According to Paul Goldberger in the NY Sun,
[Jane Jacobs] regretted the construction of more and bigger buildings, and the enormous power held by the real estate industry, Mr. Goldberger said. “But she was also a realist,” he said. “She was not Utopian, and I think that was the thing that distinguished her from many other intellectual and urban thinkers. She believed that the world we had was actually pretty good, if only we would learn to understand it, appreciate it, and handle it right.”
Exactly. That is what I was saying in my comments on Michael Pollan (here and here). Our food world — which is mainly a processed food world, very little food is unprocessed — is actually pretty good. Some food processing is done according to wrong theories — the wrong theory that fat per se is fattening, for example. The newest food processing gets the most attention because it is still noteworthy (e.g., low-fat foods) but it is new theories that are most likely to be wrong. This is why “processed food” gets a bad rap. Most food processing, which is no longer advertised and we no longer notice because it is so common, is done according to correct theories — the main examples being cooking, refrigeration, freezing, and other forms of germ reduction. The germ theory of disease is correct. The poor health of many Americans reveals plenty of room for better understanding; I think the theory behind the Shangri-La diet is an example of better understanding. That theory suggests new types of food processing, as I explain in the last chapter of the book.