Food or a sum of its parts?

On:
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Chapter 5-6.

In these chapters, Pollan tackles the processed food trend in our country. As we have read before, corn and soy beans make up the majority of the processed foods found in grocery stores. Over the years, the industrial food chain has become concerned with the issue of perishable products and therefore perishable profits. Industry has taken it upon themselves to conquer the "dream of liberating food from nature" (90), which would keep their products on the shelf longer, and find a way to mess with people's natural appetites and stomach capacities. What has arisen from this movement is a belief that "food" is more beneficial as a sum of combined nutrients than the whole food itself. One food additive company went as far as to say that people are better off eating synthetics than natural products: "Natural ingredients, the company pointed out rather scarily, are a 'wild mixture of substances created by plants and animals for completely non-food purposes- their survival and reproduction. These 'dubious substances' came to be consumed by humans at their own risk'" (97). I have a hard time agreeing with this statement at all. If whole foods (plants, animals...) weren't meant to be consumed as food sources, what in nature is meant to be the food source? People have become so concerned with the individual nutrients that make up a "healthy diet" that they have forgotten that nutrients interact with other nutrients to be beneficial or destructive to our bodies. In nature, food sources have these nutrients pre-combined for our benefit. Why would we not take advantage?

The next chapter deals with the effects that the food industry has had on national health. Supersizing portions, increasing sugar and fat intake, and production on nutritionally useless "food" items in general has thrown the country into an obesity epidemic. Pollan points to the conflict of interests in government decisions that are made concerning the health of our country. As we see a rise in obesity and other related health issues, the government continues to support an unhealthful production system where commodity crops are subsidized, supporting the use of substances that are not necessarily beneficial to our health (HFCS- Hi fructose corn syrups, and other corn and soy derivatives found in most all processed foods). Pollan further supports the idea that most of our countries issues such as health care and poverty could be diminished if we simply tackled the issue of a faulty food system. Read his "Farmer in Chief" article written to the president-elect in 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html