Author and journalist Michael Pollan told a packed Cohen Auditorium yesterday that conventional food policies, while well intentioned, suffer from substantial shortcomings.
"It is what Marxism was to the Soviet Union — a noble idea [that] in practice has proved to be a disaster," he said while delivering the Snyder Presidential Lecture.
Pollan, a professor at the University of California, Berkley, and the author of the popular 2006 book "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals," spent much of his speech criticizing the Western diet.
Arguing that how people consume their food is almost as important as what they actually eat, he suggested that Western norms have enabled unacceptable rates of heart disease, strokes and Type-2 diabetes.
In particular, he told those in attendance — many of them from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy — that even academic views of nutrition are lagging.
"I'm not saying [nutritionism] isn't worth doing to get better at, but it's not there yet," he said. "It is full of promise, but right now we're where surgery was in the year 1650 — interesting, promising, but are you ready to get on the table? Are you ready to let these conclusions shape your life?"
To illustrate the problems with fixed conceptions of nutrition, Pollan compared the Western diet to its historical predecessors.
"Diets that predated Western diets are incredibly diverse — humans have been healthily eating a diversity of things," he said.
Inuit tribes, for example, have lived healthily on seal blubber.
"There is no one ideal human diet, and the really peculiar thing is we have created the one diet that reliably makes us sick," he said.
Pollan suggested that Americans are now at a fork in the road, and that one option is to surrender to current ways of eating in the hopes that evolution will eventually prevail.
"We can wait for evolution, but it will take a long time, and in the meantime we will be really sick and spend a lot of money," he said.
The other option, Pollan said, is to move away from the Western diet by turning more to farmers' markets and unprocessed foods.
Pollan, a frequent critic of industrialized agriculture, opposes the widespread reliance on commodity crops that are used in engineered food.
"Essentially, we have an agricultural system that is dedicated to the production of a lot of commodity crops — corn, soy, wheat, cotton, rice … which can be broken down to chemical parts and reestablished into foods," he said.
In place of the current system, Pollan would like to see a simpler, more wholesome food industry. "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," he said.
He also encouraged an increase in home cooking, an emphasis on teaching children how to eat healthily and the establishment of a mandatory lunchtime at schools.
According to Pollan, these small changes could help address Americans' dysfunctional relationship with food, which he said has risen to the level of a national eating disorder.
"The idea that people would pay to buy a book telling you where your food comes from and pay for another one to tell you how to eat it is remarkable," he said. "We Americans have our own paradox. People obsess about dietary health but nevertheless have some of the worst dietary health in the world."
According to Pollan, academics are partly to blame. By breaking food down into nutrients in a way that most consumers do not understand, he said they have essentially created a "priesthood of nutritionists, journalists and food experts of all kinds."
He added that this filtering of information through self-proclaimed experts has turned faulty conclusions into mainstream dogma.
To further complicate the situation, nutrients are divided into categories of "good" and "evil," leading academics to scorn some, like trans fatty acids, and laud others, like omega-3 fatty acids.
Pollan said that such categorization is dangerous and leads to confusion because of the ever-changing status of nutrients.
"The identity of nutrients is always going up and down, and they will change again, I am confident," he said. "For example, right now the status of saturated fat is going under evaluation."
Another contributing factor is the stronghold that corporations have on food production.
Pollan noted that while modifying food may help corporations pad their bottom lines, producers are passing on unhealthy products to consumers.
Students seemed to learn from and enjoy the lecture.
"Our most basic and innate instincts about food are actually correct over what the media and nutrionists have been feeding us," freshman Julia Fleekop said. "Healthy foods are unprocessed and fresh and look like they should, not Honey Nut [Cheerios] with synthetic milk or yogurt in a tube."
Pollan's lecture was part of the Richard E. Snyder Presidential Lecture Series, which is designed to bring controversial speakers to campus. Past lecturers have included affirmative action critic Shelby Steele and author Salman Rushdie.
"Tufts has been so fortunate to have this series that has brought truly wonderful people to this university," University President Lawrence Bacow said yesterday during his introductory remarks.
