Nutritionism and Orthorexia

I wish I'd had access to In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan's wonderful book about the intrusion of science and marketing into the Western diet, three years ago when I was first formulating my own ideas about fatness, metabolic illness, and problems with the food supply.

I felt in my bones that there had to be some environmental cause for the overwhelming epidemic of obesity that has flourished since I came of age. Simply writing the problem off as one of essentially a moral nature didn't make any sense to me. Two-thirds of Americans didn't suddenly become lazy, weak-willed, and gluttonous in a single generation.

I suspected that artificial additives and soil depletion were screwing up the collective metabolism, and Michael Pollan agrees, while also providing a lot of missing pieces of what I was trying to puzzle out.

( Here are some excerpts that I've found particularly thought-provoking. )