Letters to the Editor
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Michael Pollan and the Skinny Bitches are both unrealistic...
Both Pollan and the Skinny Bitch team make good points, but you can't just buy into every word of the latest diet-tract-masquerading-as-expose-nonfiction. That said, I strongly prefer Pollan--he points out, correctly, the many flaws in our current food/agriculture system (e.g., monoculture and factory farms), in well-reasoned, thoroughly researched fashion (let's not pretend that the many footnotes to PETA in "Skinny Bitch" are the equivalent of real research). Pollan sums up his latest, "In Defense of Food" thusly: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And that is sound advice. Unlike the propagandists of "Skinny Bitch," Pollan points out that human populations have thrived on many types of foods for millennia--but only until the advent of highly processed, government-subsidized food did we see the rise of widespread diseases of affluence such as Type II diabetes. The authors of the "Skinny Bitch" screeds, however, advocate eating precisely the types of fake foods (vegan Canadian bacon, anyone?) that contribute to environmental and health problems. Not to mention their unkind, condescending tone. Unfortunately, neither the Pollan approach (locally grown, minimally processed) nor veganism is a realistic approach--they are both too expensive and time consuming for the average consumer.