Michael Pollan speaks about food

So by now you (the 4 people who occasionally read this) may be thinking all I ever do is go to talks and movies, but writing about topics from class doesn’t seem that interesting. How interested are you in “analysis of collinear data” or “the log logit model”? I didn’t think so.

Tonight I went to see Michael Pollan the author of most recently “In Defense of Food”. I recently read “Omnivore’s Dilemma” which had a great story of food. The talk will be available from Stanford on iTunes soon and is worth a listen. He’s definitely an engaging speaker who kept the overflowing audience engaged throughout the hourlong talk and following 30 minutes of questions. There were so many people that the aisles were completely full of people, including me, and there was still a lobby full of people trying to get in 10 minutes before the start. He talks about the importance of eating healthly and not getting sucked into the “Nutritionalism” machine which tries to turn food into its parts. He convincingly argues that nutritionists and food scientists still don’t know what makes food work, and that extracting bits doesn’t always extract the benefit. His solution follows from the quote above, eat (whole) food not nutrients or edibile foodlike products. Like my stepmom says, the freshest food lives on the perimeter of the grocery store. I really like his idea of “Don’t eat anything that won’t rot.” If the stuff that eats the food we don’t isn’t interested in it, we probably shouldn’t be either.

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Michael Pollan