In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Edition: Lrg
- Author: Michael Pollan
- Publisher: Large Print Distribution
- Release Date: May 2009
- ISBN-10: 1594133328
- ISBN-13: 9781594133329
- List Price: $16.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryAmazon 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 |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Another book that revolutionizes the way I view our interactions with plants
Rating:
Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Michael Pollan begins his book with these especially concise declarations about how to eat healthfully and he then writes a book about how nutritionism, the 'Western diet', and unmindful eating have led many humans astray (often down paths to stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer). Pollan encourages us to shy away from reductionistic dietary journeying towards a fuller and more mindful experience with food and with other humans. He calls for a return to eating whole foods. It's strange that a music festival (Bonnaroo) and then my doctor's recommendation that I take a medication (a $60 a month medication no less!) to try to reduce my triglycerides would lead me on such a dietary quest that my core beliefs about food and meals would be decimated and more humanly primordial food mindfulness would rise from the ashes like a phoenix of health. I grew up very thin and very athletic and figured that I could eat whatever (often highly processed, laboratory flavored 'food-like substances), tons of whatever, and few plants. This was a very important book for me to read considering that a lovely baby boy grows inside the womb of my lovely bride. This book will help me to be mindful of what we as a family eat and what we slowly eat together. This is a very important book that I recommend for everybody to read. I place this book in very high regard and will cherish it along with other books that have helped change my worldview about our relationship with plants. I also recommend that you consider reading _Fast Food Nation_, _Slaughterhouse_, and _What to Eat_.
Exactly what I was looking for
Rating:
Very informative book. I found out that lot of things I was eating I thought were "healthy" actually aren't. I've never struggled with weight, so I don't really care about calories, and most "eating healthy" advice focuses heavily on calories and not so much on what's actually in the food. I try to eat healthy, but this book also made me realize that food isn't just the sum of its parts.
An education
Rating:
Couldn't put this down. Pollan is an excellent researcher and social commentator. This timely book entertains, inspires, and motivates. He sheds light on some of today's important issues. Give this to every carnivore you know--they'll turn over a new "leaf". Goodbye fad diets and hello to eating "mostly plants".
You'll never look at food the same
Rating:
Michael Pollan wrote In Defense of Food to give Western culture a timely and necessary message: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. This simple yet profound adage is unpacked over the next 200 pages as the author takes aim at three formidable enemies: nutritional science, the food industry, and the Western diet. These three entities are all deeply intertwined, feeding off each other at the expense of the consumer.
Pollan is not a scientist or a medical professional, and never claims to be. Instead he is a journalist whose research skills and voice of clarity is evident within the first few pages. The book's bibliography alone spans 23 pages, showing the massive amount of effort he put in to ensure reliability and accuracy.
In Defense of Food uses several examples to support it's premise that our diet needs drastic changes. The book frequently references and explores the recent phenomenon lipophobia, or fear of dietary fats. This serves as an excellent illustration of how nutritional science effects the average American's diet, which is then capitalized on by the food industry, with little regard to the veracity of these health claims.
Pollan goes on to contrast the personal ramifications of our "scientific" Western diet with the traditional diets of other cultures, such as Mediterranean or French, drawing heavily on the pioneering work of Weston A. Price. The results of these comparisons are astounding, best understood in an experiment done on Westernized Australian Aborigines. This particular group of ten had left the bush several years ago and had since reaped the consequences of the Western diet: obesity, elevated risk of heart disease, and type two diabetes. The experiment took them out of civilization and put them back in the bush for seven weeks, forcing them to leave their sedentary lifestyles and rely on their indigenous lifestyle and dietary habits. After about fifty days of foraging and hunting, in other words eating real and natural food, they had basically all but reversed their previous health problems.
The implications that the author fleshes out here are mind-blowing. We can escape our poor health simply by changing our diets. Sure, this doctrine is frequently espoused and believed by the general populace, but if it's practice were the norm why are Western diseases like hypertension and diabetes becoming more and more ubiquitous? To answer a question with a question, how would that benefit the pharmaceutical companies? Unfortunately, the drug companies have a stranglehold on the vast majority of the medical community which in turn trickles down to the trusting patient. For an excellent treatment on the calloused corruption of the pharmaceutical world, check out the book Our Daily Meds by Melody Petersen.
As much as I would love to write more on this book, I know I wouldn't do it true justice. The author writes with such passion about food, one of the biggest parts of our existence, that one must read the book to truly appreciate the wisdom inside. After reading this no one will ever look at food the same. What I love is he doesn't give a complex regiment to follow, but instead a major paradigm shift that will work itself out naturally in our lives. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a healthier and more fulfilling lifestyle.
Fake Food Alert
Rating: 
Eat food, says Michael Pollan. Real food, not imitation food. Not foodlike creations of food science. Not disembodied nutrients. Eat whole food, if you can find it, because it is more than the sum of its parts. This is good advice.
He discusses the economic and political angles of the food processing and marketing industries, and asks, "When will the doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospitals?" Powerful lobbies in Washington influence food "science," which is ideology anyway, not real science. Beware of the Nutritional Industrial Complex! The Western diet is a disaster because real food is disappearing from supermarket shelves and being replaced by chemical concoctions "elaborately festooned with health claims."
If the latest food science really knows better than Mother Nature, why don't babies thrive on infant formulas? Why does margarine cause more health problems than butter? Why does nutritional equivalence never seem to work? He discusses dietary fats, which might not be as bad as claimed by the lipid hypothesis. Fat is not a toxin, he says; don't be afraid of the fats in real food.
Most of this book is not new. You don't need to read it if you are already knowledgeable about food. But it makes sense. Read it if you are confused about what to eat, or if you are concerned about the degradation of the American food supply. Read it if you are overweight and don't know why.
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