Good Health is About Taking Time?

Jo Hunter Adams

Thoughts from Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food"

One thought I took away from Michael Pollan's "In defense of Food" was the notion that health is directly proportional to the time one invests in the act of preparing food and eating. The impression I took away from this book was also that culture-bound food ("Italian", "Japanese", "French") is better than non culture-bound food.

There are many cases that support his line of thinking, and there's clearly reason to support Americans moving away from restaurants and fast-food car eating. This approach may well result in better health and lower weight.

However, I was thinking about this idea with respect to South Africans, other Africans, and people in the United States southern States. In South Africa, a lot of weight issues may be related not to "eating out", but to "eating in". We get fat on braais and beer, not fast food. The stereotypical view of a South African farmer is someone pretty overweight. Although I'm not extremely familiar with the American South, there seems to be a segment of rural America that is very overweight yet, I believe, live a much slower life, and do take time to enjoy good food. For these groups of people, I think there may be something else at play-- yet it's understandably difficult to say that our cultural foods should be eaten in smaller portions.

Thoughts?

Other Book-related Posts
(1) Collapse: Haiti and the Dominican Republic
(2) Collapse: The Rwandan Genocide
(3) Collapse: Introduction
(4) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Huh, what's a Locavore?
(5) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: How Much Energy was used for that Carrot: Vegetarianism and Energy
(6) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Local Abundance and Variety
(7) Botany of Desire: Stories of Potatoes
(8) Thoughts from "In Defense of Food" By Michael Pollan (Part 1)

Thoughts from "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan

Jo Hunter Adams

Rather than go through what In Defense of Food says chapter by chapter (and make it no fun for you to read in the future), I'm going to be mentioning thoughts that the book had that it might be easy for readers to remember.

Calories and feeling full
We may feel hungry way after we've already consumed enough calories for the day, because the calories we consumed did not give us all the nutrients we needed. We may not sense our own bodies needs very completely, because we may feel generalized hunger when, in fact, what we need is a particular mineral or vitamin, and we're already "caloried out".

Pollan describes this (U.S.) experiment where people were given bowls of soup, and unbeknown to them, the bowl was being filled from underneath the table as they ate. The people who had their bowls filled more tended to just keep on eating. And they ate massive amounts. This experiment revealed that many people, particularly in the English-speaking West, are out of touch with their nutritional needs. We feel full based on external, rather than internal, cues.

Other Book-related Posts
(1) Collapse: Haiti and the Dominican Republic
(2) Collapse: The Rwandan Genocide
(3) Collapse: Introduction
(4) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Huh, what's a Locavore?
(5) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: How Much Energy was used for that Carrot: Vegetarianism and Energy
(6) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Local Abundance and Variety
(7) Botany of Desire: Stories of Potatoes