food, was driven by the industry.

“The law had required processed food be clearly marked. But putting ‘imitation’ on the package was the kiss of death.�

The public health community was also behind loosening the restrictions, wanting to be able to re-engineer food.

In 1977, Sen. George McGovern headed a committee on nutrition that looked at issues such as a significant rise in heart disease after World War II.

The consensus was that fats were responsible. The government issued advice in simple terms, such as “Eat less red meat.�

“The meat industry lobbied and forced a re-write. It read something like ‘chose meat that will reduce your saturated fat intake.’ No one back then even knew what saturated fats were. It was bureaucratic gobbledygook. And from that point forward, the government could not tell the public to eat less of any food, for fear of defaming an industry.�

Thus followed ever-more-complicated nutritional guidelines — what Pollan has dubbed “nutritionismâ€�—  and special diets named for their creators. And there were plenty of food fads. There was the Year of Eating Oat Bran. There were animals “re-jiggered,â€� and pork named “the other white meat.â€� Hens were fed flaxseed so they would lay more nutritious eggs.

“It’s all become a marketing strategy. It makes us crazy in the supermarket.�

But, he added, “I think we’d all put up with it if it worked.�

Pollan has come up with his own collection of folksy, common-sense guidelines. They include:

• Get out of the supermarket and go to the farmers market.

• If you do go to the supermarket, stay out of the center aisles. That’s where all of the processed, never-spoil foods are. The perimeters have the perishable food we should be choosing from; they are placed there to be nearer to the loading docks.

• Eliminate foods with ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup and large amounts of salt, not because those ingredients are necessarily bad for you, but because they are markers for highly processed foods.

Some of the guidelines he shared were sent to him by readers. Pollan’s favorite: Don’t buy anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.