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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | 
| Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  146 reviews
Sales Rank: 33
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
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
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 141 more reviews...
 Stick with Omnivore's Dilemma July 3, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I thought it was beyond funny that the first people Michael Pollan cited in his acknowledgments sections were his editors. I thought this book could have used some more editing actually. It was repetitive and overly sensational. I cook my own food and have a garden, and it still made me feel incredibly inadequate at providing for myself, which is ridiculous.
I am not entirely convinced that we should completely denounce nutritionism and science because God does it better. Sounds like the same malarkey that challenges evolutionary science. And I thought it a serious weakness that Pollan uses food studies when it's convenient for his argument to do so.
Kudos to Pollan for making a lot of this research and information approachable to the average American, but I feel like he's preaching the the choir. The people who really need to read this book probably can't afford it.
Bottom Line: I celebrated finishing this book by serving myself up a HUGE bowl of Lucky Charms. Ah...high fructose corn syrup...it's been a while, my friend...
 Dietitan Delighted July 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a Dietitian and Certified Diabetes Educator I am delighted that Pollan has put together one pouch with most all the jewels. The system while well meaning is not yet optimizing our access to the path of health.
Learn to cook July 2, 2008
You really have to read Pollan's masterpiece, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," to appreciate this one, which functions as a kind of coda to Omnivore's exploration of industrial farming and its effects on the food supply. In "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto," Pollan's attack on nutritionism--the separating of a food into its components--certainly puts the lie to "alternative" medicine health gurus like Andrew Weil, who sometimes seem to push pills (vitamins, anti-oxidants, etc.) as heartily as his counterparts in traditional medicine. According to Pollan, there is no magic substance, whether it be oat bran or omega-3 oils, that can bestow health. He points out that human beings have thrived on all kinds of different diets, the so-called Western diet excepted. He convincingly argues, citing infant formula as just one example, that efforts to reduce a valuable food to its components are primitive at best and that attempts to define what comprises a healthy diet, like the emphasis on low fat consumption, have been just plain wrong. Shop the outer walls of the supermarket, he advises, looking for the real food: vegetables, fruit, fish, and meat. Stay out of the middle, where the "whole grain" junk food and "heart healthy" cookies dwell. This is an interesting and sensible book full of good advice that is ridiculously easy to follow. Despite some of the more enthusiastic reviews, I do have to say that for middle-aged readers the notion that if you follow Pollan's precepts you will live longer and avoid devastating diseases is a bit silly. (Pollan does not make this claim.) Who can predict such things? However, for those who choose to teach their children or grandchildren to eat well---what better gift for the next generation? Reader: if you can't cook you are going to have to learn.
Spread the word... July 2, 2008
If this fabulous book becomes a best-seller, as it should, if enough people read and follow its advice, if we can manage to get the kids on board with healthy eatting (PLEASE write a kid's version, asap), we can put the food processors, food "scientists" on notice that their imitation food is at least one contributing factor behind so many "new" epidemics: bi-polarity in children, autism, ADD, allergies, asthma, diabetes I & II, obesity, etc etc etc.
Thank you Michael Pollan for stating the case for real food so very well. This Saturday, I'm off to the farmer's market.
Intriguing June 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I almost put this book back on the shelf after seeing its sub-subtitle: "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants." I thought, well, duh, who doesn't know that? I expected yet another rant that we're eating too much of the wrong food, which isn't new and isn't helpful.
But this book posits some interesting reasons why we're eating too much and even more importantly why we're not eating *food*. Until I read Chapter One I had not even considered how long it's been since I looked at an item of food as something in and of itself instead of just as a collection of nutrients. Our grandparents looked at an orange and saw an orange; we look at an orange and see part of our daily allotment of Vitamin C. Yet we really know very little about what's in an orange that's protective to our health. We should eat it because it's delicious and has been part of the human diet for centuries, not because some expert tells us to.
Mr. Pollan also advances the idea that we don't spend enough on food, that if we can afford to we should spend more. This seems counter-intuitive, but in fact he's right. When you spend $6 for a half-gallon of organic, non-homogenized milk, or $4.89 a dozen for eggs from pastured chickens, you really become conscious of the food you're eating.
At the end he provides some practical advice on how to avoid the pressures that cause us to eat too much of the wrong things.
With the rise of the farmer's market in most areas we now have more opportunity than we've had in decades to eat real food. Try it, you'll like it -- that applies to both this book and the real food it advocates.
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