Nothing But Iron:  Pollanation By Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. October 12, 2009 With all due respect to Bo Ryan, Mark Johnson and Elton John this might have been the biggest event in Kohl Center history.  Technically, it wasn't even a sellout, partly because there was no charge to attend, and partly because only half the arena was designated for seating.  The 7000 people who did show up filled the available seating quite well, from the front row of the floor-level seating to the highest row of the upper deck. Conspicuously absent were balls and pucks and goals and uniformed athletes and whistles and people wearing red clothes.  I did wear a red motion-W shirt, but I was one of few to sport the native dress of my people.  Likewise, there were no guitars or pianos or drum sets.  No amplifiers.  No thirty-foot-high banks of speakers.  It wasn't a game or a concert, so you may wonder why we were there.  And I will let you wonder that for a few more seconds because suspense is an important literary tactic that I learned from reading the works of professional writers who commonly use it to make their readers think they are good at writing.   We were there, in fact, to see a lecture by a professional writer.  His name is Michael Pollan.  I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking, "How does he know what I am thinking?  That's creepy."  You are also thinking the same thing that Connor thought out loud went he found out I went to a dahlia show:  "Dad, you went to a flower show?"  Yes, I did go to a flower show, but the gardeners were wearing hunting vests, wielding miter saws and fixing carburetors, and I went to see the man stuff and only occasionally glanced–disapprovingly–at the flowers, especially the pink ones, son.  There was a lot of spitting too, and we scratched ourselves wherever and whenever we wanted.   O.K. so I went to a Kohl Center lecture given by a writer.  Michael Pollan is not just any writer.  Pollan writes about a subject that is near and dear to my heart, not to mention my stomach and points beyond.  He writes about food.  Again, I know what you're thinking: Yaaaaaawwwn.  Once you dozed through a health class about that.  Calories.  Vitamins.  Carbs.  Fats.  Or even worse, reduction sauces and demi-glazes.  Boring.  Dullsville.  Nerd alert.  Somebody hit me with a Better Homes and Gardens to wake me up.   It's not like that all.  Pollan writes about food in ways that few have done.  He writes about real food, the way food was before it was a commodity and before we thought too much about it.  He writes about the modern deluge of fake food, how it came to be and how it hurts us.  And he presents it in a way that is actually entertaining.  To merely call Pollan a writer is to call Ben Franklin an inventor.   Pardon the hyperbole, and pardon the use of words like hyperbole, but Pollan is one of the great minds of our time.  He's intelligent in thought, words and speech, but doesn't act it or even look it.  (Sorry, Michael, but you could be a poster boy for Regular Digest.)  He's eloquent but not stuffy and polysyllabic.  (What kind of a person says words like polysyllabic?  I meant to say hyperpolysyllabic.)  He's teaches, but is not preachy.  And he is funny.  Very funny.  Best of all, Michael Pollan's work might save your life, or, better than that, he might make your life better.   Pollan wrote best sellers In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma.  I found both to be enlightening.  I got In Defense first, on loan from my friends Terry and Debra, who gave it to me after we had a discussion about food during dinner at their house.  That was the night we ate zucchini flowers.  You laugh, but I bet you a Coke that you would like them as much as I did and I won't even make you pay up when you lose because Coke is a part of my history, but not my present.  The dinner, typical of Terry-Debra dinners, would have ranked somewhere between Oklahoma and Texas had BCS voters been there.  It's a good thing the BCS voters were not there because it would have been crowded and I would have been kicking some serious rump roast.  Sorry, sports has a way of seeping into any discussion.  Anyway, I said I liked the simple idea of eating foods of many different colors.  At that point my friends must have deemed me Pollan ready.  I was soon captivated.         I should remind you that I am a professional doctor. With that designation, you might assume I have had extensive training in nutrition, which is one of your dumbest assumptions since that time you assumed that Peter Griffin was a real guy and you tried to make him your Facebook friend, but he wouldn't confirm you and you got angry and cancelled your satellite subscription.  (It's OK if you don't get that.  It just means you're old.)  At this point, eighteen years into my medical practice, I can say I have been woefully ignorant about the subject of what to eat, when to eat it and when to stop eating it.  In fairness, I am an anesthesiologist, so the bulk of my dietary practice stems from the phrases, "Don't eat or drink  after midnight." and "Yes, she can have a few ice chips."  I would be willing to bet that most of my colleagues, even gastroenterologists and endocrinologists have a similar paltry understanding of food.  I say this for two reasons:  1) Food education is not a priority in medical school, which taught us how to fix people, but precious little about keeping them from getting broken in the first place.  2) I have seen how my colleagues eat, which is how I used to eat.  Pollan argues the latter largely accounts for the difference in health-care expenditures in our country compared to European countries.               The lecture, which was sponsored by UW Madison's Go Big Read program, started with a bag.  Not a bang, a bag.  From this brown paper grocery bag Pollan removed a box of Pop Tarts, a pack of Twinkies, Gogurt, a box of Fruit Loops and, for contrast, an apple.  He held up the Fruit Loops and pointed to the Smart Choices check mark in the upper right-hand corner of the box, wondering how it could be that a cereal containing 43% sugar by weight is a smart choice.  So he asked.  One answer, I think from a member of the committee designating smart-choice foods for check marks, led to the following:  "It's better than a donut." He went on to talk about our Western diet:  a complex product of deception, profit, government-sustained excess, ignorance, prioritization failure and junk science.  He explained how we consumers give it life and how it is a truly remarkable accomplishment to have found what has eluded other cultures for most of human existence:  a diet that actually makes us sick.  He talked about the remarkable breadth of healthy food choices.  Some cultures subsist well on meat, some on fish, some on fat, some on vegetables.  What the healthy diet lacks are Gogurt, Twinkies and, as Pollan calls them, thousands of other edible food-like substances synthesized from chemically-modified components of corn, soy and wheat, often adorned with fancy, deceptive health claims.   We may think of Pollan as the food guy, but the scope of his ideas is broader than that.  In the span of an hour he had not only talked about food, but covered the ways in which food is an integral component of health, health care, politics, the environment, the economy and agriculture.  That's a big bang for zero bucks.   Pollan's ability to explain intricate relationships in terms simple enough for the average person to understand, is a remarkable talent.  He goes beyond typical investigative journalism, not only elucidating the problem, but offering solutions, including simple rules for eating, like these, which were not in the book:  1) Don't eat anything advertised on television.  2) Eat all the junk food you like, as long as you make it yourself (from scratch).  Pollan says he loves French fries, but only eats them once a month because they are such a mess to make.   It may turn out that Pollan doesn't have all the answers, but I think we will find he has asked the right questions of the right people.  He has masterfully scrutinized and compiled the best available evidence for sensible eating since the days when evidence was not required to eat.  Call it a gut feeling if you like, but I am all in.  At least mostly all in.   If we can say nothing else with certainty, we can say that the status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable. You now have choices.  You can scoff at me and dismiss the Pollan movement as another passing fad.  You can have no opinion and do nothing.  You can check out Pollan's books or the many free links (Wikipedia has a bunch) to his articles or watch his movie, Food, Inc.  You can meet me at McDonalds for a Big Mac, large order of fries, and a large cola-flavored high fructose corn syrup, only I won't be there.  You can be part of what could be a critical shift in our culture that may once again make our nation healthy, strong and solvent.  I leave you with thought fragments that I could have used above if I did not have crops to tend, food to prepare, other articles to write and warm places to visit:  1) There were farmers in the audience too, some of them sporting green protest shirts adorned with "In Defense of Farming".  Pollan argued that he was pro farmer and explained how our current way of eating is not only killing farmers, but killing farming.  Of the dollars we spend on food, farmers get a tiny portion, which is why so many farms are going belly-up, so to speak.  The edible food-like substance packaging industry (cereal box makers, for example) makes more money than the farmers do.  Changing the way we eat will close the huge gap between farmers and the consumer dollar.  It will also eliminate rampant soil-degrading monocultures (vast expanses of a single crop) sustainable only with pesticides and expensive fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.  2) There were no concessions, which was really weird for a Kohl Center event.  I guess they figured that most people had read Pollan's book, so there wouldn't be anyone to buy the stuff they sell.  Note to Kohl Center:  If you sell apples or bananas, I will probably buy one or both often.  3) If you ride your bike to a Pollan lecture, go a few minutes earlier than early.  I was there almost an hour beforehand and it took me ten minutes to find an empty lamp-post onto which I could lock my bike.  On the way home I thought I had somehow time-warped into the Tour de France.  4) I am asked this question about my writing, "How do you think of this stuff?"  It's mostly effortless.  I have no trouble finding material.  The challenge is finding enough sedentary time to write it.  Here's an example of my thought process:  I went to bed without a title for this issue.  I knew I wanted Pollan in it and I had hoped for a one-word title that would neatly summarize the event and the cause.  Pollanology.  Nope.  Pollanalysis.  Closer.  Pollan something.  Pollan . . .  Pollan . . . sleepy . . . sleepier . . .  At 5:39 a.m. I woke up.  Pollanation.  It just popped into my head.  Many ideas come while I am writing.   For example, I just thought of an alternative titles:  Wanna Be Like Mike and Thought for Food.  5) Note to speakers who precede the speaker who everyone really came to see: If you are going to waste my time hearing yourself speak, please don't preface your speech with "I'll be brief."  If you are brief, I will know it and appreciate it.  If not, you just wasted a few seconds more of my time by lying to me.  6) My favorite Pollan rule for eating is this:  Avoid anything that makes a health claim.  Health-based advertising, he says, is a good sign that a food-like substance is highly processed and therefore not healthy at all.  For example, I eat butter.  Butter is a processed food, but most of the processing was done in a cow's udder and a slight bit more by a bonneted old lady with a wooden butter churn.  We have been told for decades that butter is bad.  And then margarine came along and then we found out that margarine is deadly.  These days we have a new substance to spread on our toast.  It sells itself as a healthy alternative—no cholesterol or trans fat and fortified with Vitamin A.  It's is a so-called yogurt spread made by the trade name of Brummel and Brown.  It's the only "butter" Connor will eat.  If you look closely, you will see that it's only "10% natural yogurt" (as opposed to artificial yogurt?).  Not counting water, it has 14 ingredients including a blend of four different oils and includes calcium sodium ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) to "protect quality".  I wonder why they didn't call it EDTA spread or four-oil spread?  I'll switch back to yogurt spread, but you'll have to first prove that it's better than butter. Author to Author: What if Michael Pollan had interviewed Steve Lagman on the subject of food, health and obesity.  Click Here to read what might have been said, especially if you don't have anything better to do or can convince yourself that the better-to-do thing can wait.   __________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports and other stuff column.  The author is deeply grateful to Debra and Terry, for pointing him to the trail head of the path to sensible eating, not only with books, but through culinary intelligence and by engineering our 2007 trip to Italy, an unforgettable glimpse of a different way of eating, thinking, eating, living and eating, not to mention drinking.  The author believes that wine is a food, because it comes from grapes.  The author, who once consumed an entire box of Pop Tarts in a single morning,  receives no corporate support from Amazon.com, Michael Pollan, Brummel, Brown, Kellogg's, The University of Wisconsin, the country of Italy or the Kohl Center.  The author himself does provide considerable support to the Kohl Center, so the Kohl Center owed him.  We'll call it even now.  ©2009 DrTM Enterprises.  All rights reserved.