Reading In Defense of Food

I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. I had just reached the end of his forward when I was struck by one of the closing paragraphs, which says that eaters have real choices now thanks to the revival of local farms and farmer’s markets, which make practical the availability of whole foods. I had to stop, the words echoing in my mind, because they were incredibly resonant with what myself and Tom Davenport are doing at farmfoody.org, reminding us that our health, the health of the land, the health of our food culture are inextricably linked.

I continued my reading and came to the point where Pollan relates the story of dentist and amateur scientist Weston Price, who abandoned his practice to study the food culture and nutrition of various aboriginal peoples around the world, untouched by the Western diet. Price concluded the common denominator of health among these peoples was, as Pollan says “to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.”

Tom and me believe that the survival of small, independent farms is dependent on leveraging their local characteristics, just as wine makers leverage terroir as as an argument for the uniqueness of their wines. It is not a stretch to believe, as Pollan does, that the richness of the soil has an influence on the nutritional richness of food. Price’s description mirrors that of the small, independent farm supplying the local area with food, which was common before the second world war.

Moreover, Pollan writes that Price believed that “by breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain.” I am not sure about the disruption of nutrients, but it is those broken links we wish to restore by making some new links of our own, linking local soils, local foods and local peoples together again through social networking.

As I turned the pages, I discovered another passage that resonated with our intuitions about linking together the land, food and people though locality, food and culture using the technology of the 21st century. In the latter half of In Defense of Food the author lays out rules of thumb for escaping the Western Diet, but before doing so, he observes that food does not consist of nutrients alone, but “comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” Our hope this is exactly what our website will do, create a web of social relationships reaching back to the land and to other people, through the farms and foodies, sharing their pictures and their recipes, a little bit of who they are with each other.

That is as far as I’ve got, but with farmfoody.org, Tom and me want to enable people to create, sustain and nurture change in our food culture, because we believe that a healthy society and a healthy people is a product of nurturing a set of relationships with food, the natural world and people.