Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,46

Michael Pollan in New York at one of the eateries in the progressive gourmet empire of restaurateur Danny Meyer. As we sat down, I mentioned encountering a quote of his in Columbus, Ohio. “Which one?” he asked, before guessing his most famous dictum: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

It’s easy to envision this quote plastered on the walls and menus (or crocheted on homemade samplers) at vegetarian or vegan restaurants across the United States. But this advice would have been out of place at Northstar, where the interpretation of good meant a menu touting loads of high-quality meat and dairy at Cadillac-sized portions. I asked Pollan how he felt about this trickle-down effect of his name, his words, and his work throughout the food and restaurant industries. “Good!” he said. “You could have seen McDonald’s trying to do the same thing. I’m glad it was a good place.”

One difficulty with good places—the trendy, moral, gourmet outfits—is that they have created a confusing glut of virtue. It’s hard to distinguish a place like Northstar with its commitment to “pure and natural” dining from the countless shoppes, bougie larders, and corporate brands that purvey “fresh,” “farm-raised,” or “responsible” goods. Despite sounding wholesome and ethical, often these words are meaningless or a nice turn of marketing copy. Pollan joked about encountering “GMO-free” and “gluten-free” water for sale on shelves in his travels.

Take the organic designation, for example, which basically means an item produced with relatively little use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers or an animal raised under certain guidelines. Despite being sacred to many consumers, organic often falls somewhere between useful and corrupt, depending on the item. After all, an organic label doesn’t necessarily make food more nutritious, more environmentally sound, completely free of herbicides or pesticides, or even thoroughly vetted by inspectors. Neither the shortcomings nor the price of organic food has kept it from insane popularity. Eating organic has become a source of comfort, a shortcut to culinary absolution that went mainstream. In 2015, Whole Foods, a pioneer in the organic game, was supplanted by the mega-wholesaler Costco as the top purveyor of organic food.*

As a diner, it’s nearly impossible to function in an era in which much of the reporting on the science of what’s good is built on a foundation of sand (or quinoa). Every few months, a deceptive new study gets published about coffee, wine, chocolate, eggs, butter, fat, salt, sugar, sweeteners, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), vitamins, dairy, tree nuts, breakfast, and oils. As if by design, they shatter news cycles and clutter social media feeds, and in a blink, a fruit, a grain, a root, a spice, a legume, gets indexed as secretly good, actually bad, possibly carcinogenic, ecologically problematic, a new cure-all superfood, lacking all conviction, or full of passionate intensity.

All of this din and contradiction have created a disorienting uncertainty for consumers looking for alternatives to the evils of fast and processed foods. It’s no surprise that food fads, purity-themed trends, and bizarro diets have become so enticing in a steadily changing climate of vaguely defined wellness. “Clean eating—whether it is called that or not—is perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a dream of purity in a toxic world,” writes Bee Wilson in a dissection of wellness culture in The Guardian. “To walk into a modern western supermarket is to be assailed by aisle upon aisle of salty, oily snacks and sugary cereals, of ‘bread’ that has been neither proved nor fermented, of cheap, sweetened drinks and meat from animals kept in inhumane conditions.”

What helps kindle the forces of extremism (both inside the food system and outside) is the comprehensive plunge in the credibility of government, which has never been a particularly effective arbiter or moral advocate of good-food policies anyway. It’s fair to say that a food pyramid with a base that suggests six to eleven daily servings of carbohydrates might not have been terrific advice. Meanwhile, were a consumer to follow the FDA’s guidelines for “healthy” foods, which have been in place since the early 1990s and have only come under review in the past few years, Pop-Tarts and Frosted Flakes would qualify as healthy items while almonds, salmon, and olive oil, all of which are high in fat, would be discouraged.

Even if public officials and institutions were savvier and more principled, the national credo of rugged individualism still rears its stubborn head. Americans hate being told what to do, especially by the government.

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