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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. more info
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Great read
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This book should be required reading for all Americans. A must read if you are interested in organic/local food, etc.
Real Food Right Now
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
“The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.” Although this statement is on the hundredth page of the book, it may as well be on the first since our diet — the “Western diet” — is largely responsible for the decline in consumption of “real food”, the preoccupation with nutritional content, and increasing rates of chronic diseases. Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” breaks down into three broad sections: (1) the introduction of “nutritionism” & it’s history; (2) the negative consequences of adhering to nutritionism; and three, what we — as eaters — can do to avoid the pitfalls of nutritionism, eat better, and become healthier.
Pollan attributes the emergence of nutritionism to five factors: (1) a shifting from whole foods to refined foods; (2) the deliberate simplification of our food stuffs; (3) the increase in quantity at the expense of quality; (4) the over-reliance on seeds instead of leaves; and (5), the undermining and replacing of food culture for food science. Although the reversal of these trends on a global scale may be slow and incremental, the changes made at an individual level may be immediate, insofar as the eater recognizes that “in order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance…than most of us do today” (pp.145).
Some of the suggestions proffered:
1. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, number more than five, or that include high-fructose corn syrup.
2. Shop the perimeter of the supermarket and stay out of the middle (the processed foods populate the middle of the market).
3. Frequent farmer’s markets or subscribe to a community-supported agriculture (CSA) organization.
4. Eat a lot of leafy plants.
5. Be the kind of person — but not the actual person — that takes supplements.
6. Eat more traditional foods: French, Italian, Mexican, Thai, Japanese, etc.
7. Drink a glass of wine with supper…”people who drink moderately and regularly live longer and suffer considerably less heart disease than teetotalers” (pp.181).
8. Eat less by paying more.
9. Eat meals, not snacks: Don’t graze all day — we aren’t cows.
10. Try not to eat alone.
11. Eat slowly…as promoted by the slow food movement and that which is antithetical to American fast food and the way of life it propagates: “Fast food is precisely the way you’d expect a people to eat who put success at the center of life, who work long hours (with two careers per household), get only a couple of weeks vacation each year, and who can’t depend on a social safety net to cushion them from life’s blows” (pp.195).
12. Cook.
This book is nothing short of concise, pointed, powerful, and…necessary. Highly recommended.
An education
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
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”.
Ever wondered why a burger costs a dollar?
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This is precisely why you should read this book. Sadly most people lack even a minimal amount of skepticism which is largely due to the subconscious belief of cleverly designed marketing.
This book changed my life!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I can’t say enough good things about this book. First, Michael Pollan is a TERRIFIC writer. Secondly, he handles the subject matter extremely well. What could be another boring diet book is incredibly insightful and well researched and put together. My suspicions about how food has changed have been confirmed, especially by date. Now I know I was correct in sensing that food doesn’t taste the same as it did in the early 80′s and now I know why.
Everyone who cares about their health, their family and the planet would do well to read this book and follow the guidelines. Best of all he proves how important it is to eat with pleasure!
He is also featured in the movie “Food Inc.” and I highly recommend that as well, in addition to his new book, “Food Rules,” which is a pocket guide of his suggestions at the end of this book.
Absolutely a Life-Changer
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I’m a twenty-seven-year-old male, and before I read this book last spring, I don’t think I’d ever thought about food beyond the questions, “Which TV dinner will I have tonight?” and “Papa-John’s or Dominoes?” I’m not sure what made me pick up In Defense of Food in Target one day, but needless to say, I now have many more questions about the foods I eat, and that’s a good thing.
One question the book will make you ask is, “Is this food?” It’s probably not. It’s sad that such is a question needing clarified, but it is. Much of what we eat is so processed to have lost its nutrient providing ability. He calls most of what we eat “edible foodlike substances.” Pollan illustrates vividly the outcome of our eating habits. Wherever the western diet goes, the diseases all of our family members have died from follow: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, strokes… Traditional diets, even ones with almost no vegetables, tend to produce healthier people.
Fortunately, Pollan’s book is not simply intended to scare everyone either. Pollan ends the book with a wonderful chapter of advice, general principles for what food to choose and how to prepare and eat it, for what things to avoid. For instance, Pollan has a pretty simple rule for determining whether or not something is food: Would your great-grandmother have recognized this as food? That and many other principles provide a map for navigating our confusing, and misleading, food culture.
Pollan’s book is a life-changer. It’s made me so much more conscious of what I eat and has provided me ways to make better decisions about what I eat. Pollan is a fantastic writer (reading In Defense of Food is not unlike reading something by Malcolm Gladwell), and this book also just made me so much more interested about food. I cook more now, for instance. And I’m developing an interest in cook books. And it’s not a diet book, but I did lose weight and feel better now once I started following Pollan’s advice. I couldn’t recommend this much more highly.
Fake Food Alert
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
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.
I’m giving this book only four stars because most of it is not new. It might be new to you, but you don’t need to read it if you are already knowledgeable about food. It makes a very important statement. 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.
How is the Kindle price more expensive than the paperback???
Rating:1 out of 5 stars
The book is amazing, but hello Amazon & Mr. Bezos…how is the digital version more expensive than the paperback??
Its amazing how monopolists act like monopolists.
aka “The Neolithic Diet”
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
This little book, In Defense of Food, is probably better journalism but worse literature than the author’s previous The Omnivore’s Dilemma. An attempt to summarize our current lack of knowledge about nutrition and health and provide a skeptics’ “best hunch” approach to eating, the book provides a brief critique of the “nutritional” approach to food, including critiques of the lipid and carbohydrate hypotheses, and suggests a strategy of turning back to time-tested forms of food consumption like traditional cuisines.
Compared with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, this book is less sensationalistic and seems to be on firmer footing with regard to the empirical issues it addresses. However, as in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the author’s social class and personal biases seep into the recommendations. So, for example, we know from The Omnivore’s Dilemma that the author has flirted with vegetarianism, believing it to be a morally superior way of living but unable to square it with his culinary desires. In the current book, he tells us that he can’t find a compelling reason to avoid meat for health reasons (obviously he was looking for one), although he immediately qualifies that statement by saying there are good ethical and enviromental reasons for doing so. But his recommendation to keep meat to a minimum comes in the context of one of his main case studies in favor of traditional diet–an experiment in which Australian aborigines reversed disease processes by going back to the bush. He lists their diet as birds, kangaroo, grubs, larvae, fish, shellfish, turtle, crocodile, yams, figs, and honey–a fairly high meat-to-plant ratio.
This apparent contradiction between primarily-plant and aboriginal diets points to the biggest bias problem in the book, which is the author’s typically leftist anti-self bias. Throughout In Defense of Food, the villain is “the Western diet,” although the author commends French, Greek, and Italian cuisines, which are unquestionably “Western.” That the author makes spurious comments about traditional Jewish cuisine when orthodox Jews have some of the longest life expectancies is also curious. So, for example, he recommends looking for food our Neolithic ancestors would have recognized, although the archaeological record shows that the transition from Paleolithic life (like that of the Australian aborigines) to Neolithic (the introduction of farming) coincided with worse health and shorter life-spans. However, recommending a Paleolithic diet wouldn’t square with any culinary desires for artisanal bread or fit in with the author’s California-university-professor social niche.
The plant/Neolithic bias also leads him to unfairly criticize Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, suggesting that Taubes is recommending a nutritional approach to eating that has as little merit as the lipid hypothesis that Taubes criticizes. In fact, Taubes is a science journalist whose point is more about the failure of the science community to approach low-carb and low-fat diets with proper rigor and the medical community’s propensity for approaching obesity as a moral/social failure rather than a physiological/hormonal issue.
Despite my reservations, I would definitely recommend In Defense of Food. The author’s approach to nutrition, which is a post-modern combination of healthy skepticism with pseudo-traditionalism both appeals to my own sensibilities and, as far as I can tell, makes the best of current nutritional science. For those not already immersed in the issues the author addresses like “seeds vs. leaves,” this is a quick and worthwhile read.
In Defense of Food
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
What the world needs to know about food! Don’t take for grantedthat food found in the grocery store is good for you, our goverment seems to care more about industrial marketing and greed of human beings that the goodness God provided with “natural” whole food in its original state. It is time to spread the word, educate people and take back our health and lives and participate in this wonderful operation of caring what we eat!
“The silence of the yams”
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Makes a great case for the food that has no PR department. Being a fan of Food Inc., much of this was not a surprise (especially the ravages of high fructose corn syrup) but I still found a lot of useful and eye-opening information to make even better choices for myself and my family. In particular, the distinctions about “free range” and “grass fed” as well as what organic really means and what it takes to qualify as organic was helpful.(Some foods labeled organic are not the best quality and are shipped from far away while small farmers may not have the resources to jump through the official hoops but nevertheless produce better food.) I am armed with better distinctions, and that is well worth the read.
Sadly I must disagree
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Great read. Plenty of information, unfortunately I find this to be shameful pandering of a book. Pollan spends quite a while talking about the inabilities of the nutritional industry to accurately tell which nutrients are good for a variety of reasons, says there experiments are inconclusive and inaccurate. He then goes on to use these same types of studies to support his what he says is missing from out diet since we aren’t eating “food” anymore. I personally find the assumption that I wouldn’t notice the hypocrisy to be offensive. It detracts from his entire point.
This book changed my life!
Basically I read it as an extended argument that good food (“real food”) is worth paying for or worth the effort to grow/harvest/obtain. That is a big change in attitude. I wish I’d read this book 20 years ago.
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Well, this book changed how I eat, and therefore presumably changed my life
I really liked the historical perspective on the food industry and our relationship to food. I never thought about how chemically complicated real food is and how many risks we take by simplifying it through industrial processes. All current controversies about food and nutrition seemed silly after reading this book — we should eat what we evolved to eat.
A great case for changing the way we eat, and entertaining too
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
As someone who already buys organic, avoids the center aisles of the grocery store and heads to the farmer’s market whenever possible, I wondered whether I would really gain anything from this book. While Michael Pollan’s overall message is not new to me, many of the reasons Michael puts forth to support this message are.
For instance, I never realized that organic produce is not just chemical-free, it’s also higher in most measured micronutrients PLUS some of the plants own defenses against pests (polyphenols and carotenoids) also help the human body fight inflammation and aging. Naturally, when we spray plants with pesticides, they need, and therefore produce, fewer of these compounds.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. This philosophy is based on good science, logic and the clear empirical evidence that our diet is making us sick. Michael build a strong case, and then provides some clea, concise rules of thumb to help us get back to old ways of eating without selling our house and moving back to the farm. Along the way, he’s full of tongue-in-cheek remarks that had me laughing out loud (like another good rule of thumb for how to distinguish between food and the thousands of other foodlike substances sold in the supermarket – “Never eat food that’s incapable of rotting”)
Another book that revolutionizes the way I view our interactions with plants
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
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_.
great thoughts on food!
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Amazing book that everyone needs to read, doesn’t matter what your view is on food and agriculture you will find something relevant to you and your health in this book!
Healthful Eating
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I have always been cautious about eating processed food, but after reading Michael Pollan”s latest book – In Defense of Food – I have plenty of evidence to back up my eating habits. My husband and I took turns reading the book to each other before bed. We are now big advocates for eating naturally. Every packaged item, dish made with white rice or white flour, and artificial vitamin pill is rapidly losing any appeal it may have had to us before.
Opened my eyes to the nature of foods
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
I won’t claim that this book changed the way I eat, but it has reinforced a lot of things I’ve been trying to do. Eating foods that are organic, grown naturally and as close to the farm as possible. By this, I mean, in it’s natural state, as opposed to processed and made with artificial ingredients.
What I really learned and didn’t know before was how much farming, specifically corn, has changed over the last 50 years. It makes so much sense. In our rush to add nutrients to food, we are also deleting nutrients we don’t know about. Somewhere along the way, the body suffers a deficit of nutrients and an over-abundance of others. And our body keeps eating, as a result, looking for those missing foods.
This is a well-written book, something that makes you go “hmmm”. Even if you can’t adopt everything he asks, it makes you think and hopefully helps you a little bit along the way towards living a healthier lifestyle.
A Must-Read
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
It seems obvious enough — how to eat, that is. You’d think that, of all things, eating would be the one thing that we humans could do without an instruction manual. But in fact, scientists, the food industry and “(ahem) journalists”, have taken great care in convoluting things so completely that an instruction manual is exactly what we need in order to learn–or rather, re-learn–how to feed ourselves. The commercial on television purporting a bottled food substitute as being a better choice for your child than anything that can be found in the produce section of the grocery store is as stark a reminder as any.
Michael Pollan is precisely the man to write such a manual (manifesto). After reading Pollon’s prior book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I found myself struggling with the dilemma of figuring out what to eat next. How good is organic after all?! Is ‘free range’ really any better? This book takes you into heart and mind, not to mention the historical context of how food has transformed into product, and what that really means for us as eaters turned consumers.
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is a must-read for anyone who has ever been concerned about what they put into their bodies. It is a must-read for anyone who hasn’t. Even if it changes little about the choices one makes as an eater and consumer, there is infinite value in the the knowing. And after reading this book you will know a whole lot more!
Allows us the reader to really understand our food
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Read this book and finally understand our food. With over a hundred thousand man made chemicals, and most of them ending up in the food, or engineered food products we consume Michael Pollan steers us through the confusing maze of what to purchase, and what and how to eat our food. Great book.
Book review
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
The book was brand new and in great condition. I have not had a chance to read ‘In Defense of Food’ but I am looking forward to reading it since I thoroughly enjoyed reading Michael Pollan’s books.
Exactly what I was looking for
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
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.
Worthy Successor to Omnivore’s Dilemma with Caveats
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
In Defense of Food is a very worthy successor to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, although by comparison it’s quality did fall short in a few ways.
The mantra for the book is “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” Don’t we all eat food already? Not food as your grandmother understood it, Pollan argues. The industrial food system has processed and refined our “food” so much that ingredient lists have become paragraph-length bodies of incomprehensible chemical names and additives, rather than the whole foods which we ate in the pre-industrial food era. This is the era Pollan would have us return to. In doing so, we would reverse much damage caused by Western diet-related diseases–cancer, cardiovascular disorders, adult-onset diabetes, obesity, etc.
What led us to the current state of unhealth, Pollan argues, is an ideology he terms nutritionism: the belief that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. While this seems like an intuitive approach to understanding food, this reductionist thinking can be dangerous. If we’re not careful, it can lead us to narrow-minded, over-reaching conclusions like the Carbohydrate Hypothesis (he argues), which places the blame squarely on carbohydrates for most of our health woes, while neglecting other factors. Or worse, we develop entirely erroneous ideas like the Lipid Hypothesis, the current mainstream view which blames dietary fat and cholesterol for causing cancer and cardiovascular disease, and which spawned the flood of low-fat, processed foods which inundate our grocery stores–much to the satisfaction of the industrial food chain, who simply re-engineer the old fatty foods by substituting the fat with additives and artificial flavors, then re-marketing these new foodish substances as low-fat and healthy.
Pollan’s chief criticism of reductionism is that it’s a divide-and-conquer approach, as opposed to a holistic, big picture approach, and is therefore succeptible to forest-for-the-trees errors–making dietary recommendations based on discrete nutrients while being susceptible to missing the synergistic inter-relationships in actual,
real foods which contain many, interacting nutrients.
Let’s accept this argument for a moment. If food us too much of a complexity for our understanding now, and we should probably wait until the science sorts out all these nutrient intricacies before we can fully understand food (I disagree, but that’s ok) what is the strongest line of reasoning to take in terms of present dietary recommendations? Pollan says listen to your mother. In other words, return to a pre-industrial, agricultural-based, whole-foods diet. While I think this suggestion would be an indisputable improvement over our present dietary state, I think the line of reasoning is weak. He even admits repeatedly throughout the book that diseases of the western diet existed pre-industrial food era–they were just less prominent and not the epidemic they are now. A much stronger line of reasoning would be to return to a pre-agricultural, Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer diet, in order to completely rid ourselves of western diet diseases. This approach is never even cursorily mentioned, for whatever reason, even if it’s impractical for many people (most couldn’t be bothered or have the means to take such an approach).
In the end this is a very insightful, thoughtful book, and even though i disagree with some of his conclusions and sometimes his line of reasoning, this book is very accessible and many people would benefit greatly from the knowledge and recommendations here.
You’ll never look at food the same
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
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.
Health and food should be a priority
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
In the Defense of Food discusses first, the history of food and nutrition; second, the fallacies of nutrition in the western diet which contribute to diet related health issues; and third, the author’s suggestion for a healthy diet. Michael Pollan examines the United States government policies related to recommendations for a healthy diet such as the food pyramid and the FDA qualified approval of nutritional health claims. He discusses the government committees that have been formed to address diet related health issues, their original findings and how their final published findings were influenced by particular food markets.
This book is jam-packed with scientific specifics of nutrition as well as a significant amount of history and anthropology. It is well organized and persuasive. It is written for educated seekers of the truth about diet and health. I partially support the author’s position. I believe his conclusions may be accurate, but I find it disconcerting that he quotes experts and studies of nutrition with disdain in one breath and marvel in the next. It appears dependent on whether or not it supports his conclusions. I would need to review the studies for myself before giving my full support.
I would like the opportunity to ask the author a few questions such as: What drove you to study this topic? How has it changed your eating habits? Were the changes difficult? Are you healthier now?
I give this book four stars. It contains some fascinating history and good suggestions. I feel motivated to try and keep this book in mind as I do the grocery shopping for our family and prepare our meals. However, it is a little a repetitive and dry. I am planning to pass, the book around to my family and friends to help them make better informed decisions about their diet and health as well. I especially would like my children to consider it as they are soon to embark on their on lives and raise their own families. I would love to see them start with wise choices.