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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
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Rating:  191 reviews
Sales Rank: 136
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594201455
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.2
EAN: 9781594201455
ASIN: 1594201455
Publication Date: January 1, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
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
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 186 more reviews...
 Ayurveda and Food equals Health & Longevity November 14, 2008
"Constantine" (NEW YORK CITY)
This book is welcome. I use it together with the Yale University School of Medicine Dr. Frank John Ninivaggi book: Ayurveda: A Comprehensive Guide To Traditional Indian Medicine for the West. Both give practical info about how and what to east for great health in body, mind, and spirit. I recommend them both.
Just Eat Food. Real Food. November 6, 2008
Tricia Huff (Cincinnati, OH)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Don't you want any of this good food?", my Great Aunt Margaret beams at me over the buffet aisle. I answer, "If any of it were good, I would want it."
It is the 1970's and a new kind of restaurant came to our rural county: the smorgasbord. Adult eyes widened at the sight of aisles of food, a melange of red, orange, brown and white gooey side dishes punctuated by varieties of tough grisly meat. They wonder that I don't want to load my plate as they do. I equally marveled over their reaction. The food tasted off; powdery when it should be toothsome, salty where it should be savory, and blandly gelatinous when it should be creamy.
Anything Aung Margaret cooked was a hell of a lot better than this and now I know the reason behind what even my uneducated seven year old palate was perceiving. Aunt Margaret's meals were simple, always a meat, potato and vegetable, cooked simply; but the meat was fresh from the butcher's pack, the potatoes from the bag, and the vegetables from our garden in summer, or from the can or freezer in winter. At my uncle's request, Aunt Marg cooked just like his mother did, and his mother was born in the 1890's. Unknowingly we were living Michael Pollan's dictum to only eat food that our great grandmothers would recognize as food.
Throughout the work Pollan explores how our Western understanding of food has been reduced to calories and nutrients, a movement he calls nutritionism. He asserts that Westerners have forsaken and maligned the social, emotional and sensory aspects of eating and asked science to dictate our diets. But science has not been successful at curing our ills and limiting our waistlines through diet due to the inherent reductionism necessary to most scientific research. Also, so much of the processing of food has brought with it ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup and hydrongenated vegetable oils, ingredients that are not doing us any favors.
Pollan cuts through the proliferation of dietary advice based upon managing various nutrient levels, and calls us to a simpler, more enjoyable approach to food: just eating food. Real food. Food that you don't have to add water to and stir. Food that doesn't come in a plastic bubble pack. Food that looks and smells and tastes like what it really it. What could be better?
If you are a bit of a foodie already, you will be nodding your head in agreement all through this this book. If you are tired of trying various dietary regimens to no avail, then this work will set your heart at ease. If you are the impatient sort, skip the chapter on nutritionism's history and delve right into the guidelines in the final chapters. However you use this book, it definitely serves up food for thought. Bon Appetit!
enlightening November 5, 2008
A. Yang
This book transformed how I think about food. It also revealed the extent to which we are socialized to have such misunderstandings about food. This is a must-read for anybody who wants to eat better. It raises awareness as to what is really food really vs. what is simply food-like product.
Blew Through This GREAT Book November 4, 2008
R. Williams (Los Angeles, CA United States)
This should be mandatory reading. I like the structure: tripartite, 1. breaking down the emergence of 'nutritionism' (the doctrine that food should be measured by the recognizable component nutrient values), and debunking it, brilliantly through the lipid hypothesis (fat is bad), 2. The pathological component: 'Western Diseases' and the search for a unified field theory nutritional equivalent, then 3. Getting Over Nutritionism, which is a set of prescriptive ways to avoid the foregone horrors, delivered as a fusion of deadpan and Lutherian theses.
What's great about this book is that, without an ounce of (deserved) hysteria, it empties both barrels into all the culprits whose role in what has become institutionalized mass murder has been for whatever reason off limits. Surprisingly, it's in some of the indictments that don't go far enough that the only disappointments lurk. For example, there's a longish discussion of the nurses studies that were the source of many of the errors, but no discussion of the worst such mistake: the emergence of HRT as a general purpose solution for menapause, which literally ended up killing millions (when HRT was finally stopped in its tracks, breast cancer rates dropped 15%).
Actually, the best thing about this book is that the devolution of food (through corruption) that is detailed here can be read as an allegory for the culture at large: reductionism, the subjugation of all things to the short term interest of the sellers, the absence of said agents when the downstream costs explode on their victims. Though the book does read amazingly well on the two levels simultaneously, I ended up wishing that the author spent some energy widening his gaze to try and understand how some of these mishaps occurred. For instance, the nutritionism diatribe discusses the part/whole shortcomings brought on by reductionism. Not unlike what happened when Utilitarianism emerged in philosophy in the 19th Century. There are many places where the simple process of even making hypotheses is not just questioned, but likened to something akin to insanity. It would have been great if there were some discussion of the fact that 'science' education generally means no exposure to philosophy or rhetoric, or process theory for that matter, and the results have been horrific.
A must read.
Powerful Message October 30, 2008
Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)
This book is an examination of the Western diet and health. In his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan described his personal experiences in taking the challenge of re-connecting with food. In the present book, Pollan explores some of the themes that he uncovered with his increased interest in food, such as where food comes from, and why we eat it. The book is divided into 3 parts: The Age of Nutritionism, The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, and Getting over Nutritionism. Pollan argues that food processors and industry groups have used scientific findings on nutrition to further their own financial interests rather than safeguard our health. As a result of "educational" campaigns on nutrition, we follow a misguided program of obsessing over individual nutrients, enriched ingredients, and supplements, when what we really should be eating is a variety of unprocessed foods in reasonable amounts.
The book is quite engaging to read, as well as informative. Pollan consulted numerous scientific articles when researching this book. Sources are provided at the end of the book, divided by chapter and topic; many are also available online at the author's website. Following the publication of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan has become a leader and spokesperson for the localvore movement, in which consumers are urged to shorten the food supply chain and eat food that is produced close to home. In the present book, Pollan presents both a guideline and justification for such local eating: "Shake the hand that feeds you." He points out that direct connections between food producers and food consumers help producers keep in mind that real people will be eating their foods (thus, the food needs to be healthy, clean, free of pesticides and other contaminants), and help consumers keep in mind that real people have grown their food (and need to be compensated fairly and held accountable for their growing practices). Such a guideline makes much more sense than the arbitrary distance limits popular in localvore literature (limit your diet to foods grown within a 100 mile radius of where you live). In formulating such a simple guideline, Pollan has distilled the true intention of the localvore movement into a catchphrase that is both meaningful and easy to remember. This is only one of the many simple guidelines Pollan proposes in this book as alternatives to the ones we hear in the media about fat, cholesterol, and vitamins. The book is very thought-provoking and informative, wherever you are in your relationship to food.
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