What Would Burke Eat?

What do you think of when you hear the term “organic food”? Granola? Flaxseed? Hairy people at farmers’ markets peddling goat cheese?

Whatever images popped into your head, I’d wager that Edmund Burke — the 18th century British statesman and intellectual father of modern conservatism — was not one of them. But he should have been. After reading Michael Pollan’s new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, I’ve realized that Edmund Burke should be considered the intellectual father of the organic and locally-grown food movements as well.

Pollan’s latest follows up on his 2006 work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. There, he focused both on the production of the modern Western diet and the environmental damage it causes. In his new book, by contrast, he shifts focus to the individual, examining the effects of different diets upon humans. Unsurprisingly, the obesity-creating American diet doesn’t earn high marks. Pollan’s primary argument is that we should eat food — real food — rather than “edible food-like substances.” Rejecting the latest nutritionist fads, his motto is simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

What’s striking about Pollan’s argument is how fundamentally conservative it is. Echoing many of Burke’s arguments, Pollan elevates the wisdom of traditional customs over the relatively puny powers of Western reason.

One of the most powerful of Burke’s conservative arguments has always been an epistemological one – one concerned with the nature of knowledge. Burke is at his most persuasive when he’s talking about the limits of human reasoning powers. Skeptical of our abilities to determine the highest good through abstract rationality, Burke contends that we should look to the wisdom inherent in customs and tradition, rather than trying to draw up a brave new world from scratch.

Under this view, tradition isn’t glorified for tradition’s sake. Rather, tradition is a giant laboratory that provides us insight into what works and what doesn’t. To Burke, we abandon these traditions at our peril when we opt for sudden change or revolution. (Admittedly, this view has also been used to justify longstanding exploitative relations such as slavery).

Whether Pollan intended it or not, Burkean themes like these underpin In Defense of Food, including skepticism of modernity, the wisdom of customs, and the harms of sudden change.

Notably, Pollan is skeptical about what exactly modern science can tell us about our diet. One of the book’s big themes is that scientists and nutritionists simply don’t know all that much about why eating real food--the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food--helps us.  It’s clear, though, that it does.  For that reason, scientists can’t replicate the benefits of eating real food through vitamin pills or fortified oat bran or whatever this year’s fad happens to be. There’s something about eating the food itself that’s inherently beneficial. Indeed, one rule of thumb, he argues, is to avoid eating anything that has to explain why it’s healthy.

Custom also plays an important role in Pollan’s arguments.  Notably, Pollan doesn’t outline specific things to eat. In fact, he argues that humans are capable of thriving on extremely varied diets. Instead, he argues that we can learn general rules of thumb from humanity’s traditional eating practices.

Consider, for instance, the French diet. Although it includes lots of wine, cheese, and meat, the French do not suffer the same rates of heart disease or obesity as Americans do. Pollan notes that scientists can’t really identify which specific food or nutrient makes this type of diet so relatively healthy.


Pollan doesn’t claim to know the answer either, but he argues that it’s something about the diet itself, viewed more holistically. Maybe it’s the way the wine counteracts the meat. Maybe it’s some other combination. Who knows? Certainly not the nutrition scientists. And that’s precisely Pollan’s point: we simply don’t know what makes this diet so healthy — we just know that these traditional eating customs (as a whole) lead to relatively good health.

Finally, Pollan notes the dangers of rapid change, though here the warning applies to diets rather than, as it did for Burke, to forms of government. He reminds us that the Western diet of processed sugar and carbohydrates (coupled with a lack of plant-eating) is a relatively new phenomenon. No humans in history have ever eaten the way that we do.  And it shows. The spikes in obesity and diabetes--particularly in children--are evidence that humans simply aren’t designed to eat this way.

Pollan’s forceful conclusion is that our current way of eating is killing us. He argues that eating “[real] food” will help, even if we don’t know exactly why, and that customs are smarter than we are. That was Burke’s message too, as he gazed across the Channel watching the French Revolution overthrow generations of custom in the name of new abstract theories.

As a political progressive, I’m not always supportive of applying Burke’s thought to modern politics (though his anti-guillotine platform seems reasonable). But if you apply his insights to the dietary realm, he looks like a true visionary. Who knew? — Edmund Burke, patron saint of hippie organic food.

John Blevins is an assistant professor at South Texas School of Law.