Would Grandma recognize it as food?

Michael Pollan and the Ship of Theseus

This is Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan has written a few books on food and nutrition. Let’s just say I am not a fan of Michael Pollan.

Maybe the food-related quote Michael Pollan is most famous for is this:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Now I obviously disagree with the plants part, and I think the other 2 are not useful advice. It’s a nice quip but it doesn’t help anyone.

What is “food?” What is “too much” and might there be a reason some of us are eating “too much?” What if it’s not an independent variable?

It’s such an obnoxious little expression that Amber O’Hearn has actually made the counter-quip:

Eat Meat. Not Too Little. Mostly Fat.

- From FacultativeCarnivore.com

But today, let’s not focus on this saying. He’s said other things that are less obviously useless, though still useless. But discussing some of them is interesting.

Today I want to focus on:

Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

- Michael Pollan

This is the short version, here’s the longer quote:

Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce, ask yourself, “What are those things doing there?”

Sounds reasonable, right? Let’s be Lindy! Our great grandmother wasn’t unhealthy. Or at least, she did not have modern diseases of civilization.

But I think this advice is malarky, to use a word your great grandmother might’ve been familiar with.

UPF I did it again

I have previously written about why I think focusing on/avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods is not the solution. I gained 100lbs on a strict keto diet that was almost entirely devoid of UPFs. I’ve cooked my own meals almost every day for more than 20 years, since I left my childhood home. I cooked 99% or so of the meals that I got fat on from fresh ingredients.

While many UPFs do include many of the “modern horsemen” that we suspect of causing the diabesity epidemic, that’s not baked in - you could just as well make UPFs without them. And you can also consume these ingredients without eating UPFs, as my 100lbs-gain experience proves.

In short: “processing” doesn’t make food unhealthy. Cutting is processing, as is dehydrating, canning, and cooking. It is certain very specific parts of “ultra-processed” foods that make them unhealthy, and we should avoid those instead of using a very vague umbrella term that has tons of false negatives (harmless things it forbids) and false positives (unhealthy things it allows).

If the root cause of metabolic disease is really something like seed oils, then it doesn’t matter if they come in the form of UPF or if you drizzle soybean oil all over your salad or eat slabs of high-linoleic acid bacon for breakfast.

Would great grandma recognize pizza?

I think this great grandmother heuristic also has both a lot of false positives and false negatives.

Would she recognize.. sushi? Would a Japanese great grandma recognize Pizza? The world was a lot less integrated and travel was much more costly and expensive 100 years ago.

We didn’t have Asian-Mexican fusion restaurants in.. 1890? Or whenever great grandma would’ve been born.

Heck, great grandma might not have recognized pizza anywhere in the U.S. unless she maybe grew up in New York City! I knew grandparents of friends (not “great” grandparents) who considered pizza ethnic food.

If we go back far enough in time, nobody in Europe would’ve recognized potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, chocolate, pineapple, peanuts, .. these are all New World crops that were brought back after 1400.

Surely this heuristic isn’t supposed to simply filter out ancient, healthy staple foods from other regions of the world?

I suppose there could be an argument made that your ancestors adapted to a certain diet that was relatively regional, and your genetics haven’t yet caught up to globalization.

But the Irish did reasonably well on potatoes when there wasn’t a famine. You could say they thrived. Lots of people in Europe tolerate rice very well even though rice doesn’t really grow there.

Would great grandma recognize ultra processed food?

I’m not sure she would be able, without an ingredient list, to tell it from “real” and “whole” food?

Now there are of course UPF products that aren’t even trying to imitate a real food, e.g. Mountain Dew or maybe Twizzlers. (I’ve previously written about The Strange Attraction of the SAD and UPFs.)

But a lot of UPF is explicitly designed to look, feel, and taste like an old-timey, real food. Except all the ingredients were put together from industrial base ingredients like whey isolate, soybean oil, emulsifiers, dyes, glucose syrup, and so on.

For example, Pollan mentions a “box of portable yogurt tubes.” Sure, great grandma’s yogurt might not have come in a box of tubes. Maybe in a jar. But apart from the packaging, would she be able to tell modern faux-yogurt from real yogurt?

If you let A/B great grandma one of these faux pretend “foods” vs. the real thing, she might notice that they taste or feel different. I suspect that she’d much prefer the flavor of the real item, as often these UPF faux-foods aren’t nearly as good.

But apart from that, how would grandma know just from looking at them? Would she describe them as “not food?”

Would great grandma recognize the fatty acid profile resulting from modern animal feeds?

The biggest source of linoleic acid in the American diet is.. chicken.

Chickens and pigs are now fed soybeans, corn, and often even explicitly soybean oil and corn oil.

Since these animals, like us, are monogastric, they cannot convert those fats into something better and simply store them when they grow.

Then we eat them, and so we eat the linoleic acid indirectly without ever touching a “seed oil.”

This is why I like to say that bacon is just “chunky seed oils.”

A bacon, full of seed oils

Would great grandma have recognized that the chicken she’s roasting, or the bacon she’s frying up for you, contains 20-30% linoleic acid instead of a more traditional 5-10%?

Maybe. If she’s astute, she might notice that the bacon is softer than she’s used to - a common complaint as early as 1900, when some European countries (Denmark, IIRC?) banned American bacon for being too soft, which comes from a higher-than-normal PUFA feed (corn vs. barley or whatever Europeans fed their chickens).

In chickens, it’s more difficult to discern.

Certainly these are changes an experienced great grandma might notice. But would she recognize these chickens and the pork/bacon as “food?”

Would great grandma recognize KFC or french fries?

Fried foods like french fries and fried chicken are commonly cited as the worst of the worst ultra-processed foods and junk foods.

But the first recorded recipe for fried chicken is from.. 1747. It stems from Scotland. (This explains a lot, actually, lol. Hello deep fried Mars bar!) Certainly, fried chicken was extremely common in the American South all throughout the 1800s, possibly introduced by Scottish immigrants.

The Koreans claim to trace their deep-fried chicken tradition back to the 15th century.

While YOUR great grandma might not have recognized the fried chicken of today if she didn’t grow up in the South, there were certainly tons of Southern great grandmas that would absolutely recognize it.

Deep frying other things was common even before than, and was popular in medieval Europe.

The first written record of fried potatoes is from 1529, when Spaniards found people in what is now Chile doing it. Europeans were deep frying stuff before that, but they didn’t have potatoes.

The first modern-style french fries are attributed to a Spanish nun who was known for making them. She died in 1582. It is assumed that Spain was the first European country to eat fried potatoes simply because they were the first to colonize the New World and bring back the potato. It then spread throughout the rest of Europe, as did fries.

So again, it’s quite possible that your great grandma wouldn’t have been familiar with french fries simply because they were somewhat regional, if she didn’t grow up in a region that featured them regularly.

But certainly there would’ve been grandmas as early as 1600 that would’ve absolutely recognized french fries as food.

Of course, what’s the real change between the fried chicken of 15th century Korea, or the french fries of 1529, compared to our modern iterations?

It is largely the oil they’re cooked in. Back then, almost nobody had access to enough high-linoleic acid fat to deep-fry things. The fats used for frying would’ve probably been, depending on the region, beef tallow, lard from pigs fed way less soybeans & corn than today, palm oil (in the tropics), possibly refined olive oil or avocado oil, or clarified butter/ghee.

While many of these (lard, palm oil, olive oil, avocado oil) aren’t quite as low in linoleic acid as tallow or butter are (2%) they can often range from 8-12% instead of the 50% in soybean oil or 60% in corn oil.

Meaning the same fried chicken or french fries now have 5x the linoleic acid content or more than what the traditional recipes contained.

And, again, it’s possible that great grandma would’ve A/B tested traditional fried chicken vs. modern ones, or french fries, and determined that she preferred the taste of the tallow fries over those of the soybean oil fries. Or noticed that the latter went rancid more quickly.

But she almost certainly would’ve recognized these very old foods as .. food.

The Food of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is an interesting thought experiment about what constitutes an identity, dating back to the Ancient Greeks: If Theseus sails his ship around the world for decades, and slowly replaces every single piece of it during repairs, is it still the same ship? At which point does it stop being “Ship 1” to become “Ship 2?”

This is the situation we have with some faux-UPFs like modern “yogurt” but also, even more subtle, with modern pigs & chickens. Are these the same chickens and pigs? Almost certainly not, especially if we look at qualities we think are at fault: the fatty acid content of their fat. But they are clearly still pigs & chickens, and great grandma would certainly recognize them as such.

And the faux yogurts.. they contain whey, they contain sugars, they contain proteins and often fats.. but what is the definition of “real food” or “yogurt” that makes them unhealthy but great grandma’s home made yogurt “healthy?”

Sorry great grandma, but you’re FIRED!

Pollan’s quip about your great grandma is therefore, like the other Pollan quip, mostly useless as a heuristic to tell “healthy” from “unhealthy” food.

She would probably throw out a lot of things that are fine to eat. And she would keep a lot of what are the most potent modern obesogenic and unhealthy “junk foods” as well.

A lot of modern faux UPF “foods” might be recognizable as “food” to her, even if she would’ve considered them terrible tasting and not particularly fresh. But in absence of showing her the nutrition label, she would probably not have been able to tell the UPF imitation from “food.”

And the nutrition label was introduced almost 100 years after great grandma was likely born, so she would never have seen one in her life. Back then, you simply didn’t need nutrition labels.

Once again, the brief quippy heuristics sound cool on book covers, but they don’t actually produce good results.