Swindled
by Bee Wilson
400pp, John Murray, £16.99
In Defence of Food
by Michael Pollan
256pp, Allen Lane, £16.99
According to Bee Wilson and Michael Pollan we are all going to hell in a supermarket cart. Scooting round the aisles in a trance, pulling down food "products" which bear little resemblance to the real thing, we proceed to flop down in front of the computer to chomp mindlessly on sweet and salty poisons. No wonder that we're fat and tetchy, exhibiting many of the signs of malnutrition. In a world of apparent plenty we are starving ourselves to death.
Both writers take the long historic view to explain how we - an Anglo-American "we" which explicitly excludes the more thoughtful pockets of continental Europe - got into this pickle. While the French and Italians and Spaniards tuck into small portions of local food which doesn't have time to get gussied-up between farm and fork, we gorge on deracinated pap which has been leeched of all goodness and then flown halfway round the world.
That's the theory anyway. But just as the French must get tired of being held up as an example of gustatory best practice (some of them, surely, occasionally long to let the side down with a cheeky Big Mac), we need to be careful about falling into received wisdoms when it comes to fixing the bigger problem. According to both Wilson and Pollan, simply "going organic" is not enough. For one thing, there are plenty of suppliers of excellent foodstuffs who, for one reason or another, do not fly under that flag. And for another, organic doesn't always mean quite what you think. In a recent study it emerged that produce labelled this way had actually clocked up more air miles than the common or garden varieties. (And, by the way, doesn't "garden" sound quaint in this context now?)
It is this kind of taxonomic tangle, believe Wilson and Pollan, which has led to our messed-up relationship to eating. By fixating on individual terms at particular historic moments - trans fats, Omega 3, carbs - the nutritionists who advise the food industry have tweaked and counter-tweaked their models of a healthy diet until nothing makes sense any more. Take dietary fats. For 25 years we were told that they were responsible for everything bad from obesity to heart disease. The only exceptions to this were the polyunsaturated varieties, which were supposed to have a neutral, even quietly benign, effect. Now it transpires that this is completely back-to-front. It is polyunsaturated fats which actually gunk you up, raising cholesterol and messing with your insulin. In short, for the past quarter of a century we have been encouraged by our betters in white coats to shovel down precisely the kind of fat most likely to bundle us into an early grave.
This kind of flip-flopping about food is only possible in cultures that have long been uncoupled from the land. In describing the list of food swindles to which various Britons have been subjected - pickles boiled up with copper pennies, milk squeezed from dying cows, sweets tinctured with mercury - Bee Wilson is quite clear that it is the lengthening distance from soil to dinner plate that makes such outrages possible. By the early 19th century, our cities were already so big and our land so anonymously farmed that it was impossible to hold anyone to account for a bad loaf or a joint of tainted meat. Into this gap of ignorance and sleight of hand stepped earnest men such as Frederick Accum and Arthur Hassall, who probed and tasted and measured and reported back on the horrors they routinely found in the urban diet (Hassall's microscope revealed, for instance, that West Middlesex water was teeming with countless tiny crab-like animals).
Yet these common-sense interventions were more problematic than you might expect. With Britain busy getting great on a policy of economic laissez-faire, the idea of setting up protective measures of the kind employed in France, where butchers could only trade if their breath was sufficiently sweet, was looked on with grave suspicion. In a bustling free-market, it was left to the consumer to exercise her purse-power by refusing to buy coffee bulked out with acorns or fish touched up with paint. Not until 1860, by which time Hassall's scandalous findings had been popularised by the Lancet, did Britain get its first food law designed to protect the interests of anyone skittish enough to buy their supper from a stranger.
It would be nice to think that from this point on Britain started to get the kind of transparent - metaphorically-speaking - food it deserved. But in fact, as Wilson deftly demonstrates, the coming of legislation simply introduced such linguistic fogginess that it actually became easier for someone to claim special powers for their brand of magic beans. "Lo-cal", "no fat" and "heart-friendly" are all descriptors which doubtless pass some basic legal definition, and yet mean nothing at all. Pick a packet of crisps which boasts that it is "reduced in salt" by all means, but don't make the mistake of thinking that it is doing you any good. "At its worst," thunders Wilson, "the information age has meant reinforcing people's capacity to be cheated, rather than their right to good food."
What is to be done? Michael Pollan thinks he has the answer which is simply to "eat food". By this he means that we should clear our minds of the confusing chatter of nutritionists, who tend to isolate a single vitamin or food group and label it a star, and follow instead the kind of diet eaten by our pre-industrial ancestors. Thus, rather than worrying about our B6 intake or deciding to lower our cholesterol we should think in terms of a luscious tomato or a sweet draught of milk. Each food is a system, explains Pollan, not a collection of unpronounceable compounds, and should be eaten in the kind of combinations that would have made sense to our great grandparents. Anything which comes in a packet or a tin is out, although freezing is fine.
It all sounds rather lovely, until you start to think again about Wilson's book which reveals just how far back this food-tampering business goes. As early as 1266 Henry III promulgated his super-stern Assize of Bread and Ale which laid down the basic rules for the stuff of life for the next five and a half centuries. And so eating the same way as your ancestors, as Pollan suggests, would not necessarily mean sticking to a yeoman diet of food pulled straight from your own land, but might actually encompass looking at a bit of dodgy bread quizzically, trying to decide whether you'd been done. And his suggestion that you avoid anything your great-granny wouldn't recognise as food would mean - although obviously it depends on the granny here - no sashimi, avocado or parmesan. And frankly that seems like a sacrifice too far.
Pollan's book, then, is a lyrical if rather fuzzy manifesto about how we might eat in a way which benefits not just ourselves but the larger ecological system. Wilson is tougher-minded, more realistic both about the past and the probable future. There have always been food rogues, she seems to say wearily, and there probably always will be. Our job is to try and make sure that we don't get caught out by them.
