Elitist

Michael Pollan gives lots of advice, some of which I agree with, and other that I don't. Plus some is contradictory.

• Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
  

Why not? I don't like nondairy creamer, either, but a teaspoonful isn't going to kill you.

• Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims.

Sure, just because it makes a claim doesn't mean it's going to be that healthy, but it might be OK for you.

• Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

For food to have been processed is in itself not necessarily a bad thing. Every week I eat a loaf of whole grain bread that is processed, with more than five ingredients, many of which are unfamiliar or unpronounceable. In fact I would prefer something fresher, but that's not an option for most Americans. And what's the hostility to high-fructose corn syrup? Are all other sugars OK?

• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

Bla bla bla. As a matter of fact, I do that when it's possible, but there's no year-round farmer’s market.

• Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality.

Who's paying? I'm afraid that people with less money are going to ignore all his advice because of comments like this.

• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

One I can whole-heartedly agree on.

• Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

Yeah, yeah. But I wonder what he's got against the Chinese and the Indians?

• Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.

Again, a good idea, but not something that everyone can do.

• Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet.

Yeah, I agree, but what about avoiding "anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food" and "food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar"?

As Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote about Michael Pollan's book

What Pollan fails to explicitly acknowledge, or perhaps even to concede at all, is that his brand of boutique eating is a luxury good. He's rich (not that there's anything wrong with that), so he can afford to refuse beef when he isn't sure the cows have been allowed to graze on grass their entire lives. He has time to keep a vegetable garden. When he turns up his nose at "jet-setting Argentine asparagus" from Whole Foods because it "tasted like damp cardboard," he demonstrates a refined palate that separates him not only from the masses shopping at Wal-Mart but from the yuppies shopping at Whole Foods. When he further frets that such veggies are "floating on a sinking sea of petroleum" he demonstrates a refined political sensibility. And while Pollan is free to hope that someday everyone will be able to eat just as he does, he can't make a useful connection with sustainablemom.

When Pollan ate an organic TV dinner as part of his research, he wrote that "peeling back the polyurethane film covering the dish" made him feel "a little like a flight attendant." But for many of America's "industrial eaters," peeling back the plastic on a TV dinner doesn't make them feel like they're on a flight to Paris. It just makes them feel like dinner's ready. Pollan's positions are shaped by his exquisitely refined political and gastronomical sensibilities, to be sure, but a huge aesthetic component seems to be lurking beneath the surface, mostly unacknowledged by Pollan himself. Food, like other cultural artifacts, is freighted with symbolism, and The Omnivore's Dilemma could easily serve as a how-to guide for elite eating. As each trend spreads, the upper crust goes from whole wheat to organic to local, always trying to stay a step ahead of what's readily available to the average Josephine for Tuesday dinner. You get the sense that we're moving toward a world where the only really refined cuisine will be turnips, pulled from our own gardens in front of our dinner guests and cooked on the spot in butter churned at home earlier that day.