a fascinating reader message

Michael sends an especially fun message. I was given Pollan’s The Botany of Desire several years ago as a gift, but haven’t gotten to it yet, I’m ashamed to admit. (It’s dangerous to give me books as gifts, because they can easily end up in a stack of 40 others at any given moment.)

Anyway, this message opened up windows for me, and I’ll now get to Pollan sooner rather than later:

“I think I’ve found you another potential ally in Michael Pollan. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, he rose to awareness a few years ago
with his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Now, his almost painful argument
for eating meat aside (he takes some weird pseudo-Levinasian stance,
talking of respect for the animal as Other, and meeting their gaze,
etc, etc.) I think he is actually doing some very good object-oriented
metaphysics in the same way Ian is. When I first heard about Michael
Pollan, I was working part-time in a book store and I couldn’t believe
how popular his Omnivore’s Dilemma was, so I decided to find out more
about him. I picked up his earlier book, The Botany of Desire, which
is essentially a biography of four different plants, apples, tulips,
marijuana, and potatoes. The book details the co-evolution of these
plants with humans, shifting in perspective from us to them and
focusing primarily on the interactions between us and these plants we
find so desirable. He continues along this sort of study in the best
parts of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for example when he provides a brief
history of corn (it doesn’t hurt his co-evolutionary story that corn
apparently can’t reproduce on it’s own and actually needs humans for
fertility).

I just finished his latest book (which has been great bedside
reading), In Defense of Food. This latest is probably his most
philosophical, engaging less in the history of foods and serving
largely as a critique of reductionist food science which he calls
Nutritionism. Basically, science treats foods as if they are reducible
to their basic nutritional elements, while Pollan tries to show that
actually, food can’t be treated that way (as vitamin supplements show
us for example, the body simply hasn’t adapted for pure vitamins and
minerals and thus doesn’t absorb most of the tablet anyway). His
critique is very similar to your own critique of reductionist
metaphysics. He bases the book on three sentences: ‘Eat food. Mostly
plants. Not too much.’ with the major distinction in the book being
drawn between ‘food’ and ‘food-like-substances,’ those things which
are made from food to look like food, but are chemically ‘enhanced.’
This actually reaches a new level when he talks of science attempting
to promote the healthy foods from different regional cuisines, so when
they say something like ‘Well what makes the Greek diet so healthy? Is
it the nuts? The olive oil?’ as if it must simply be one object, if
not one nutrient (Omega-3s, etc). Pollan will say that while we engage
food on a whole-food level, these whole-foods (real food) is part of a
larger frame (object?) known as the cuisine. So not only can’t the
individual foods be broken down into the sum of their parts, but
neither can regional cuisines. The whole is always greater than the
sum of its parts.

One of my favourite parts of the book is when he talks briefly about
soy, how soybeans themselves actually contain anti-nutrients which
counter-act their own nutrients, so that when they are eaten, they
provide little sustenance. Centuries ago in Asia however, people
discovered that if you pound the soybeans, boil them, and then take
the liquid and let it solidify, you remove the anti-nutrients and tap
into the healthy core of the soybean, getting tofu. I think this is
actually a great example of one object combing the depths of another
as per OOP. Anyway, this may be nothing, but I think a lot of Pollan’s
work is perfectly in-line with what you have been doing, and probably
what the future of OOP could (should?) be, taking objects seriously
and writing about them.”