In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
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Book Reviews of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Book Review: Changed My Eating Habits
Summary: 5 Stars
I now buy more local and organic foods than I did before. I now view my buying habits as a form of politics. I now have a drive to get my garden growing. This book instilled all of these new resolves into me while teaching me more about where my food comes from. Our children, and most of us that are not so young, think that food comes from the supermarket. We don't understand, or it is hidden from us, what our food actually goes through before it arrives at Row H-1 on the 5th shelf. Pollan has determined that this lack of connection with our food is causing not only a reduction in food quality but also an impact on our health as a nation. He actually goes so far to say that many of the weight related health issues that Americans suffer is due to the food-like substances that we eat, which are mainly processed corn. So, for my families' health and for the economic health of my local farmer I have changed my eating habits.
After all of that praise I do need to comment about his abuse of nutritionists. He states over and over again about how nutritionists are part of the problem and I think he has put too much weight on their sore shoulders. Yes, the food processors love that they can just add another substance to their food-like item and sell it as healthy, but it wasn't the nutritionists' fault that they take study data and skewed it to their profit. I believe food scientists are an important part of our society and are doing wonders to help our country's health.
Book Review: Informative and Easy to Read
Summary: 5 Stars
For some reason that I can't quite remember, I got started on a kick reading about food stuff. I reserved several books at the library (the closest thing to a drive-thru as the library gets) and started reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food; An Eater's Manifesto first. It was engaging and not so heady that I couldn't read it in snippets, waiting in lines and such.
He tells you right at the beginning that after writing The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, his publisher suggested he write a book telling the world how he thought we ought to eat. After much research he decided it was very simple: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." Knowing that he could sell a book that was only 7 words long, he devoted most of the book to explaining how he arrived at that conclusion.
I found his explanation of how things work in the health and diet industry to be INCREDIBLY interesting!!! Being a veteran of several swing diets, I know first hand how crazy they are, so his moderate, common sense approach, backed up with science is very convincing.
The last part of the book is very similar to his booklet Food Rules. He explains what he means by "food" as opposed to "processed food like substances" and gives a lot of good rules of thumb and tips for avoiding processed foods. I'd love to own a copy of the book since the library wouldn't let me keep theirs, but it'll have to get in line.
To read my other reviews: [...]
Book Review: Should be required reading
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was great at sounding the alarm on nutritionism. I found other reviews that state Pollan has no scientific credentials and therefore should not be making claims about nutrition laughable. Perhaps you misunderstood the whole point of the book? Why are the people in this country the only people who feel they need an expert or a PhD to know what foods to feed themselves? Every other living creature is able to make these choices without such consultations...even other humans living in other countries seem to not fret over food and yet are healthy and thinner than we are. The point is you don't need to know nutritional facts and you do not need to count calories. You need to start eating whole foods, eat less, and eat mostly plants. No...he does not say one cannot eat meat, but he does suggest only eating meat of animals raised properly and fed natural diets. He will not say one should be vegetarian or vegan, because many "traditional" (for those who cannot figure this term out...it's anything rooted in tradition...like the diets of the French, Italian, Japanese...insert any culture besides ours here) contain meat and there have been documented civilizations thriving on meat and animal products alone. But yes, he does suggest meat is not required in our diets and perfectly healthy diets for the people living in this country will contain little to no meat. Good read and eye-opening to a culture so adapted to nutritionism we don't understand eating without it.Book Review: Fake Food Alert
Summary: 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. The main cause of obesity is food processing by the "Nutritional Industrial Complex." We don't need "well-balanced meals" supervised by nutritionists. All we need is real food.
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. 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.
Read this book 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 obese and don't understand how you got that way.
Book Review: A Must-Read
Summary: 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!