JuliaEmily

An eaters manifesto

You’ve got to love manifestos haven’t you - an individual writes a tome instructing the rest of the human race how to live their lives. At the Latitude festival we went to the literary arena to hear Vivienne Westwood (quite the idol of mine) present her manifesto, clearly stating in her own inimitable, faintly doddering, style what is high and low culture and instructing us in taking the high road. I am afriad she rather failed to hold our attention, focused as we were on the fact that she appeared to have spilt numerous glasses down her cream silk dress, which she proudly proclaimed to have worn for 10 years. Even while in so many ways I agreed with her completely, I struggled with the arrogance of the concept of a manifesto.

But of course that is not going to stop me reading them, in fact there is nothing like the word manifesto to arouse my curiosity. So when I spotted An Eater’s Manifesto on a friends bureau I had to start reading. It starts with this simple mission statement ‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants’. The opening chapter of the book clearly outlines a healthy eating strategy which makes perfect sense, but leaves you wondering why on earth you would need to write an entire book around such a blaringly obvious though wonderfully simple concept.

Simply because there seemed to be nothing more to say I found it impossible not to keep reading. Michael Pollan went to to explain not why this eating plan was prefereable to any other, but how we as a society had travelled so far from this basically obvious premise of eating. How mass production, processing and regulation have lead us into a situation where of the average supermarket’s contents only a fraction is really ‘food’.

He asks us to walk around our supermarkets with an imagined ancestor, our great-grandmothers, or even a caveman, and only to buy foods they recognise as food. I can sign up for this as a concept - although I may need to take someone’s Japanese and German great grandmothers round with me to end up with a diet I am content with.

He goes on to add more rules: Avoid things with unfamiliar ingredients, unpronounceable ingredients, or more than five ingredients, avoid food products that make health claims coz when did you even see a label on a banana claiming to be high in protein low in fat? Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting - all of which sound pretty sensible to me.

That said, the book did grind on me a few times, a little preachy, over simplified and skewed - but then that would seem the way of the manifesto as a medium. He also seemed to have be labouring under the assumption that a majority of Americans strive for a healthy lifestyle, well I would like to break it to him that probably a big chunk of them don’t actually give a damn about what’s healthy. At one point it became clear to me that your average American wasn’t exactly his target audience, when he said that of course not everyone could afford to eat organic and freerange ‘but those of us who can, should’, Ow!

This book is not going to change how I eat, although it nicely affirmed some of my choices, and gave me some interesting arguments against the pre-made meals I have always railed against. So thanks Michael Pollan I shall enjoy my future visits around the supermarket with my phantom entourage of batty old ladies and neandertile men!