[Springboard] LIMITS TO POWER STUDY new economic thinking

[James Wiegel]

I ran across 2 things recently:
 
1.  The current issue (December) of ODE magazine has a special report on 3 ways to build a better economy (see below)

2.  Bill Moyers featured Michael Pullan who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma and an Eater's Manifesto.  Love to hear David Zahrt comment on this.
 

Jim Wiegel

A laugh is composed of 'a series of short vowel-like notes (syllables) each about 75 milliseconds long, that are repeated at regular intervals about 210 milliseconds apart'. from The Kingdom of Infinite Space.

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David Bank | December 2008 issue
Making money a renewable resource

San Francisco based investment banker Peter Liu's new resource bank has already garnered $166 million in deposits, which it's using to fund green technology and sustainable businesses. 
Photo: Jennifer Hale
Several years ago, when the drips through our ceiling could no longer be ignored, we decided to install solar panels along with a new roof on our Berkeley, California, home. Then, when we needed a new car after our son arrived, we opted for a Toyota Prius.
We paid a premium for our little bit of green chic. That is, the money saved on our monthly electricity bill and at the gas pump didnt immediately justify the price of the not-yet-mainstream products. We figured the photovoltaic system wouldnt save us money for at least a dozen years, and it may be at least half that long for the gas-electric hybrid to pay for itself with better gas mileage. Were counting on global instability and corporate malfeasance to make our investments pay off, we joked to friends. And we havent been wrong yet! 
At about the same time, across the San Francisco Bay, Peter Liu was making a much bigger bet on the same trends, literally banking on the green economy. Liu, a chemical engineer by training, assembled a Whos Who of Silicon Valley investors and others to put up just less than $25 million to open the first explicitly green bank in the U.S.
Since then, with a single branch and nearly no marketing, the New Resource Bank has attracted $166 million in deposits, including $10 million from the state of California. For individuals and institutions that have to bank somewhere, having ordinary savings and checking accounts in a bank that puts the money to work with loans to organic food producers, green developers and sustainable businesses has powerful appeal. As of June 30, deposits had more than doubled from a year earlier, while loans had nearly tripled, to $98 million.
Green may be the best kind of bank to be in these economic conditions, says Julius Genachowski, co-founder of the investment firm Rock Creek Ventures. He was one of New Resource Banks original organizers and came up with its name. I think we were early in recognizing that a bank that focused on this market could also be a successful business.
The promise of the green economy enabled Liu to raise an additional $14 million from investors this summer, despite the meltdown on Wall Street. New investors included Generation Investment Management LLP, the fund established by former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and his partner, David Blood (their moniker, Blood and Gore, is a good description of the financial markets). Triodos Bank in the Netherlands, one of the worlds first banks established specifically to finance sustainable businesses, increased its stake in New Resource Bank. The amount of new financing fell short of New Resource Banks targets, but nonetheless gave the bank room for growth in both deposits and loans.
These days, making loans to businesses like organic cheese-maker Cowgirl Creamery, and offering no money down financing to homeowners interested in putting solar systems on their roofs no longer seems risky compared to investments in, say, subprime mortgage backed securities. (New Resource Bank did recently announce its first bad investment, a $1.9 million residential construction loan.)
Still, in the financial ecosystem, banks like New Resource represent an evolutionary growth spurt. Socially responsible investments, now 10 percent of the market, primarily seek to avoid harmful practices. Green venture capitalists made a record $2 billion in equity investments during the second quarter of 2008, according to Cleantech Group, a San Francisco research consulting firm. That has created a boom (dare we say bubble ?) in green technology startups. But scaling up the green economy also requires the kind of bread-and-butter credit traditionally provided by banks as business and construction loans or, say, financing for residential solar power systems that allow homeowners to pay a monthly installment. New Resource Bank is committed, as it says in its financial statements, to financing efficient and sustainable resources in its community. 
Liu, now vice chairman at the bank he founded, insists the new market dynamics have reversed the historic trade-off between social benefits and financial returns. Now, sustainability is good business. When New Leaf Paper in San Francisco started to deliver 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper in 1998, for example, few paper mills had made sustainability a cornerstone of their business practices. With New Leaf growing 30 percent a year, competitors are starting to change their ways, says founder and chief executive Jeff Mendelsohn. New Resource Bank offered a slightly better interest rate than New Leafs previous bank on a $3.9 million line of credit, he says, which New Leaf uses to fund accounts receivable, inventory and other business needs. Theyve been a good partner as we navigate this fast growth, Mendelsohn says. They invest their time and their financial skills. Its more than an arms length financial relationship. 
Paul Herman, founder of HIP Investor, a researcher and consultant for investors looking for socially responsible and sustainable business opportunities, says New Resource and a handful of other banks around the U.S. Green Bank in Texas, Home Savings Bank in Wisconsin and Charter Oak Bank in California, to name a few, fill a market niche for small green enterprises. Access to capital allows the opportunity for those businesses to prove they can be profitable, Herman says.
In this economy, a green bank provides a rare opportunity for depositors to leverage money to support their values with little risk, since the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation now insures deposits up to $250,000. As a rule of thumb, New Resource, like other banks, is able to lend 10 times the amount of money it has on deposit, meaning a $100 deposit can enable a $1,000 loan to a green business. And since New Resource covers the ATM fees charged by other banks, depositors can get their money any time from any ATM. 
Without a real marketing push, New Resource already has more than 1,000 depositors, including Ode. We believe that we are evolving from what was yesterday a social movement into a market opportunity, Liu told me in the banks only branch, a LEED certified green office in San Franciscos South of Market neighborhood. Thats what we are engaged in a market expansion exercise. 
Peter Lius green education began at an oil company. He emigrated to the U.S. with his family from Taiwan when he was 12, settling in South Los Angeles. His father opened an electronics-supply store, where his son worked after school. Liu attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in chemical engineering, and went to work for Chevron oil company. I was very practical minded and put personal economics first, he says. I took the biggest offer at the biggest company. 
As a process engineer at Chevrons petrochemical plants, Liu helped design sites that met Californias stricter environmental regulations, as well as lower-cost facilities that satisfied looser rules in Louisiana, Texas and other countries. There are a lot of good people, great people, at Chevron, but external forces are really needed for advances to be made, Liu says.
So Liu switched sides, joining Californias Air Resources Board and helped put into practice the states Clean Air Act. One object lesson: Executives at Chevron and other companies, who complained about proposed rules for clean gasoline, changed their tunes once the regulation was implemented. Ads trumpeted their products abilities to keep fuel lines clean and help cars run better. It became a marketing advantage, not a requirement, Liu says.
That experience led to a masters degree in public policy at Princeton University, and eventually into the banking world at Chase Manhattan Bank and Credit Suisse First Boston. The direct impetus for New Resource Bank came in 2004, when Liu, along with software entrepreneur Bob Epstein and several others, was asked by Californias treasurer at the time, Phil Angelides, to help develop a green strategy for the states two huge public pension funds, an initiative dubbed The Green Wave. Eventually, the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) agreed to invest $1 billion in established companies that met environmental standards, and another $500 million in venture capital and private equity investments in clean technologies.
Liu says many of the entrepreneurs he met told him, Thats all great, but the capital chain isnt just about private equity. The real need for money is on the credit side. In other words, in banking.
Liu and Epstein began shopping the concept for what they were calling The Sustainable Bank. One of their first meetings was with Peter Blom, CEO of Triodos Bank, established in the Netherlands in 1980, now with operations in the U.K., Spain, Belgium and Germany. Triodos had considered entering the U.S. market, but worried its model wouldnt translate well. Europeans were willing to accept slightly lower interest rates to realize social returns, Blom says; Americans, at least until recently, werent. Likewise, Triodos was able to start in Europe with basic banking adding more services later. The U.S. market required a full menu from the start.
Blom was impressed by Lius research and analysis, and by his questions about Triodos operations. He asked a couple of extra questions that were not so easy to get from the Internet, Blom recalls. We thought, Why do it ourselves if there was such a good partner? New Resource Bank didnt accept all the money Triodos principals wanted to put in; the initial round of financing exceeded the plan approved by bank regulators by 60 percent. Now, Triodos has a 10 percent stake.
Such interest from investors underscores what may be New Resource Banks greatest challenge, by now, everybody is going green. Some 60 banks worldwide have adopted the Equator Principles, setting out social and environmental guidelines for project financing. Citigroup vowed to provide $50 billion to environmental projects over the next decade, while Bank of America announced a $20 billion initiative to support sustainable businesses and turned its new 55-story, $1.2 billion Manhattan office into the worlds most eco friendly skyscraper.
Last year, when former U.S. President Bill Clinton launched a global energy efficiency building retrofit program, he quickly signed up five of the worlds largest banks, ABN AMRO, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, each committed to arranging $1 billion in financing for cities and building owners to reduce energy consumption in existing buildings. If the money comes through, that will double the worldwide retrofit market.
Such global-scale investments are necessary if the world is to reduce emissions 30Ã? gigatons by 2030, about half the projected output, if current trends continue, the radical step experts say is necessary to stabilize carbon dioxide levels and avoid catastrophic climate change. A few more solar rooftops and Prius drivers wont be nearly enough.
A cap on carbon output, along with a market for carbon trading, will drive a booming market for clean technology, generating billions of dollars for investments that, in theory, could meet much of that challenge. In practice, however, it will take more than money and technology to realize the potential of the green economy. Equally crucial is leadership to coordinate multiple players and diffuse new practises to homes and businesses. Thats where institutions like New Resource Bank come in.
The city of Berkeley, California, for example, said last year it would become the first urban center in the country to finance the upfront cost of solar installations for homeowners who agree to pay back loans over 20 years through assessments on their property tax bills. The key to this entire program is to find a bank willing to provide the financing anticipated by the program, city staff members wrote in a report. 
Likewise, Milwaukee and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) are developing a plan to retrofit the citys building stock, an ambitious effort called Milwaukee Energy Efficiency, or Me2. Under the plan, $500 million in private financing would be repaid by building owners through monthly bills for the retrofit work, guaranteed to be below the cost of current energy bills.
I have not found finance to be a problem, per se, says Joel Rogers, the director of COWS and a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who hopes to launch a pilot program in January of 2009. What the banks want to see is a demonstration of this working. They dont want to fund an experiment. What they have all said is, If you can guarantee payments, by getting this on a utility bill, with a penalty for non-payment, then Ill get you a very low cost of capital, below market rate. And I believe them. 
Liu says New Resource is committed to breaking down barriers and taking on such leadership. The banks solar-financing program packages government rebates, tax incentives and low-cost capital into 25-year loans. Real estate developers who come in for financing can choose between two loans, one for conventional buildings and one for green construction, with a one-eighth percent discount and lower fees. For a $5 million loan, that could mean a savings of more than $60,000 over 10 years.
With the financial crisis exposing the perils of business as usual, Liu is looking for unconventional opportunities. The hurt for just doing the conventional things is getting greater and greater, he says. As the markets revive, Green should be associated with better performance. 
Thats in line with the advice Peter Blom of Triodos offered Liu in their meetings. You really need to be the crazy guy when others say, This is green enough, he told Liu. You have to go the extra mile. Liu has already taken New Resource Bank that extra mile, and now hes going further.

© Ode Magazine USA, Inc. and Ode Luxembourg 2008 (further information in Privacy & Copyright)

 
 
Death of a paradigm
The current economic pain must result in a greater collective gain.
Noreena Hertz | December 2008 issue 

Countries must be given the freedom to determine their economic policies to meet their own needs, argues Noreena Hertz. 
Photo: Chris Saunders
We’re witnessing the death of a paradigm. As is usual at moments of mourning, such a claim is met by denial, resistance and anger from the initiators and defenders of the old faith.
But it would be parochial to think recent events just expose microflaws in the banking system and the outcome will be a tinkering with the financial system and that’s that. The dominant economic theory of the past 20 years, a theory that put liberty before equity, gave markets more power than states and saw risk as a public good that shouldn’t be restrained, is defunct. The system that not only condoned but encouraged excessive greed, the laissez-faire capitalism embraced by the U.S. and the U.K. some 20 years ago, and foisted on the poorest countries of the world by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, has had its day. The public won’t tolerate resuscitating it.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean all versions of capitalism are redundant. It was part of the hubris of the Washington hegemony that its capitalism was the only capitalism. But capitalism has always existed in substantially different forms. The continental European form differs from the Asian, which differs from the Swedish, and so on. The differences largely depend on the extent to which a country values the state, wealth redistribution, community, culture and non-monetary measures of success. It’s only the Anglo-American “end of history” type of capitalism, a philosophy that actively discarded these other factors and decoupled the economy from social justice, that must soon be buried.
For the paradigm was inherently dishonest, built on promises that could never be fulfilled. In the past few months, its various disconnects have begun to be publicly revealed: disconnects between the real money that circulates in our economies and the Monopoly money that circulates in the financial realm; disconnects between what we physically own and what we can afford to own; disconnects between risk and reward, two things the paradigm itself supposedly traded off against each other but in recent years became perfectly correlated; disconnects tangibly manifest in unintelligible bank balance sheets, in unprecedented levels of personal debt and in hedge fund bosses earning billions annually.
Up until now, the challenge to the hegemonic position was confined to a group of thinkers, myself included, who saw the writing on the wall and published to that effect, and a handful of national politicians who were determinedly vocal in their concerns. But although we dissenters did have significant audiences, our views were never seen as mainstream, because the supporters of the hegemonic paradigm were the global business elite, the dominant economic, financial and business media and the U.S.

This will change. Now that the cracks are so clear, now that people’s jobs are in peril, in the U.K. and U.S., unemployment is rising at meteoric rates, now that the loan pushers are calling their loans in, now that we don’t have money to shop and we witness our wealth collapsing, the public is getting angry, and not just at bankers. We’re seeing a fundamental outrage at the whole interconnected mess of a system: at energy companies that record massive profits yet allow pensioners to struggle to stay warm in winter; at CEOs who can earn up to 1,000 times the salary of their average worker; and soon, any day now, at those politicians who allowed this to happen, at all those who allowed such a fundamental disconnect between how these politicos portrayed the world and how we’re now collectively experiencing it.
The public recognizes that it has the moral right and authority to damn the ideology that resulted in this. This is a fundamental change. Smart politicians will recognize this tectonic shift, this change in the balance of power from high finance and big corporations to the people, and will seek to build political capital from it. We’re all socialists now, what with mainstream politicians from left and right criticizing bankers’ irresponsible behavior and salaries, and calling for state intervention in the financial markets.
But these calls won’t get them elected if they’re addressed only in the banking sector. For the financial crisis is a manifestation of a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about the world, a flawed way of thinking that’s going to hurt real people increasingly over the next couple of years as the world enters a recession. And it will hurt not only people in countries that preached the paradigm, but those in countries that didn’t. Job cuts, shrinking growth forecasts, tumbling stock markets are already being seen in Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Beijing and Moscow. The poorest countries will experience the double whammy of having had to deregulate, privatize and open up their markets to be eligible for aid and seeing those pledges go unmet.
This is the first full crisis of globalization, a recognition that in a tightly interconnected world, one country’s troubles fast become each and every country’s troubles, the first collective “lose-lose” situation. That means the smartest politicians will be those who aren’t only willing to differentiate themselves from the laissez-faire past, but who are willing to engage in a transparent exchange of ideas about what kind of world, what kind of society, we want. The smartest politicians will be those who come willing to reconstruct and, if necessary, dismantle their prior assumptions, and are open-minded about which thinkers, ideas, theories to embrace and which to reject. The smartest politicians will be those who understand, and are explicit in stating, that when the facts stop fitting the world view, they have to recreate the world view, not recreate the facts.
And in that process, they can and must draw lessons from the past 20 years. No more “one size fits all” economic prescriptions. Countries must be given the freedom to determine their economic policies to meet their own needs. No more domineering, romanticized policy of deregulation. The perils of weak or non-existent regulation are all too clear. Any industry that potentially harms the public good must be fair game to regulate, with teeth. And the myth that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” at the old ideology’s core, must finally be jettisoned. For it was never true. Social mobility in the U.K. has barely improved in 40 years. In the U.S., a quarter of the country’s wealth is in the hands of just 14,000 families. It’s time to put in place policies that will ensure that upside gain, not only downside risk, is shared.
The next phase of capitalism, properly configured, will forsake catchy slogans and neat economic models for the complex nuances our multi-polar world demands. It will mix policies of localization with an understanding that those problems that owe to our interconnectedness, like CO2 emissions, will necessitate global solutions and can’t be tackled alone. And it will actively seek to redefine what’s valuable, so children growing up today don’t make the mistake our generation made of confusing success with the ability to purchase another pair of Nikes or a Gucci bag.
The old paradigm may be dying. But let us not mourn and instead have hope. For if from its ashes something significantly different, better and wiser emerges, then however hard the immediate future may be, the current economic suffering will not be in vain but for our collective greater good.
 
IN T RODUC T ION l AN EATER’S MANIFESTO 
 
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants 
 
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy 
 
I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages or so. I’ll try to resist, but will go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recommendations 
 
Like, eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat 
 
You can see how quickly things can get complicated 
 
I started on this quest to identify a few simple rules about eating after publishing The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2006. Questions of personal health did not take center stage in that book, which was more concerned with the ecological and ethical dimensions of our eating choices. (Though I’ve found that, in most but not all cases, the best ethical and environmental choices also happen to be the best choices for our health—very good news indeed.) But many readers wanted to know, after they’d spent a few hundred pages following me following the food chains that feed us, “Okay, but what should I eat? And now that you’ve been to the feedlots, the food- processing plants, the organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what do you eat?” Fair questions, though it does seem to me a symptom of our present confusion about food that people would feel the need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or doctor or government
 food pyramid, on so basic a question about the conduct of our everyday lives as humans. I mean, what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat? True, as omnivores—creatures that can eat just about anything nature has to offer and that in fact need to eat a wide variety of different things in order to be healthy—the  3  “What to eat” question is somewhat more complicated for us than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom have for most of human history been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to children without a lot of controversy or fuss 
 
But over the last several decades, mom lost much of her authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to scientists and food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance of the two) and, to a lesser extent, to the government, with its ever- shifting dietary guidelines, food- labeling rules, and perplexing pyramids 
 
Think about it: Most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children or, for that matter, what our mothers fed us as children 
 
This is, historically speaking, an unusual state of affairs 
 
My own mother grew up in the 1930s and 1940s eating a lot of traditional Jewish- American fare, typical of families who recently emigrated from Russia or Eastern Europe: stuffed cabbage, organ meats, cheese blintzes, kreplach, knishes stuffed with potato or chicken liver, and vegetables that often were cooked in rendered chicken or duck fat. I never ate any of that stuff as a kid, except when I visited my grandparents. My mother, an excellent and adventurous cook whose own menus were shaped by the cosmopolitan food trends of New York in the 1960s (her influences would have included the 1964 World’s Fair; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; Manhattan restaurant menus of the time; and of course the rising drumbeat4 l in defense of food  of food marketing) served us a rotating menu that each week completed a culinary world tour: beouf bourguignon or beef Stroganoff on Monday; coq au vin or oven- fried chicken (in a Kellogg’s Cornflakes crust) on Tuesday;
 meat loaf or Chinese pepper steak on Wednesday (yes, there was a lot of beef); spaghetti pomodoro with Italian sausages on Thursday; and on her weekend nights off, a Swanson’s TV dinner or Chinese takeout 
 
She cooked with Crisco or Wesson oil rather than chicken or duck fat and used margarine rather than butter because she’d absorbed the nutritional orthodoxy of the time, which held that these more up- to- date fats were better for our health 
 
(Oops.) Nowadays I don’t eat any of that stuff—and neither does my mother, who has moved on too. Her parents wouldn’t recognize the foods we put on the table, except maybe the butter, which is back. Today in America the culture of food is changing more than once a generation, which is historically unprecedented— and dizzying 
 
What is driving such relentless change in the American diet? One force is a thirty- two- billion- dollar food- marketing machine that thrives on change for its own sake. Another is the constantly shifting ground of nutrition science that, depending on your point of view, is steadily advancing the frontiers of our knowledge about diet and health or is just changing its mind a lot because it is a flawed science that knows much less than it cares to admit. Part of what drove my grandparents’ food culture from the American table was official scientific opinion, which, beginning in the 1960s, decided that animal fat was a deadly substance. And then there were the food manufacturers,  which stood to make very little money from my grandmother’s cooking, because she was doing so much of it from scratch— up to and including rendering her own cooking fats. Amplifying the “latest science,” they managed to sell her daughter on the virtues of hydrogenated
 vegetable oils, the ones that we’re now learning may be, well, deadly substances 
 
Sooner or later, everything solid we’ve been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study. Consider the latest findings 
 
In 2006 came news that a low- fat diet, long believed to protect against cancer, may do no such thing—this from the massive, federally funded Women’s Health Initiative, which has also failed to find a link between a low- fat diet and the risk of coronary heart disease. Indeed, the whole nutritional orthodoxy around dietary fat appears to be crumbling, as we will see. In 2005 we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we’d been confidently told for years, help prevent colorectal cancers and heart disease. And then, in the fall of 2006, two prestigious studies on omega- 3 fats published at the same time came to strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences found little conclusive evidence that eating fish would do your heart much good (and might hurt your brain, because so much fish is contaminated with mercury), a Harvard study brought the hopeful piece of news that simply by eating a couple
 of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil tablets) you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third. It’s no wonder that omega- 3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of our time as food scientists rush to microencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly all- terrestrial foods as bread and pasta, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, spout fishy new health claims. (I hope you remember the relevant rule.) By now you’re probably feeling the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science- section reader as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few words of this book. Words I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food- industry marketing, and will. But before I do, it’s important to understand how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and
 anxiety. That is the subject of the first portion of this book, “The Age of Nutritionism.” The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutrition science, and—ahem—journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. But humans deciding what to eat without professional guidance—something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees—is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, a definite career loser if you’re a nutritionist, and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or reporter. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, that you should “eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so like a large gray cloud, a great Conspiracy of Scientific Complexity has gathered around
 the simplest questions of nutrition—much to the advantage of everyone involved. Except perhaps the supposed beneficiary of all this nutritional advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters. For the most important thing to know about the campaign to professionalize dietary advice is that it has not made us any healthier. To the contrary: As I argue in part one, most of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century (and in particular the advice to replace the fats in our diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter 
 
My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters. To do this requires an exercise that might at first blush seem unnecessary, if not absurd: to offer a defense of food and the eating thereof. That food and eating stand in need of a defense might seem counterintuitive at a time when “overnutrition” is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than undernutrition. But I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it—in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone—is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term. Jean- Anthelme Brillat- Savarin, the eighteenth- century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which “feed,” and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology 
 
But if food and eating stand in need of a defense, from whom, or what, do they need defending? From nutrition science on one side and from the food industry on the other—and from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered. As eaters we find ourselves increasingly in8 l in defense of food  the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex—comprised of well- meaning, if error- prone, scientists and food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus 
 
Together, and with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed an ideology of nutritionism that, among other things, has convinced us of three pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the “nutrient”; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health. Because food in this view is foremost a matter of biology, it follows that we must try to eat “scientifically”—by the nutrient and the number and under the guidance of experts 
 
If such an approach to food doesn’t strike you as the least bit strange, that is probably because nutritionist thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology 
 
That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea—destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do—and no people suffer from  9  as many diet- related health problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.*[1] The scientists haven’t tested the hypothesis yet, but I’m willing to bet that when they do they’ll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so- called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists, who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and
 blithely eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low- fat diets. Maybe it’s time we confronted the American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily 
 
I don’t mean to suggest that all would be well if we could just stop worrying about food or the state of our dietary health: Let them eat Twinkies! There are in fact some very good reasons to worry. The rise of nutritionism reflects legitimate concerns that the American diet, which is well on its way to becoming the world’s diet, has changed in ways that are making us increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well- established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Yes, the rise to prominence of these chronic diseases is partly due to the fact that we’re not dying earlier in life of infectious diseases, but only partly: Even after adjusting for age, many of the so-called diseases of civilization were far less common a century ago—and they remain rare in places where people don’t eat the way we do 
 
I’m speaking, of course, of the elephant in the room whenever we discuss diet and health: “the Western diet.” This is the subject of the second part of the book, in which I follow the story of the most radical change to the way humans eat since the discovery of agriculture. All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy. These changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted: lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of
 everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains 
 
That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known for a long time. Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group of doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that  11  wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way of eating and adopted the Western diet, there soon followed a predictable series of Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. They called these the Western diseases and, though the precise causal mechanisms were (and remain) uncertain, these observers had little doubt these chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet 
 
What’s more, the traditional diets that the new Western foods displaced were strikingly diverse: Various populations thrived on diets that were what we’d call high fat, low fat, or high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed, there have been traditional diets based on just about any kind of whole food you can imagine. What this suggests is that the human animal is well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet, however, is not one of them 
 
Here, then, is a simple but crucial fact about diet and health, yet, curiously, it is a fact that nutritionism cannot see, probably because it developed in tandem with the industrialization of our food and so takes it for granted. Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of the Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or searching questions about it 
 
But we can. By gaining a firmer grasp on the nature of the Western diet—trying to understand it not only physiologically but also historically and ecologically—we can begin to develop a different way of thinking about food that might point a path out of our predicament. In doing so we have two sturdy—and strikingly hopeful—facts to guide us: first, that humans historically have been healthy eating a great many different diets; and second, that, as we’ll see, most of the damage to our food and health caused by the industrialization of our eating can be reversed. Put simply, we can escape the Western diet and its consequences 
 
This is the burden of the third and last section of In Defense of Food: to propose a couple dozen personal rules of eating that are conducive not only to better health but also to greater pleasure in eating, two goals that turn out to be mutually reinforcing 
 
These recommendations are a little different from the dietary guidelines you’re probably accustomed to. They are not, for example, narrowly prescriptive. I’m not interested in telling you what to have for dinner. No, these suggestions are more like eating algorithms, mental devices for thinking through our food choices. Because there is no single answer to the question of what to eat, these guidelines will produce as many different menus as there are people using them. 
 
These rules of thumb are also not framed in the vocabulary of nutrition science. This is not because nutrition science has nothing important to teach us—it does, at least when it avoids the pitfalls of reductionism and overconfidence—but because I believe we have as much, if not more, to learn about eating from history and culture and tradition. We are accustomed in all matters having to do with health to assuming science should have the last word, but in the case of eating, other sources of knowledge and ways of knowing can be just as powerful, sometimes more so. And while I inevitably rely on science (even reductionist science) in attempting to understand many questions about food and health, one of my aims in this book is to show the limitations of a strictly scientific understanding of something as richly complex and multifaceted as food. Science has much of value to teach us about food, and perhaps someday scientists will “solve” the problem
 of diet, creating the nutritionally optimal meal in a pill, but for now and the foreseeable future, letting the scientists decide the menu would be a mistake. They simply do not know enough 
 
You may well, and rightly, wonder who am I to tell you how to eat? Here I am advising you to reject the advice of science and industry—and then blithely go on to offer my own advice. So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers 
 
Not that we had much choice in the matter. By the 1960s or so it had become all but impossible to sustain traditional ways of eating in the face of the industrialization of our food 
 
If you wanted to eat produce grown without synthetic chemicals or meat raised on pasture without pharmaceuticals, you were out of luck. The supermarket had become the only place to buy food, and real food was rapidly disappearing from its shelves, to be replaced by the modern cornucopia of highly processed foodlike products. And because so many of these novelties deliberately lied to our senses with fake sweeteners and flavorings, we could no longer rely on taste or smell to know what we were eating 
 
Most of my suggestions come down to strategies for escaping the Western diet, but before the resurgence of farmers’ markets, the rise of the organic movement, and the renaissance of local agriculture now under way across the country, stepping outside the conventional food system simply was not a realistic option for most people. Now it is. We are entering a postindustrial era of food; for the first time in a generation it is possible to leave behind the Western diet without having also to leave behind civilization. And the more eaters who vote with their forks for a different kind of food, the more commonplace and accessible such food will become. Among other things, this book is an eater’s manifesto, an invitation to join the movement that is renovating our food system in the name of health—health in the very broadest sense of that word 
 
I doubt the last third of this book could have been written forty years ago, if only because there would have been no way to eat the way I propose without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot. There was really only one kind of food on the national menu, and that was whatever industry and nutritionism happened to be serving. Not anymore. Eaters have real choices now, and those choices have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture—all of which, as we will see, are inextricably linked.  That anyone should need to write a book advising people to “eat food” could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat 
 
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[1] *Orthorexia—from the Greek “ ortho- ” (right and correct) + “exia” (appetite) = right appetite. The term was first proposed in 1996 by the American physician Steven Bratman. Though orthorexia is not yet an eating disorder recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, academic investigation is under way


      
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