Sandra Steingraber, a biologist who published the first book linking data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries, visits Bates College to deliver the 14th annual Otis Lecture at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Sponsored by the Philip J. Otis Endowment at Bates, the event is open to the public at no cost. A reception and book signing follow the lecture. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

Steingraber’s lecture is titled Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment. A poet, survivor of cancer and biologist, she has brought all three perspectives to bear on a critical health and human rights issue: the growing body of evidence linking cancer and environmental contamination.

She presented the disease as a human rights issue in her internationally acclaimed book Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Vintage), which correlated toxic release data with U.S. cancer registry data. Originally published in 1997, the book was released in a second edition this year and has been adapted for the screen as a documentary featuring the author.

Steingraber’s next book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (Berkley Trade, 2003), revealed the extent to which environmental hazards threaten each stage of infant development.

Likened to pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson by the Sierra Club, Steingraber has been much honored for her science writing. She was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, and received the first annual Altman Award and a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund.

She has testified before numerous national and international governmental bodies and is recognized as an effective two-way translator between scientists and activists.

A columnist for Orion magazine, she is a scholar in residence at Ithaca College. She lives with her beloved family in a 1,000-square-foot house with a push mower, a clothesline and a vegetable garden.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support Bates programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

“The science around food,” said Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan to a rapt Bates College audience on Oct. 27, “is basically where surgery was in 1650.”

Then he asked, “Are you ready to get on the table?”

The line drew one of many big laughs from the capacity crowd at the college chapel. Yet therein, too, lay a key theme of Pollan’s talk: In what he calls the “American paradox,” the U.S. obsession with nutrition has actually given this nation “some of the lousiest nutritional health in the world.”

“The ideology that we bring to food and eating decisions really is the problem,” he said. He calls this ideology “nutritionism,” and says its disciples have put their faith in imperfect, even destructive, science and food-industry marketing.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates, Pollan’s droll, fact-rich talk was titled In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution. (Because scores of would-be listeners were turned away from the crowded chapel for the evening talk, he reprised the address the following morning.)

His appearance was timely, coinciding with the College’s yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative, examining where food comes from and what it means. During Pollan’s two-day stay at Bates, an institution whose dining practices he praised as “light years ahead of many other places,” the award-winning writer and journalism professor visited around the campus community and offered an informal talk about writing on Monday afternoon.

• Read an edited transcript of Pollan’s speech

Pollan summarized concepts from his best-selling Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and this year’s In Defense of Food. Ultimately, he asked his listeners to shun nutritionism and the Western diet of refined stodge and feedlot meat; seek out food from sources as natural as possible; and remember that “if everybody sought out real food, whole food, cooked it themselves, and ate it with friends and family, [so] much would change in this country.”

Nutritionism sees food as a “delivery system for nutrients” and eating as an activity relating solely to health. It borders on religion, complete with a priesthood — nutritional scientists, food-industry marketeers and their willing acolytes in the press — and a Manichean worldview of good vs. evil food components.

A highlight of the talk was a history of nutritionism, which Pollan linked to late-19th-century grainy gurus like John Henry Kellogg and Charles William Post. And resonating with listeners of a certain age, many of whom still wonder where “draft beer in a bottle” came from, was Pollan’s reminder that today’s nutritionism is rooted in the 1970s.

In 1973, under food industry pressure, Congress repealed a regulation that compelled manufacturers to label certain imitation foods as “imitation.” That opened the door to all sorts of substituted ingredients and such curious products as fat-free sour cream.

Four years later, Sen. George McGovern presented the Senate’s well-intended “Dietary Goals for the U.S.,” calling for fewer saturated fats, refined grains and sugars. McGovern’s report, Pollan explained, put the government for the first time in the role of trying to influence the eating habits of all Americans on the grounds of health.

But in a fascinating sort of ju-jitsu, the food industry took what was in fact a critique of its methods and parlayed it into a “brilliant new marketing strategy”: using the government guidelines, and later the auguries of nutritional science, to build a whole new profit center around nutritionally engineered products like Nabisco’s Snackwells line of diet confections.

The industry found some “magic words: If you put ‘low-fat’ on a food, people will eat a ton of it,” Pollan said, to laughter. “The obesity epidemic and the public health campaign to get fat out of the diet coincide.

“What a public health disaster.”

In short, Pollan said, the “science behind nutritionism has just been completely wrong.” Both the chemical composition of foods and the absorptive powers of the living body are too subtle and complex for current science: “You have a mystery on both ends of the food chain that has thwarted any attempts to really reduce it.”

Where science has gone astray, cultural tradition and family wisdom over the millennia successfully conveyed information people needed to survive on the foods naturally available to them — a surprisingly wide spectrum of foods. Traditional diets are incredibly diverse, Pollan said. “There is no ideal human diet. One of our great good fortunes is that we can do well on whatever nature has to offer on six of the seven continents.”

So “there is no one proper way to eat,” he said. But “there is one way not to eat” — the Western diet. “How could civilization, 10,000 years after the birth of agriculture, have come up with the one way that reliably makes people sick?”

Prior to the question-and-answer session that ended the evening, Pollan reminded listeners of the unbreakable relationship among healthy people, healthy communities and healthy agriculture. “It turns out that what is best for our health is best for the health of our agriculture too. It really is a win-win, because what our agriculture really needs is to diversify” away from its dependence on monoculture and chemical inputs — “and what we need to do as eaters is to diversify, to eat many different real foods.”

He also offered a few of his rules for eating, including the seven-word phrase that has become a mantra among Pollanites: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Suggesting that we avoid “any food that won’t eventually rot,” he described a package of Twinkies that has sat in his office apparently unchanged for two years. “The microbes . . . are not interested,” he said, to laughter. “The microbes leave them alone. And we should, too.”

Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books scrutinizing the impacts of the “food-industrial complex” have fueled a nationwide fascination with Americans’ food choices, speaks at Bates College at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, in the College Chapel, College Street.

Titled In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution, Pollan’s address is open to the public at no charge. A reception and book signing will follow. The annual Otis Lecture, the event is made possible by the Philip J. Otis Endowment at Bates.

One of the most prominent advocates for changing the culture of eating in the United States, Pollan has expressed a food philosophy stunning in its reach and simplicity: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In The Botany of Desire (Random House, 2001), the influential Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006), and this year’s In Defense of Food (Penguin Press, 2008), Pollan not only challenges us to ponder our diet, but reminds us of our dependence on the land for our sustenance.

In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he follows each of the food chains that sustain us — industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves — from the source to a final meal, while focusing on our relationships with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he traces the origins of everything on the plate, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

His follow-up, “In Defense of Food,” is an indictment of a conspiracy of marketers, nutritional scientists and mass-producers of “edible foodlike substances” that, in the Western diet, has replaced food with nutrients and common sense with confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls “the American paradox”: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

“Pollan’s critique of the American food industry and the plague of obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, cancer and untimely death for which it is largely responsible is comparable to the work of Rachel Carson as a contribution to the history of human self-destruction, for the food fabricators could not have done their work without our complicity any more than the environmental polluters could have done theirs,” Jacob Epstein wrote in a review of “In Defense of Food” for The New York Review of Books.

Pollan has received numerous awards for his work. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and won the 2007 James Beard Foundation Award for best food writing.

Pollan grew up in Woodbury, N.Y., and was introduced to gardening by his grandfather. He attended Bennington College and received a master’s degree in American literature from Columbia University. He served as executive editor for Harper’s Magazine for many years and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

The event coincides with Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food, a dominant theme of the 2008-09 academic year. Including a Web site, events and other programming, “Bates Contemplates Food” is an initiative to raise consciousness about the consequences of our food choices and, in particular, about Bates’ own efforts to feed the campus in a healthy, sustainable way.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support Bates programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.