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.
Customer Reviews
The Vision of Michael Pollan:
Not more important than The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but absolutely necessary reading for anyone concerned with reversing America’s disastrous agriculture policies and politics
Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.:
“Most nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter…[Americans] suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.”
One factor is industrial farms, which breed for quantity rather than nutritional quality. Another is processed food - many nutrients are destroyed in the processing. When our bodies are still craving nutrients, we remain hungry and consume more calories.
The author introduces the term Nutritionism, the focus on nutritional components in a diet (such as protein, Omega 3, Vitamin B12) rather than the foods. “People don’t eat nutrients; they eat foods, and foods can behave differently from the nutrients they contain… A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutritional parts.”
Margarine is a good example of the hazards of engineered food. “The food scientists’ ingenious method for making healthy vegetable oil solid at room temperature - by blasting it with hydrogen - turned out to produce unhealthy trans fats, fats that we now know are more dangerous than the saturated fats they were designed to replace.”
Pollan’s advice: don’t east anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
The good news is, it is not too late to benefit from improved eating habits. The book includes a fascinating story of 10 middle-aged Aborigines who left the bush and became diabetic and overweight. They returned to their homeland, accompanied by a researcher. After seven weeks of eating their traditional diet, blood tests “found striking improvements in virtually every measure of health.”
Pollan’s summary is: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
But he doesn’t demonize meat eaters. In fact he cites research by Weston Price from the 1930s. “Price identified no single ideal diet - he found populations that thrived on seafood diets, dairy diets, meat diets, and diets in which fruits, vegetables, and grain predominated. The Masai of Africa consumed virtually no plant foods at all, subsisting on meat, blood, and milk… The Eskimos he interviewed lived on raw fish, game meat, fish roe, and blubber, seldom eating anything remotely green.”
This is a well-written, highly informative book.
Made me change my diet.:
This book was a wonderful eye-opener. It delves into the eating habits of America, why we are a diet-obsessed culture and why these diets aren’t doing a damn thing to help us.
I couldn’t recommend this book enough. I feel as if every American should read this and honestly think about what this man (and our own common sense) has to say about eating properly.
Since reading this book, I have began to change my diet, using the guidelines that Pollan suggests. I feel like Americas would be better off if they themselves gave this new idea of “eating food” a chance.
How our “food” is no longer really food:
The devils here are “nutritionism” and “reductive science.” I would prefer the terms “big agriculture” and “over processed, refined and denatured” foods. And if the word “science” is insisted upon, it should be “science” sponsored by big agriculture and food processing companies. Terminology aside, the point that Michael Pollan is making is that the problem with the American diet that has led to an astonishing increase in obesity and attendant chronic diseases of plenty such as type two diabetes, is that we are eating foods that have been produced unnaturally in monocultures, foods that have been stripped of many of their nutrients, foods that are alien to any kind of established or traditional cuisine.
Pollan demonizes reductive science because that has been the tool of the corporate interests. However reduction in science is a method breaks things down into individual parts, a method that is handy for some kinds of problems. When we cannot break down the problem effectively, as in the case with food, reductive science is less capable and we must give greater weight to historical science. We must look at entire cuisines and the social situations in which food is eaten to understand our nutritional relationship to what we eat and how. Sometimes it is the case the whole IS greater than the sum of the parts. In the case of even a single food, such as an orange or an apple or leaf of spinach, it is not currently possible to identify reductively just what it is about the food that makes it healthy for us to eat. Indeed, as Pollan argues, there may well be synergistic effects from a single food to an entire cuisine that are essential to good eating.
Pollan writes: “In recent years a less reductive method of doing nutritional science has emerged, based on the idea of studying whole dietary patterns instead of individual foods or nutrients.” (p. 179) He adds, “How a culture eats may have just as much of a bearing on health as what a culture eats.” (p. 182)
It is also the case that we eat too much. We eat by portion size or until our plate is clean when we should be paying attention to how much we have eaten and how full we feel. We are not able to do that very well because we eat too fast and eat amid a host of distractions like the TV, or the traffic as we are driving in our vehicles, and we have no traditional guidance as to how much to eat. Guiding us are the great corporations that produce the food and want us to consume vast quantities of their products. Furthermore, eating has gotten too easy. I did a little study of some of the foods eaten by the Native Americans in the area around Sacramento and found that just processing foods like acorns, Digger pine nuts, black walnuts, etc. required hours per meal. Pollan asks, “How often would you eat French fries if you had to peel, wash, cut and fry them yourself–and then clean up the mess?” (p. 186) Fast food is a huge part of the problem which is why there is a healthy movement that started in Italy called “slow food.” Pollan even refers to some studies which show that “the widespread availability of cheap convenience foods could explain most of the twelve-pound increase in the weight of the average American since the early 1960s.” (pp. 186-187)
The sad truth is that big agriculture and the food processing corporations have addicted Americans to the easy macronutrients in their “foods” and we are in denial. Pollan notes, “The snack food and beverage industry has surely been the great beneficiary of the new social taboo against smoking…” (p. 191) We have traded one addiction for another.
When we look at traditional diets the world over from China to the Mediterranean, we can see that they suffer from heart attacks, obesity, etc. must less often than we do. I think a more active lifestyle is a major factor here, but the total of ensemble of what, how, and when they eat in traditional ways is the other major factor. Pollan concludes that “the human animal is well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet, however, is not one of them.” (p. 11)
There is a lot of other interesting information and insights in this excellent book about how and why we got to this sorry state of affairs vis-à-vis food. This is the third of Pollan’s books on food that I have read, and although perhaps the least of the three, it is nonetheless an outstanding piece of work that ought to be widely read. The other books are The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Natural History of Four Meals (2006). See my reviews at Amazon.
Required reading for anyone who wants to eat healthfully in the United States:
As a journalist Michael Pollan can take a broader view than a nutritionist when looking at food and the food systems that create our food. As with “Omnivore’s Dilemma” (Michael Pollan’s previous work on food systems in the United States) “In Defense of Food” is really “required reading” for anyone in the United States who wants to eat healthfully. In this book Michael Pollan does an excellent job of cutting through the reductionist thinking common in the nutrition world today, offering very simple ideas on how to eat healthfully.
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