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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Hardcover)

~ Michael Pollan (Author) "If you spent any time at all in a supermarket in the 1980s, you might have noticed something peculiar going on..." (more)
Key Phrases: good calories, lipid hypothesis, ern diet, Women's Health Initiative, World War, United States (more...)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon 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

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In his hugely influential treatise The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of the environment. His new book takes up where the previous work left off. Examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of health, this powerfully argued, thoroughly researched and elegant manifesto cuts straight to the chase with a maxim that is deceptively simple: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But as Pollan explains, food in a country that is driven by a thirty-two billion-dollar marketing machine is both a loaded term and, in its purest sense, a holy grail. The first section of his three-part essay refutes the authority of the diet bullies, pointing up the confluence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists—a cabal whose nutritional advice has given rise to a notably unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily. The second portion vivisects the Western diet, questioning, among other sacred cows, the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. A writer of great subtlety, Pollan doesn't preach to the choir; in fact, rarely does he preach at all, preferring to lets the facts speak for themselves. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1st ed edition (2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1594201455
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594201455
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (355 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,086 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Michael Pollan
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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First Sentence:
If you spent any time at all in a supermarket in the 1980s, you might have noticed something peculiar going on. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
good calories, lipid hypothesis, ern diet, imitation rule, nutrient parts
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Women's Health Initiative, World War, United States, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Slow Food, Health Study, Weston Price, Joseph Hibbeln, Paul Rozin, Wonder Bread, National Academy of Sciences, New England Journal of Medicine, Colin Campbell, Walter Willett, Sara Lee, Bad Calories, Estimations Considering Worldwide Diversity, Joan Gussow, Harvey Levenstein, Marion Nestle, Kerin O'Dea, Smooth Whole Grain White Bread
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830 of 857 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Care for your family? Want to live long and well? This is required reading., January 8, 2008
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."
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301 of 310 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Back to Nature, February 22, 2008

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.
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277 of 299 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars We truly are what we eat . . . . . or don't eat, January 6, 2008
By Theodore A. Rushton (PHOENIX, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews
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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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars A florid history of food "nutritionism" with dietary recommendations
Having enjoyed Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I looked forward to reading In Defense of Food, but was ultimately disappointed. Read more
Published 3 days ago by Joanne www.openmindrequired.com

2.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't bring much to the table
I was looking forward to this book, but ended up being disappointed and reselling my copy. I've been reading a number of food science books lately, and I was surprised to see... Read more
Published 6 days ago by D. Neufeld

5.0 out of 5 stars If you care about what you eat and how you feel...
Books, manuals, health guides, nutrition, DIET!!!!....what to eat!!!
Putting all of the above mentioned aside, this is a timely, essential guide to electing proper choices... Read more
Published 10 days ago by An Educated Consumer

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing Point of View
Most refreshing way of looking at the whole food, nutrition and diet point of view. Perfect for anyone wanting to eat for longevity and health, but confused by the plethora of... Read more
Published 10 days ago by J. Carter

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, Radical, Timely
A sequel to The Omnivore's Dilemma, this work is, by comparison, a real eye-opener, highly interesting, and likely to stimulate much overdue discussion, and wide-ranging changes... Read more
Published 10 days ago by Azim Amarshi

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Real Science. Almost Crackpot Science, Be Careful...
Whew, did I write that title? I read this book several times, and I have watched several of his interviews, and yes, he is knowledgeable and charming. Read more
Published 13 days ago by Inga-Haban

5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading
When I first noticed the title of this book I couldn't understand why food would be defended but after reading the book I not only understood the title but I discovered why such a... Read more
Published 22 days ago by Milarepa

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite the eye opener this one is
This book as well as others by Michael Pollan have really opened our eyes to the real food issues in America today. Read more
Published 23 days ago by Jaydee

5.0 out of 5 stars you have to read labels!!!!!
I have really learned to read labels - it is shocking and makes grocery shopping difficult at first... but you will feel so much better! Read more
Published 26 days ago by gardener97

4.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as the Omnivore's Dilemma
I'm a big Michael Pollan fan, and I loved The Omnivore's Dilemma. That book taught me a lot of stuff about the food industry I didn't know, plus it was entertaining to read about... Read more
Published 29 days ago by K. Mullen

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