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 enlarge | Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $11.84
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Rating:  192 reviews
Sales Rank: 115
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Showing reviews 156-160 of 192
 Real Food Guru Pollan Advocates Going Back to the Basics and Getting to Know Your Local Farmers February 7, 2008
Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
At this date, I still have not read Michael Pollan's sweeping look at how people currently get the food they eat, the highly praised The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, perhaps because I was afraid of a wake-up call regarding my own diet along the lines of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. As I am reaching the age where monitoring my cholesterol take has become crucial to my well-being, I have become increasingly concerned about the quality of the food I eat even more than the quantity, my concurrent preoccupation. The latest book from Pollan, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley with a passion for researching the origins of food, is an eminently readable eye-opener because he takes the fairly audacious stand that nutrition is nothing that can be manufactured and that real food in and of itself needs to be respected for the complexities it provides to accommodate one's diet. The author does not lay claim that dismantling food into its essentials cannot be done but rather asserts that any effort to reconstitute such food is bound for failure because scientists have yet to identify the full range of nutrients that would need to reproduced.
Targeted to a nation of people insecure about the way they look, the immediate availability of food-like substances that advertise higher nutrition and lower fat has been the key to their success. In fact, according to Pollan, such substances are cheaper in cost since government subsidies greatly reduce the prices of sugar and fat, often under the guise of high-fructose corn syrup and soybean oil. They also keep longer in the pantry or refrigerator than actual food, and the combination of these convenience factors has had a direct impact on our ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The author effectively dissects what food really is and even more astutely, what it isn't with common sense observations. If it didn't exist in our grandparents' kitchens when they were our age, chances are pretty good that it isn't real food. A claim of health benefits on the packaging is another dead giveaway. The sad irony is that the Western diet, previously espoused as the one the rest of the world should emulate as an indication of prosperity, is the one where food substitutes are most pervasive. Other diets around the world may contain high fat content, but the limited availability of food substitutes has allowed them to lead healthier lifestyles than ours. That's really the main point of Pollan's discourse - how do we reclaim the healthy diet that will bring us back to the basics of our ancestors.
This is where he takes flight with his passion for food and doesn't let impracticalities stop his purist intentions. I enjoyed his idea of developing the so-called perfect meal, which he defines as everything on the table must be prepared specifically from ingredients within close proximity of his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. The extent to which Pollan remains true to his commitment is what fascinates me as he goes as far as collecting local yeast spores for the bread dough and foraging in the wild for salad greens. His anthropologist-level enthusiasm in gathering food is impressive, though he even admits it's not practical to do all the time. The feasibility of doing the same exercise in areas with more extreme climate conditions is questionable. It's also not a coincidence that the author hails from the Bay Area, home of renowned organic eateries like Chez Panisse and Cafe Gratitude. Pollan gratefully does not use his book as a seething diatribe against agribusiness and supermarket chains. Instead, he provides a fairly well-grounded criticism of their business practices thanks to his own investigative journalism. While he provides familiar, almost cliched advice on keeping a healthy diet, he is more interested in having his readers support the idea of getting to know the individual farmer rather than trying to understand the science of what makes up the food substitutes that sustain us now.
 Not without flaws February 7, 2008
Charlie (Virginia, USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
About: Pollan picks apart the Western diet, saying that the industrialization of food as well as nutritionism (paying more attention to the nutrients in a food rather than the food itself) has destroyed our health. He then offers suggestions on how readers can change their own diets (Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants, which he elaborates on in the final section of the book)
Pros: Quick read, well written, interesting topic (I happen to agree with his main points), presents a nice overview of flaws in nutrition science, acknowledges that people's bodies are different (i.e. some folks can't digest lactase), nice resources section at the back.
Cons: While Pollan does provide sources, they are not linked to individual sentences in the book, just listed alphabetically by chapter, leaving the reader wondering where he specifically got some of the information he states. He states that his authority to write such a book is "tradition" and "common sense" which seems to me like saying "anyone could have written this book". Although he admits it in a later chapter, some of his prose smacks of the nutritionism that he rails against (i.e. he seems smitten by omega-3 acids). Uses "more on this later" frequently enough that it becomes annoying. Although he says he's just providing "suggestions" and that he doesn't want to tell people what to eat, I see little difference between the two.
 Food for Thought February 6, 2008
Kevin A. Freeman (MA)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
On the heels of his best-selling THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, Michael Pollan has written a much smaller, more user-friendly book that serves as a "Cliff Notes" to Big Food Corporations and why they're bad for not only your body, but your wallet (do the words "health costs" mean anything)?
IN DEFENSE OF FOOD is divided into three parts: "The Age of Nutritionism" (which defines and explains what scientists have done with your food while you were dozing for a few decades on that "sugar high"); "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization" (which convincingly connects the dots between the western diet science and Big Food have teamed up to give us and sickness); and "Getting Over Nutritionism" (which sets out a game plan for you to turn over a new leaf -- then eat it). If you know someone who would never in a million years pick up (much less finish) a book about something they'd rather eat than read, I would at least suggest they look over this third part, which is all of 61 pages.
If we have any chance against the one-two punch of Big Food and Big Pharma (one to make us sick, the other to offer nostrums to "heal" -- or not -- these sicknesses), then we should be educating ourselves by reading books like this. The science part might be a little dry, but the advice, such as don't eat a food that didn't exist when your great-grandmother ate, OR one that has more than five ingredients, OR one that has words you cannot pronounce among its ingredients, is sound enough.
Pollan even argues (against all odds) why we should be paying MORE for food, not less. For one, bad "food" is cheap because Big Food mass produces it and, in the case of corn and soybeans, our government subsidizes it. Good food (produce) is expensive -- but in the long run, you'll save money on all the health bills you'd be sure to accrue if you just ate blindly as Big Food would have you.
Clear and concise, IN DEFENSE OF FOOD is a call to the ramparts. Buy it, read it, live it. When you're kneeling in your new garden this summer, you'll be glad you did.
Another fine effort for Pollan February 6, 2008
J. Canestrino (Lodi, CA United States)
In his latest book, the author does his best to dispel the myths of the food processing industry who have co-opted nutrition scientists and government agencies to their cause. It is the natural follow up to his last book which sought to elucidate the practices of the food production industry. He decides to jump into the fray and make some very basic recommendations for those who want to know how to eat. His primary message is to change the way you think about food and make it more of a family and social event. Eat locally, eat fresh and eat in moderation. In particular, he encourages everyone to focus on eating minimally processed foods which means that in most stores we should shop around the periperhies of the store (produce, fish, meat, bakery) and avoid the center aisles. And, his wit and humor are in evidence, "Meanwhile, the genuinely heart-healthy whole foods in the produce section, lacking the financial and political clout of the packaged goods a few aisles over, are mute. But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health." Gotta love that line.
If you don't buy this book, you will die sooner then your potential February 3, 2008
Karam Khan (Surrey, British Columbia (BC) Canada)
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
My tagline to this review is kind of true.
I won't go over everything you have heard/read about this book before getting to my review. I am sure you've read every summary of what Pollan says.
As a person always interested in modern nutritionism and the act of eating food in balance with our lifestyles etc, this book at first intimidated me and I thought twice about picking it up. (The other factor-a hardcover with a hardcover price) also dissuaded me. I did pick it up on a whim thinking only that if some good ever comes out of this book, then what I pay or read will be worth it.
Fast Forward few weeks:
This is, by far probably one of the fewest books a person ever reads that change your life. For the better,I might add. It is a transformation into opening your eyes in a concise,sincere and never preachy manner. Day 1 of skimming over this book made me make better choices in my diet. As day 1 went on to become day 5,6,7 so on...I started feeling better, moving quicker,being more alert then ever before. A few weeks later my jeans were falling off my waist and I had to invest in a new pair. The old tweed jacket that I once wore as a 20 yr old quasi prepster made its return to my wardrobe 6 years later.
and that is just one side effect.
the months and years from now, there will be many many more.
and all for the best.
Therefore: If you don't buy this book, you will die sooner then your potential.
:)
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