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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto |  | Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  357 reviews
Sales Rank: 70
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0143114964
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.2
EAN: 9780143114963
ASIN: 0143114964
Publication Date: April 28, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
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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Showing reviews 1-5 of 357
 Read This. Every Last Word. Preferably Now. March 21, 2010
Deb (Palo Alto, CA)
Undoubtedly, this book will be hailed as one of the most influential books of our time. In just 200 pages, Pollan demystifies the 30+ years of confusion, contractions, and chaos created by the food industry and nutritional science. The cover of the book introduces his holy trinity of healthful eating: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants. And the rest of the book anchors the roots of this simply ingenious (and indigenous to many traditional cultures, it turns out) approach to eating. In essence, Pollan shows that the way for us to move forward in our health is to step back into tradition.
On one level, the book traces how the industrialization of food (or more accurately "edible food-like products" which have made our nation sicker than ever) has shifted the focus of eating from whole, complex, quality, culture-centric foods to those that are refined, simple, abundant, and science-ified. But, the overarching message of the book is that our return to health depends our returning to our evolutionary, biological, cultural, and ecological roots where eating is not just fuel for life but the way of life.
Perhaps this book should be required reading for anyone who eats!
 To be a fool or not to be a fool, that is the dilemma. March 19, 2010
Nothing right, is left 2 chance
This book to me is saying, just because somethings are considered everyday normal, cool, acceptable, fine, that's good, and so on that we are all stuck in this whirlpool of status quo. Look this book might not be perfect, but it's good, it's concise and logical. I've read other books related to the subject and they are all saying about the same thing ,which is, we are dealing with short term goals while ignoring the long term goals therefore you can pay me now or you can pay me later.
 A florid history of food "nutritionism" with dietary recommendations March 14, 2010
Joanne of joanneunleashed-dot-com (Pennsylvania)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 Doesn't bring much to the table March 11, 2010
D. Neufeld (San Diego, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was looking forward to this book, but ended up being disappointed and reselling my copy. I've been reading a number of food science books lately, and I was surprised to see that In Defense of Food mostly just references works I had already read, without bringing much new to the table. If this is your first book on the subject it might be a good primer, but if you've read T. Colin Campbell or Joel Fuhrman you can pass.
If you care about what you eat and how you feel... March 7, 2010
An Educated Consumer (Floral Park, NY)
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!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 357
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