- ISBN13: 9780143114963
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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 man… More >>
#1 by Jesse Kornbluth on August 7th, 2010
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What’s better for you — whole milk, 2% milk or skim?
Is a chicken labeled “free range” good enough to reassure you of its purity? How about “grass fed” beef?
What form of soy is best for you — soy milk or tofu?
About milk: I’ll bet most of you voted for reduced or non-fat. But if you’ll turn to page 153 of “In Defense of Food,” you’ll read that processors don’t make low-fat dairy products just by removing the fat. To restore the texture — to make the drink “milky” — they must add stuff, usually powdered milk. Did you know powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, said to be worse for your arteries than plain old cholesterol? And that removing the fat makes it harder for your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins that make milk a valuable food in the first place?
About chicken and beef: Readers of Pollan’s previous book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, know that “free range” refers to the chicken’s access to grass, not whether it actually ventures out of its coop. And all cattle are “grass fed” until they get to the feedlot. The magic words for delightful beef are “grass finished” or “100% grass fed”.
And about soy…but I dare to hope I have your attention by now. And that you don’t want to be among the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight and the third of our citizens who are likely to develop type 2 diabetes before 2050. And maybe, while I have your eyes, you might be mightily agitated to learn that America spends $250 billion — that’s a quarter of the costs of the Iraq war — each year in diet-related health care costs. And that our health care professionals seem far more interested in building an industry to treat diet-related diseases than they do in preventing them. And that the punch line of this story is as sick as it is simple: preventing diet-related disease is easy.
In just 200 pages (and 22 pages of notes and sources), “In Defense of Food” gives you a guided tour of 20th century food science, a history of “nutritionism” in America and a snapshot of the marriage of government and the food industry. And then it steps up to the reason most readers will buy it — and if you care for your health and the health of your loved ones, this is a no-brainer one-click — and presents a commonsense shopping-and-eating guide.
If you are up on your Pollan and your Nina Planck and your Barbara Kingsolver, you know the major points of the “real food” movement. But if you’re new to this information or are disinclined to buy or read this book, let me lay Pollan’s argument out for you:
– High-fructose corn syrup is the devil’s brew. Do yourself a favor and remove it from your diet. (If you have kids, here’s a place to start: Heinz smartly offers an “organic” ketchup, made with sugar.)
– Avoid any food product that makes health claims — they mean it’s probably not really food.
– In a supermarket, don’t shop in the center aisles. Avoid anything that can’t rot, anything with an ingredient you can’t pronounce.
– “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”
– “You are what you eat eats too.” Most cows end their days on a diet of corn, unsold candy, their pulverized brothers and sisters — yeah, you read that right — and a pharmacy’s worth of antibiotics. And they bestow that to you. Consider that the next time there’s a sale on sirloin.
– “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” By which Pollan means: Eat natural food, the kind your grandmother served (and not because she was so wise, but because the food industry had not yet learned that the big money was in processing, not harvesting). Use meat sparingly. Eat your greens, the leafier and more varied the better.
In short: Kiss the Western diet as we know it goodbye. Look to the cultures where people eat well and live long. Ignore the faddists and experts. Trust your gut. Literally.
In all this, Pollan insists that you have to save yourself. And he makes a good case why. Our government, he says, is so overwhelmed by the lobbying and marketing power of our processed food industry that the American diet is now 50% sugar in one form or another — calories that provide “virtually nothing but energy.” Our representatives are almost uniformly terrified to take on the food industry. And as for the medical profession, the key moment, Pollan writes, is when “doctors kick the fast-food franchises out of the hospital” — don’t hold your breath.
“You want to live, follow me.” I loved it when Schwarzenegger said that in “Terminator.” It matters much more when, in so many words, Michael Pollan delivers that same message in “In Defense of Food.”
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Bozena Klejne on August 7th, 2010
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It is so good to read a book about nutrition that does not promote any new diet! The author’s message is plain and simple: Go back to nature, eat wholesome foods, and don’t bother with dieting. Don’t overeat; instead eat slowly, and enjoy your meals – such notion has already been promoted by Mireille Guiliano in her bestseller “French Women Don’t Get Fat”.
Our curse is processed food. The dieting industry completely distorted our feeding process. Our desire to improve everything and to separate ‘needed’ ingredients from the ‘unneeded’ ones leads us to refining most of our food products. However, our artificially ‘improved’ food only seemingly has the same nutritious qualities as natural food. Artificial and natural foods have as little in common as silk roses with real ones.
Processed food is easily obtainable, doesn’t require much work to prepare, and, unfortunately, it is often also addictive. At the same time it is full of calories with very small nutritional content.
Like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Pollan’s new book is indeed eye-opening. It makes us think twice about what we are going to put into our mouths the next time we eat. For more reading about the danger of refined foods I strongly recommend Can W e Live 150 – another book devoted to living in agreement with nature, and revealing the secrets of healthy diet.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Theodore A. Rushton on August 7th, 2010
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Americans are fat.
Who’s to blame? The government. Ay, but there’s the rub. If the government undoes its mischievous agricultural subsidies, voters in farm states will throw the rascals out of office. Look what happened to Sen. John McCain in Iowa because he wants to end ethanol subsidies. No politician can afford to be public spirited instead of self-centered. The cure is not in government.
Instead, an intelligent solution begins with this book. Pollan goes to the heart of the matter, which is the content of our food. Our consumer society is based on making attractive products. For food, this means added sugar or added fat.
To quote Pollan: “. . . we’re eating a whole lot more, at least 300 more calories a day than we consumed in 1985. What kind of calories? Nearly a quarter of these additional calories come from added sugars (and most of that in the form of high-fructose corn syrup); roughly another quarter from added fat . . . ”
These extra calories are from nutrient-deficient food. It began with refined flour in the 1870s which removed bran and wheat germ to produce long-lasting snowy white flour. Consumers loved it because flour no longer turned rancid, and it didn’t become infected with bugs.
Okay. Why didn’t bugs chomp down on this new flour? Quite simply because the nutrients, the bran, wheat germ, carotene, were gone. Pollan explains, “. . . this gorgeous white powder was nutritionally worthless, or nearly so. Much the same is now true for corn flour and white rice.” Take a look at a package of white flour and count the additives that make up for the loss of natural ingredients. Then you’ll understand the basic thrust of this book and its remedies.
How do refined carbohydrates affect us? They are implicated in several chronic diseases including diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.
This book outlines those problems and practical solutions to the lack of nutrients and excess of fat and sugar in our daily food. Quite simply, good health is often less a matter of miracle medicines than of common sense meals. Pollan outlines the problem and offers solutions, as indicated in a University of Minnesota study of natural ingredients in wheat which concluded, “This analysis suggests that something else in the whole grain protects against death.”
Protects against death? Did that get your interest? If so, this book is truly a major step toward a much healthier lifestyle . . . . . merely by changing the foods you eat.
Try it. You’ll like it.
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by Samuel Sellers on August 7th, 2010
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This was not a bad book, but the biggest problem I had with it was that it was too short (just over 200 pages of text in large typeface) and it often repeated points without elaborating on them in as much detail as I would have liked. Pollan goes back to the theme of “Nutritionism” throughout his book, and discusses how the interests of food scientists and manufacturers have aligned to create the food environment we have today. This is a very fascinating story, but he seems too narrowminded on the theme of nutritionism and how that has ruined our food system and doesn’t detail other potential causes.
Other interests (such as the beef and dairy lobbies, which he briefly alludes to a couple times in the book) have also had a tremendous influence on the national diet. Moreover, the way we live our lives, busily, without time to eat, is a tremendous contributor to poor health that Pollan again only alludes to. Lifestyle is a huge part of the food culture that Pollan encourages, but he doesn’t specify what elements of lifestyle are common in the most successful food cultures.
My other major bugaboo with the book was that he barely touched on the notion of vegetarian and vegan diets, which are becoming increasingly popular in the States. The question of whether these diets are safe and healthy was not mentioned much (about a paragraph or so) and some insight into these two movements would have been appreciated.
Overall, it’s a quicker read than the Omnivore’s Dilemma, but less detailed and with fewer eye-opening moments. A book that should be read, but I recommend you save your money and wait until the paperback edition is released.
Rating: 3 / 5
#5 by C. URen on August 7th, 2010
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Michael Pollan’s book has some generally good advice about what to eat, and some fascinating/disturbing info about the American food industry, but I was continually frustrated by the author’s weak attention to research. Pollan is a not a scientist, and doesn’t seem to find it very important to ground his assertions with unimpeachable facts. His advice can sometimes be contradictory (“don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize” but “eat tofu”–If your great-grandmother didn’t come from Asia, it’s doubtful she would recognize anything made of bean curd) and he tends to cite sources that he likes, rather than sources he’s really investigated. For example, Pollan would never list a dairy-industry pamphlet as one of his sources, but he gleefully quotes some rather doubtful statements from an organic-food-industry pamphlet, and apparently didn’t bother to ask even one secondary source to verify them. He writes a compelling essay showing that nutrition and dietary habits are incredibly difficult for scientists to study, and implies that any information based on nutritional studies is flawed, yet quotes certain studies as if they are somehow immune to this problem. Pollan maintains that the American government’s health-education programs are a major cause of the obesity epidemic, yet the descriptions he gives of these programs don’t match my memory of what was actually being taught at the time. And because he gives merely general endnotes, rather than specific footnotes, it’s difficult to check where he got his information.
I also had a little trouble with Pollan’s tone, which is strangely naive, and occasionally condescending. He seems overly impressed with some of his own statements, such as his claim that humans are the only animals that turn to experts to tell them what to eat. Even if one accepts that this is true, humans do a lot of things that animals don’t do, and in many cases, we should be glad of it. (And as Paula Poundstone has pointed out, she has to tell her dog to get his head out of the garbage every day.)
I think Pollan is basically right that the American food industry would benefit from a major overhaul, and the suggestions he’s making to the government would make us all healthier if they’re implemented. But it’s too bad that someone with generally sound ideas can’t take a little more trouble with the details. Overall, if you read this book to learn how to eat healthier, you’ll get some good tips, but take his “facts” with a grain of salt. This is definitely a book to be read, but it should be read critically.
Rating: 3 / 5