And if you want to talk about how “we’ve always done it”, people actually ate healthier when there was no refrigeration or gobs of energy spent bringing us blueberries from Chile (not sure that’s where they come from, but they DO NOT come from either Kentucky or Michigan in March). In Texas you raised your own stuff; in Europe you raised some, and bought stuff at the weekly market (still do). It was of necessity fresh, and raised without pesticides, etc. And you bottled wine and cured meat to eat over the winter. So there.

Pollan doesn’t advocate at ALL doing things just based on tradition. He gives very solid reasoning for it, and it all makes a lot of sense. And he doesn’t even advocate a vegetarian/hippie diet, like some might thing he would. Much to my disappointment.

And as Todd suggests, he spends a lot of time talking about thing things that “food science” have done to our diet and health because of that inability to truly test what something will do to the human body over time until we actual do it to the human body. The best example he gives is the whole “butter is bad for you, so eat this margarine crammed with trans fats” debacle. But he talks about others, too.

Amazing, I think Pollan’s approach is pretty moderate and balanced. He is clear that no one can eat a perfect diet. He merely advocates trying to be as aware as we can, and eating food that is nourishing physically AND emotionally. I’m all for that.

I cede the point that food safety science is much more akin to drug testing – there are not black and whites, people are multivariate creatures, and you have to treat it more like a black box system than rigorous science.

I fully expect opinions to change as we begin to understand and track better long term effects. I’m certain HFCS tests safely in everything evaluated before it hits the market, but long term, we see the prevalence of HFCS in our diet (possibly) causing ill effects.

However, I’ll take some science (with large error bars) over “that’s the way people did it for years”, which strikes me as edging very close to homeopathic herbal remedies. Ginseng root doesn’t improve memory; some chemical or combination of chemicals *in* the root has this effect. Just because something works doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and figure out why it works, then apply that knowledge to improve our lives.

That’s why I support food science, fundamentally. I do think we can and have gone overboard, and a return to close-to-earth practices is warranted and overdue, but I’ll take this imperfect science over nothing.

As to the production, I’d dearly love to see a transition program whereby farmers are given incentives to alter their crop balance. We could have moved whole tobacco crops into something else more useful to us when cigarette companies took their blows. It’s a broken system that has its merits but needs an overhaul.

I’m going to question your assertion that science has vetted these “chemicals” (as the husband of a chemistry teacher, I know how ridiculous it is to vilify chemicals as a group), though. I mean, it’s done its best, no doubt, but the fundamental problem is that you can’t really apply the scientific method to people when it comes to eating.

Let me say this another way. If you want to test a preservative’s effect on, say, meat, it’s easy. Take several cuts of meat, as identical as you can make them. Subject them all to identical conditions, except that part of the group gets the preservative. Test the meat cuts after some period of time, and draw your conclusion. Easy.

Now try to test the effects of that preservative on people, using the same, scientific method. You can’t. You can’t get anywhere close to changing just one variable. People aren’t like that. They eat different foods. In different amounts. Their digestive tract is a bafflingly complex collection of chemicals. To say nothing of how their personal habits (exercise, etc.) affect the situation.

And, on top of that, there’s the question of whether the effect of any preservative will be long-term, not short.

I’m not actually a huge hater of modern food science. As much as I read Michael Pollan and like to shop at the farmer’s market (or at least the local grocery store with plenty of local, organic options), I also ate at Taco Bell yesterday. (What can I say, they really know how to mix their chemicals up to make something horribly, awfully appealing.)

But I don’t, fundamentally, trust modern food science. I think most of the effort goes into testing that the product “works”, as defined by: looks right, feels right, tastes right, stores right, travels right. And missing or ignored is the question of whether it’s actually, truly healthy.

As to your rhetorical question about “Tariffs and subsidies to change the economics of sweeteners and food additives?” … Well, if you’ve read Pollan, then you realize that the current state of food science, which is overwhelmingly derived from only two crops (corn and soybeans) is due to the subsidies that already exist. Removing those would go a long way, in my opinion, to balancing out the costs away from junk food and towards food food.

I also think that there’s something to subsidizing farmers who grow food that’s actually healthy for us (e.g. broccoli, spinach, and all those vegetables we all know we’re supposed to eat). One complaint about eating healthy is how expensive it is. Why in the world is it more expensive to make a fresh salad than to eat a cheeseburger with fries? (Answer: because of corn subsidies, among other things.)

You (and I, when I don’t eat out at fast food — which I usually regret afterward) cook your own food not only because you like to do so, but because you can afford to. How absurd is it that our government spends taxpayer dollars to ensure that, for those less well off, HFCS is cheap and abundant, tilting the economics for them towards making that choice to buy something with HFCS? Is that the best use of our government money? Would that hypothetically poor family eat better if cheeseburgers necessarily cost $10 to produce, but salad greens were $.50 a bundle?

Dad: Hah. No, I’m not raising pigs in our backyard (although tempting….) – I can now get raw pork belly without driving to the other side of Houston or farther. I’ve done all the curing, omitted the final smoking step (I don’t have a smoker, and I wasn’t feeling THAT MacGuyver-ish), but it’s delicious.

rest of article interesting, informed, thought-provoking.

Really homemade?