Audio Books In Review

by Michael Pollan
read by Scott Brick

An extensive expose of how the Western diet has gotten into the sad shape where we now find it. Pollan argues that we’ve lost our way. We’ve left behind what food meant to our lives and our culture, and we’ve allowed ourselves to be seduced by food marketers and faulty science. Thus, he argues, the key is to get back to “real food”…away from prepackaged food, preservatives and the rush of stuffing something down our gullets so we can get back to work.

I found his most powerful point to be his assertion that “food science” really doesn’t know what it’s talking about. It thinks it does…and in some areas it probably does. But since it’s a constantly-shifting base of knowledge (much of which invalidates bedrock beliefs of just a few years before), we make a mistake in assuming that it really has a handle on what’s going on. And, of course, we’ve all realized this in the back of our minds anyway…we don’t even get excited anymore when we’re told that something “causes cancer”. They’ve been wrong so many times before, who cares…right?

In the case of food, we need to understand that “we don’t know what we don’t know”…so simply running a scientific study on food and listing what it consists of doesn’t tell us a lot. There are micronutrients and other components that we don’t even know to look for yet. He bashes the religion of “nutritionism”…bascially the worship/elevation of nutrition rather than food. When we try to break food down to its component parts, then try to reassemble those parts to create the perfect human diet, we’re always missing something. We don’t understand the complexities of food, how it works for us, where it comes from…and it’s a mistake to abandon traditional diets and whole foods which have nourished us for many generations.

I heard Leonard Lopate’s interview with Michael Pollan recently, and enjoyed him so much…his manner, his points, his illustrations…that I didn’t even wait for my monthly audiobook credit to come thru. I went out and picked up the audiobook at B&N. Pollan has written a few books and is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and is a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

On many levels, I enjoyed the book. There was almost nothing that I disagreed with, and I felt like he built a strong case for returning food to its rightful place in our lives: thoughtful eating, time for eating in community, listening to our bodies and where to find real food…all this was informative and helpful.

However, I found myself ultimately disappointed in this book, for a number of reasons:

• Pollan himself was so engaging in the interview that I was sold on him as much as on what he was saying. He made it easy to listen to him, on a subject that doesn’t often interest me. However, the book wasn’t read by him. I can understand that he’s not a professional narrator himself…but I found myself thinking all the way thru that I wished I could just listen to another interview with him instead of this book.
• The narrator was a guy named Scott Brick. Since I was going to mention his name, I’ve just taken a quick peek online and found out that he has done around 300 audiobooks to date…many of them big titles, etc. I’ve never heard his work before, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t listen to him again…but his performance of this book was the biggest disappointment of all for me. His delivery was very nasal…almost whiny. I almost wondered if he had a bad head cold while recording. He also sounded…I don’t know…”snooty”? Sort of arrogant. And, IMHO, he overacted the material instead of just delivering it, even though I felt the writing was solid and accessible all on its own. I felt this way from the very first minutes of the audiobook, and couldn’t shake it thru 5 discs. I just believe he was a poor choice for this material.
• Lastly, I was disappointed for a very basic reason. Pollan never talked about “what to eat”. I don’t speak “food”…and I always appreciate examples when I’m in unfamiliar territory. I certainly understand that he didn’t want to be limiting or take responsiblity for telling people how they should eat…but when the motto for your book is “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”, I feel like that deserves some further scrutiny. Does he recommend eating plants for breakfast, etc? People who teach about food always tend to make the mistake of assuming that people know what they’re talking about, and Pollan assumed a certain level of knowledge in this case that didn’t apply to me as a reader. So I felt like I was left hanging.

The rest of the book was good stuff. It was a solid buildup, but there just wasn’t a payoff for me. Instead, I find myself longing to hear him interviewed several more times.