On days other than Monday, Pollan eats meat, but only from animals that have been raised in pastures, not in feed lots. "Once you have seen those places," he said, referring to the industrial cattle operations he visited while researching a magazine story on how a calf comes to market, "you lose your appetite."
Pollan said he wrote this eater's manifesto because even though people were concerned about the origins of food - a topic he covered in The Omnivore's Dilemma - they were more interested in personal health, in what to eat. He answers this question by setting out a number of cleverly phrased rules.
He said, for instance, that one way to distinguish real food that you should be eating from edible substances that you should avoid is that real stuff has no more than five ingredients. The food industry has also taken notice of these rules, he said, and figured out ways to capitalize on them. There is now a brand of ice cream, hardly health food, that touts itself as a five-ingredient mix.
"So I have to come up with some new rules to counter these industry ploys," Pollan said. He promised to disclose a few of his new rules at the Baltimore gathering.
Pollan said part of the reason we are confused about what to eat is that we recently got a lot of bad advice from so-called experts. For instance, the public-health campaign that urged eaters to abandon butter, which has saturated fat, and replace it with margarine, which is loaded with trans-fats, was based on bad science, he said.
"We traded in a fat that had been part of the human diet for eons for one that looked novel, but turned out to be much more dangerous. Getting people off lard and chicken fat and butter and putting them on hydrogenated oils has been a public-health disaster, and we are owed an apology," he said.
Pollan, who teaches journalism to graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, was also critical of the way the media has covered food and nutrition.
"The authors of the new nutritional studies get hyped. The editors of the newspapers want front-page stories, and the net effect, since journalism thrives on change, is that journalists tend to exaggerate every change in the science. Science is an iterative process. Scientists make mistakes they refine, but as you watch the twists and turns in a newspaper, you would think every news study is blowing up the one before."
