I was out of town for about a week recently, and I picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I’d been aware of Pollan as a slow-food spokesperson for a while now (it’s hard not to be, he gets a lot of press), so I thought I’d give him a try. In Defense of Food is a quick, enjoyable read (it reads like a long magazine article). Pollan is funny, and he makes a good, strong case against nutritionism, the reductionist ideology “that we should understand and engage with food and our bodies [solely] in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements.” His slow-food, whole-food, pro-food philosophy (which I already largely subscribe to) boils down to three simple statements: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Meanwhile, my wife’s been reading Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (another slow-food, whole-food, pro-food, anti-nutritionism book) and the intuition-focused Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and telling me all about them. So what do these three books have in common? They all make a case against overly-analytical, reductionist thinking — something I see way too much of these days.

I’m not anti-science — seriously, science is cool — but I’m really tired of scientism, the notion that science is the ultimate (neutral, unbiased) arbiter of everything, that science can and will (very soon) have the (correct, ultimate) answer for everything, etc. Basically, Science #1, Everything Else #2.

There’s this rampant (annoying) idea that scientific validation is extremely important…that you really shouldn’t trust your traditions or intuition too much without the scientific stamp of approval. Take this recent example: In this month’s Wired, Clive Thompson writes about the benefits of daydreaming. But he doesn’t just give his thoughts on the subject, he first points out that, in the past, “brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition” (i.e., they got it wrong), then immediately goes on to write about current (presumably correct) scientific thinking on the subject. God forbid he just give his opinion or trust that daydreaming, by its very prevalence, might be indicative of some underlying usefulness.

The whole thing reminds me of the trust-us-eggs-are-bad-for-you-because-of-cholesterol–oops-never-mind-eggs-are-now-ok-for-you silliness.

Sure, folk wisdom and gut instinct can lead you astray, but so can science. Rational thought and careful analysis are great, but I say, why not use your whole mind (the rational, the emotional, the intuitive, the imaginative, etc.)? And don’t forget to eat your veggies! ;-)

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