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Product Description
What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the well-considered answers he provides to the questions posed in the bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists-all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." These "edible foodlike substances" are often packaged with labels bearing health claims that are typically false or misleading. Indeed, real food is fast disappearing from the marketplace, to be replaced by "nutrients," and plain old eating by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Michael Pollan's sensible and decidedly counterintuitive advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food."
Writing In Defense of Food, and affirming the joy of eating, Pollan suggests that if we would pay more for better, well-grown food, but buy less of it, we'll benefit ourselves, our communities, and the environment at large. Taking a clear-eyed look at what science does and does not know about the links between diet and health, he proposes a new way to think about the question of what to eat that is informed by ecology and tradition rather than by the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach.
In Defense of Food reminds us that, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, the solutions to the current omnivore's dilemma can be found all around us.
In looking toward traditional diets the world over, as well as the foods our families-and regions-historically enjoyed, we can recover a more balanced, reasonable, and pleasurable approach to food. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we might start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives and enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #9 in Books
- Published on: 2008-01-01
- Released on: 2008-01-01
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it's at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food? What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that's come to typify our food culture. Many processed foods vie for a spot in our grocery baskets, claiming to lower cholesterol, weight, glucose levels, you name it. Yet Pollan shows that these convenient "healthy" alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient: our health has a nation has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats--even fruits--from our daily meals. His razor-sharp analysis of the American diet (as well as its architects and its detractors) offers an inspiring glimpse of what it would be like if we could (a la Humpty Dumpty) put our food back together again and reconsider what it means to eat well. In a season filled with rallying cries to lose weight and be healthy, Pollan's call to action—"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."--is a program I actually want to follow. --Anne Bartholomew
Review
"In his hugely influential treatise The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of the environment. His new book takes up where the previous work left off. Examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of health, this powerfully argued, thoroughly researched and elegant manifesto cuts straight to the chase with a maxim that is deceptively simple: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." But as Pollan explains, "food" in a country that is driven by "a thirty-two billion-dollar marketing machine" is both a loaded term and, in its purest sense, a holy grail. The first section of his three-part essay refutes the authority of the diet bullies, pointing up the confluence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists-a cabal whose nutritional advice has given rise to "a notably unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily." The second portion vivisects the Western diet, questioning, among other sacred cows, the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. A writer of great subtlety, Pollan doesn't preach to the choir; in fact, rarely does he preach at all, preferring to lets the facts speak for themselves. (Jan.)"
-- Publishers Weekly, starred review
About the Author
Michael Pollan is the author of four previous books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, both New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times, he is also the Knight Professor of journalism at Berkeley.
Customer Reviews
Finally the Truth about Nutritionism
Pollan thoughtfully and convincingly explains the many seeming paradoxes of "State of the Art" science about how to eat for good health. He establishes that what you eat may not be as important as the context in which you eat it, and that, as I have come to believe, there is no single universally appropriate healthy diet. He convinced me that the supposedly bad Western Diet is more accurately labeled the modern over-processed, gulped-down diet, and that one is best off, perhaps, eating what one's ancestors traditionally ate a century or so ago. The science analysis is excellent--he confirms my scientist husband's observation that "the great minds do not not gravitate to dietary science" or perhaps more accurately that nutrition reporting distorts what decent science there may be. The proof of the pudding seems to be that as I have returned to the food lifestyle of my German ancestors, I am losing weight and enjoying my food, and more important, enjoying my life.
A recovering orthorexic
A common-sense guide to eating real food!
Michael Pollan sums up his advice in 7 words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And then fortunately for us, he elaborates!
He starts by pointing out that, for most of history, humans were able to figure out what to eat without professional guidance. And then the "Age of Nutritionism" hit us. Now with nutrition science and the food industry, most of what we eat isn't even really food - it's processed food products. Now we read labels to decide what to eat. He effectively demonstrates why breaking food down into just a bunch of nutrients doesn't work...it ignores the fact that a food is a system, not just the sum of its parts. He also notes that 30 years of nutritional advice has left us fatter, sicker and more poorly nourished.
He then spends a great deal of time talking specifically about "the Western diet." He traces chronic diseases to the industrialization of our food, and elaborates on the rise of highly processed foods, refined grains, the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals, the abundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat, fast food and much, much more.
Finally, in the final chapters, he elaborates on the 7-word advice noted above and provides several dozen "rules" of eating that result in better health and more pleasure in eating. For example, he recommends avoiding food products that contain ingredients that are unfamiliar or unpronounceable, that are more than 5 in number or that include high-fructose corn syrup. He also offers a rule I particularly like: "have a glass of wine with dinner" (for the polyphenols in red wine, esp. resveratrol).
This is a really interesting book that avoids the usual discussion of protein, carbs and fat, and instead focuses on eating real food and enjoying the pleasure of meals that families enjoyed in bygone days.
Kara Lane,
Author of Wake Up to Powerful Living
Common sense isn't common. We needed a does of it...
...and Michael Pollan delivers.
I absolutely love this book. It is onethat should replace most books on nutrition and all diet books on the market. I had many "ah-hah!" moments while reading this; it is so full of simple common sense. It is shocking to realize we have come so far in the modern world and yet we have forgotten how to eat. "In Defense of Food" puts it all back into perspective.
I went to the grocery store tonight and stuck to food along the walls, avoiding food products in the aisles. It was one of the best dinners I've cooked in a long while. It felt good making it, eating it, and seeing my kids eat it, knowing it was made with real food.
I highly recommend this book!
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