In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | Michael Pollan | If you care about what you eat and how you feel...

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	In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Michael Pollan Penguin (Non-Classics), 2009 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 355 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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Refreshing Point of View

Most refreshing way of looking at the whole food, nutrition and diet point of view. Perfect for anyone wanting to eat for longevity and health, but confused by the plethora of diets out there. The journalistic approach allows a review of history, politics and facts regarding foods with most interesting conclusions.

If you care about what you eat and how you feel...

Books, manuals, health guides, nutrition, DIET!!!!....what to eat!!!
Putting all of the above mentioned aside, this is a timely, essential guide to electing proper choices in our health and well being, not to mention our planet.
There is so much misinformation, trend diognostics, nutritional mumbo jumbo, warnings, supplementation, additives, chemicals etc.
It can really be so much more simple...
EAT FOOD, NOT TOO MUCH, MOSTLY PLANTS!
Value your eating time and selections, search it out, prepare and savor, appreciate and you will be healthier, happier and wizer.
This book will spur you on!

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Intelligent, Radical, Timely

Like M. Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, this work is a real eye-opener, highly interesting, and likely to stimulate much overdue discussion, and wide-ranging changes. The mantra, "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is simple, intelligent, and ...... surprising, coming as it does from one who I had imagined to be a great lover/gorger of non-vegetarian fare.
Half way through the book I looked for Ayurveda and Macrobiotics in the index. The author had found no use for these systems, both of which have been prescribing pretty much the same rules of thumb about eating, and which have been quietly making inroads into western lifestyles since a number of decades. The difference is that for these philosophies alcohol would not be considered food. Intoxicant, yes, medicine, perhaps, but food? Indeed it's possible to argue that one thing that's very wrong with the western diet is alcohol, which is considered to be a drink.
Scientists study what they can measure, and journalists see, and write about, what they want to see. Pollan chooses to see the "fact" that a glass or two of alcohol a day is good for health. Few, if any, buddhist, hindu or muslim journalists would share this perspective.
Pollan writes a good deal on the question of why we eat. One would have thought that it's pretty simple: we eat when the body is hungry; we drink when we feel thirst. Unlike us thinking types, when one watches an animal feeding, or a human baby on the breast, or an enlightened being eating or drinking, what we witness is communion. At the end of the book Pollan touches on this word. Perhaps this concept shall be the subject of a future work of his....
And, may I suggest, if M. Pollan really wants to defend food, he needs to take on - in a later edition of the book - Jasmuheen, and breatharians, who have no use for even real food.
He might also wish to consider the possibility that the experience of greedy America (together with those of her rich friends Europe and Oceania) is indeed a deserved one. Through subsidizing their agriculture, and keeping their borders closed to the populations of the poor countries, the rich world ends up creating a mess within itself, as well as extreme poverty elsewhere. Everyone ends up losing....
Let's face it! Certain types of workers in the rich world should lose their jobs and businesses, for the sake of a better world. Most of all, the farmers, who love their machines and bank balances more than their land, animals or plants.
While reviewing The Omnivore's Dilemma I had predicted that M.Pollan was quite likely to go vegetarian sometime quite soon. This seems to be happening, although he has yet to be convinced that he needs to for reasons of health. Having been a lover of non-vegetarian food as well as alcohol previously, and a teetotaler vegetarian now, my own experience of enjoying much better well-being in this new way of life leads me to give this work a 4 rather than 5-star rating.

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A florid history of food "nutritionism" with dietary recommendations

Having enjoyed Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I looked forward to reading In Defense of Food, but was ultimately disappointed. The bulk of the book is a florid history of nutritional science's focus on isolated nutrients--nutritionalism--and how the food manufacturing industry takes advantage of scientific findings in both the development and marketing of their products. But the writing style that worked so well in the Omnivore's Dilemma was far too clever in this book for my tastes.

Pollan writes: "In the case of nutritionalism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts." As an example of nutritionism hard at work, saturated fats got a bad rap by Ansel Keys, and so vegetable oil producers capitalized on his findings by promoting polyunsaturated oils, and margarine was touted as preferable to butter. Then when hydrogenation and trans fat took a hit, margarine manufacturers changed their labels to boldly proclaim "NO trans fats." Unfortunately, margin is not a real food. It's a concocted spread.

By capitalizing on science's love for reductionism by isolating nutritional elements from the whole foods package in which they originate, food manufacturers convince us that their highly-processed and nutrient-poor products are "heart healthy," "rich in omega 3s," "contain zero trans fats," "provide daily fiber requirements," or "contain no cholesterol."

It is important to know how we got where we are in our understanding of nutrition if we are to make wise decisions about what to eat. Too many people are informed on diet by slick marketing with little knowledge of real science, and even scientists cannot agree with each other. One report claims saturated fats are bad, another claims they are healthy. How does the average reader and health seeker decide who is right? Pollan feels qualified to advise us on these points. But while he includes the research of some great health educators such as Weston Price and Gary Taubes, he seemingly ignores their contributions when he makes his dietary recommendation of: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

Pollan's advice to stick to whole foods--those found along the periphery of the supermarket--is sound, as is his advice to buy directly from the farmer, avoid foods your great grandmother wouldn't recognize, eat slowly and savor your meals at the table with friends or family, grow your own food when possible, eat meat from animals that eat food they were designed to, eat less, etc. (After all that he feels the need to inform readers not to eat at gas stations or avoid foods with health claims on the packaging.) This is all pretty typical advice spurred by the agricultural sustainability movement, but it doesn't really get down to what foods will actually sustain us.

Pollan rightly steers people away from grains and toward eating leaves. But the reason people eat grains is because they were told that saturated fats and cholesterol found in meat will kill them, and grains have a high starch content (as well as opiates), which provides calories for fuel. There just isn't enough fuel in greens. Pollan suggests that eating plants will cause you to eat less. (In actual practice, you might end up gorging on ice cream at the end of the day. Even raw food vegans bulk up on fat by eating large quantities of seeds and nuts.) But then he grants an exception to unrefined grains because their starch content provides needed calories. He fails to give weight to the fact that since the inception of agriculture humans have grown sicker, weaker, and shorter and many people get very sick on certain grains. My own health was immeasurably improved when I gave up gluten-containing grains.

Pollan's advice to eat less is sound, but people naturally eat less when their nutritional and fuel needs are met. As an example, Pollan credits the health of the French to their small portions, leisurely meals, and consumption of wine while seeming to discount the fact that the French eat a LOT of saturated fat, something he concedes elsewhere in the book. Anyone who's eaten a high-fat diet knows how satiating fat is. And low-carb diets work for weight loss precisely because consuming fat and protein provide dense nutrition and sufficient, sustainable fuel, so you end up eating less without hunger. Have a pork chop for breakfast and you can last until dinner; eat a bowl of cereal and you'll be hungry within a few hours.

Yes, he makes suggestions on which meats to eat, but doesn't provide any advice as to why eating meat might be beneficial. Instead, he writes: "Unlike plants, which we can't live without, we don't need to eat meat--with the exception of vitamin B12, every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else. (And the tiny amount of B12 we need it not too hard to come by; it's found in all animals foods and is produced by bacteria, so you obtain B12 from eating dirty or decaying or fermented produce.)" The Innuit and Masai seem to do fine with a diet very low in plants, and I've yet to read of a culture that is purely vegetarian.

Another common flaw is claiming vegetarian diets are healthier (than meat eating diets is the clear implication). Yes, when you compare them to the standard American diet they are. But where are the studies comparing the vegetarian diet to, say, a paleolithic diet or a diet of whole foods dominated by pasture-raised meats and fats? Frankly, any diet will come out ahead compared to a diet of pizza, pasta, bread, fast food, and beer. Our great grandmothers cooked with lard and tallow. Why didn't they get an honorable mention?

This book is okay if you want a verbose accounting of the history of nutritional science, and Pollan does cover a lot of ground. Serious disconnects occur between the science Pollan writes about in the first two-thirds of the book and the dietary recommendations in the last third. I don't recommend it for dietary advice. If you'd like to learn about better choices in the food you currently eat, I recommend The Real Food Revival, which will provide nonpreachy information on healthier and more sustainable options. For nutritional advice I recommend Primal Body-Primal Mind: Empower Your Total Health The Way Evolution Intended (...And Didn't) or the encouraging The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy.

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