| | |  | Nutrition | Home » » » » In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | | | | | | | 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. | | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9781594201455
• Condition: New
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Michael Pollan | | Hardcover:
| 256 pages | | Publisher:
| Penguin Press HC, The | | Publication Date:
| 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1594201455 | | Package Length:
| 8.3 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.7 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 399 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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 Okay. But not his best work.Sep 02, 2010
In comparison to his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, this book was somewhat boring. Many things are repeated in this book. Worth reading if you are studying nutrition or America's food system. But, if you had to read one of his books, I would recommend to read The Omnivore's Dilemma over this book.
 Great intro on the Food Industry and "Food Science"Aug 22, 2010
This is a pretty concise, well organized book covering the biggest problems in our food industry and "food science". It's not a long read at all, and totally informative without being a "do this, do that" type book.
In fact, if anything Pollan is great at letting you figure out the value of what it is you eat and how it effects you and your family.
0 of 4 found the following review helpful:
More than "An Eater's Manifesto"Aug 15, 2010
I aspire to be a traditional Catholic. Part of this necessarily involves a rejection of today's reigning death cult and its diabolical effluvia: nihilism, relativism, contraception, infanticide, suicidal tolerance, homosexual "marriage," etc. etc.... Alas, this kind of traditionalism is beyond the bounds of our blessed cognoscenti's famous tolerance. Well within its bounds, however - given today's growing neopagan cult of the body - is the embrace of various traditional diets. The promotion of this truncated traditionalism is what Michael Pollan's gospel is all about.
The problem, in part, is the paradoxical totalitarianism of Pollan's traditionalism-lite. If you let it, Pollan's gospel will consume your life. The chaotic echos of your descent into the orthorexic maelstrom will sound like this: Is this sufficiently organic? Was this beef grass-fed? And was it grass-finished? Are these eggs from free-range chickens? Where can I buy wild game? Must I really buy a freezer? How many ingredients are in this food? More than five? Were these vegetables/fruits grown locally? What's sufficiently local? What's the ecological profile of this food? Should I spread this gospel? Should I shun those who don't? And so on.
See, this book is not simply "An Eater's Manifesto." As the word "manifesto" indicates, it's as much about politics as it is about gastronomics. This is clear throughout the book, and Pollan has also made this clear in interviews. For example, in an interview on PBS with Bill Moyers (search Youtube), Pollan says this: "We need a food policy czar in the White House." In other words, as I suspected he would, he implicitly advocates the Oprahist matriarchy of the Nanny State (consisting of many eunuchs, of course). On a related note, it's no accident that throughout this book Pollan gives no credit to fathers for their role in the maintenance of food traditions. He gives all the credit to mothers. This annihilation of the role of fathers is, alas, at the center of today's death cult - this in a book ostensibly promoting life! Much more could be said about all of this.
And it's not simply a political manifesto. Even more, it's a quasi-religious manifesto. Brilliantly, Pollan's soteriology is trinitarian; it boils down to three commandments: 1) Eat food. 2) Not too much. 3) Mostly plants. To the extent that this gospel promotes life in its fullness, as he convincingly argues that it does, I must embrace it. What and how we eat does indeed reflect our view of creation, and traditionalism in its fullness (which is nothing other than traditional Catholicism) recognizes that God got it right. We need not, and should not, appoint industrial food processors as substitute gods. Whole food is God's food.
Incidentally, as Pollan rightly strives to reject scientism (scientism, not science), his rejection of "nutritionism" (the reigning orthodoxy that food can, without loss, be reduced to its constituent elements) makes sense. What doesn't make sense is his simultaneous pervasive, utterly uncritical embrace of the theory of evolution, which is itself rooted in the ideology of scientism. Antidote: Darwin on Trial. An unfashionable suggestion, I know. No matter.
You can see that I'm conflicted about this book. On the one hand, in Part III Pollan offers a variety of excellent and charming rules of thumb to follow in eating. And it's a refreshing rejection of the myth of progress and the rampant chronological snobbery it breeds. Yet my skeptical antennae tell me that this book is - in a world that has largely cut off any sense of the truly transcendent - part of today's desperate push towards a totalizing neopagan, Oprahist agenda in service of the Brave New World. I'll again resist saying more about this, other than to refer you to my Resist the Brave New World guide here on Amazon.
In short, I recommend that you just buy his Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, which is simply a collection of the rules offered in Part III here, along with some others. Following such rules, it seems to me, is a necessary, though insufficient, part of genuine traditionalism. One's adherence to these rules - without their baggage - should be a part, but only a part, of one's ascent to the heights.
Common food sense for the masses. A MUST READ.Aug 15, 2010
The American public has long been a captive audience of food industry corporations. They push onto our grocery store shelves inexpensive food dressed up to dazzle and seduce, all the while telling us it is good for us. The main name of the game is profit. And the clever foods corporations figured out cheaper and faster ways to produce a number of "building block material" they could use to craft all kinds of food products. Most of processed food is comprised of bleached flour, corn syrup, sodium, and hydrogenated oils. The techniques to create them have been heavily optimized so that it is cheap to create enormous quantities. This "stuff" is then used to create all kinds of things like cereals, breads, cookies, chips, snacks, and a myriad of prepared foods. On their own, the food would be mostly lacking in nutrition. So, the food companies dump in all kinds of vitamins and minerals (confirmed by scientists to be essential to our good health) to then lay claim to these things being more nutritious than old fashioned "real" food. The marketing folks tasked to help with selling these products create all kinds of attractive packaging and advertisements to lure us to the purchase. But these products are far from healthy. The inserted vitamins and minerals are not sufficiently absorbed by the human body. And the constituents of the foods consumed create other problems that outweigh any possible nutrition that might be received.
The main problem is that these companies become incredibly rich while America becomes fat and undernourished. And the side effects of this are insidiously slow to realize... it takes many years before the symptoms occur, like the massive chronic illness called diabetes. But, the pharmaceutical industry is more than happy for this to happen, for now THEY get wealthy by creating a continuous supply of the drugs needed to counteract the illnesses spawned by the poor American diet.
Michael Pollan's book goes into useful detail about how all of this happened... how America's diet became hijacked by the massive foods business and sent us on a horrible path to ill health. In the second half of the book, he gets into the basics of how we can rescue ourselves from our bad eating habits. How we can be smart to select "real food" that is really good for us.
You will find that if you follow Pollan's guidelines, you won't need to be constantly chasing after the latest diet craze. You will be healthy and fit, as long as you eat the right foods in concert with regular exercise and sufficient sleep. Don't look for an overnight change. It will be gradual. But you will notice it and hopefully live much longer (and healthier) than you would have if you had continued your previous dieting habits.
Thanks to Michael Pollan for his books that are helping to wake up America. I imagine the foods industries will try to confuse us into thinking they've fixed it all and we've nothing to worry about... but at this point, I wouldn't trust them any longer. Stay away from highly processed foods and they can't bother you. Stick with what nature intended. Don't fear all things processed... a little bit of processing is OK, as long as the ingredients are basic. But try to eat natural foods as much as possible.
 common senseAug 15, 2010
Should be required reading for anybody health minded.
Traditional dieting is not the way to go. For survival and to thrive, one must eat wholesome foods that are capable of rotting. It is plain and simple.
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