In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Product Details

The companion volume to The New York Times bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan's lastbook , The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.

• ISBN13: 9780143114963
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• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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

Customer Reviews ::

Wrong on so many levels, except there aren't that many levels - Compleat Reader -
This book is so wrong-headed, well, where to begin?

Let's begin with what the author gets right: his first sentence reads: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Unfortunately, from there on he dives head-first into the worst anti-science blather I've come across since Creationist/Intelligent Design idiocy. Pollan has absolutely no grasp of how science works. Scientists naturally revise their work as more and different studies are done, bringing in new evidence and results. In nutrition science that obviously takes time, as long-term studies are done on the effects of diet on human life over decades. But this natural revision leads Pollan to declare that scientists don't know what they're talking about, so we should ignore them. Yeesh!

Then the man cannot even make a rational, logical argument. He quotes from a set of governmental dietary guidelines from 1977: "choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake." From there he makes the absurd claim that, "... with these subtle changes in wording a whole way of thinking about food and health underwent a momentous shift ... Notice how in the revised guidelines, distinctions between entities as different as beef and chicken and fish have collapsed. These three venerable foods, each representing not just a different species but an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as mere delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves. Now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless--and politically unconnected--substance that may or may not lurk in them called saturated fat."

That's a lot of weight for one poor little phrase to carry. Not to mention the con-man style of throwing multisyllabic, scientific sounding words around to enhance one's false scientific credentials. Pollan is a journalist, not a scientist. (He has a quite annoying habit of inserting "(ahem)" before every iteration of the word "journalist," presumably because he's a journalist.)

Then his basic facts are almost always wrong. To take an easy example: he claims that "nutrition" began to be marketed, and screw up our food industry, after this 1977 the "nutrionists" and government got involved in the 1970s. Good grief, man! Did you do no simple research? Listen to food commercials from radio and television going back to the 1930s. All of them make claims like, "Eat Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, and Corn Chex for all your nutritional needs." Kellogg's entire empire was based on the idea that his cereals offered incredible natural nutrition. But research is something Pollan seems incapable of, at least when it conflicts with his ideological predispositions.

Pollan also seems to have a severe political bias, leading to his trashing of anyone who isn't a rabid Republican.

Pollan himself states that he couldn't have written these books 40 years ago because there were no alternatives to industrial food back then (ignoring the fact that he would have been 15 years old 40 years ago). While our massive food industry certainly has a lot to answer for, Pollan should be made aware that for most people organic foods are still priced out of their range. We are not all middle-class folks with tons o' money to spend on McMansions and Whole Earth Natural Grains. The reason the poor in our country often eat badly is because bad food, greasy food, fatty food is CHEAP and easy.

Finally, Pollan makes an error unfortunately rife in our writing community: treating the particular habits of citizens of the United States as universals. The American diet becomes "The Western Diet." Well, let me tell you, folks in France and Sweden and Norway--ostensibly the West--don't eat like Americans, although our mass-market fast-food industry is invading them in a big way. Please don't extrapolate from the provincial to the universal! It's just sloppy thinking.

In short, this is a poorly written, poorly reasoned, poorly researched diatribe that offers nothing past the very first sentence, quoted above. While our messed-up culture certainly needs some guidance in the basic act of eating, this is not the book to give it.