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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Hardcover – January 1, 2008

by Michael Pollan (Author)

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What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the well-considered answers he provides to the questions posed in the bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists-all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." These "edible foodlike substances" are often packaged with labels bearing health claims that are typically false or misleading. Indeed, real food is fast disappearing from the marketplace, to be replaced by "nutrients," and plain old eating by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Michael Pollan's sensible and decidedly counterintuitive advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food."

Writing In Defense of Food, and affirming the joy of eating, Pollan suggests that if we would pay more for better, well-grown food, but buy less of it, we'll benefit ourselves, our communities, and the environment at large. Taking a clear-eyed look at what science does and does not know about the links between diet and health, he proposes a new way to think about the question of what to eat that is informed by ecology and tradition rather than by the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach.

In Defense of Food reminds us that, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, the solutions to the current omnivore's dilemma can be found all around us.

In looking toward traditional diets the world over, as well as the foods our families-and regions-historically enjoyed, we can recover a more balanced, reasonable, and pleasurable approach to food. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we might start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives and enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy.

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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; 1 edition (2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594201455
ISBN-13: 978-1594201455
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.9 x 8.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 1,045 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #63,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #487 in Books > Self-Help > Spiritual
- #731 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Nutrition
- #879 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diets & Weight Loss > Other Diets

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SPARTY 047

A life changing book...

February 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

I have a medical and science background...so traced references cited....everything checks out. Recently diagnosed with osteoarthritis at age 63 and weight 284 pounds. Read this book the first week of January.....went shopping for real foods the second week of January. Find it satisfying to eat no more than 4 oz of red meat 2-3 times a week....salmon, mackeral, sardines 2-3 times a week....and a couple of days with no meat...just veggie omega 3 sources. Have re-read the book....highlighted...added notes on all pages...and bought 2 more copies for my 30 and 21 year olds...both who grew up in the age of "nutritionism" with all its false information. Following Pollan's common sense advice....paying the extra for organic basic veggies and olive oil. Decided to eliminate all wheat and corn until I loose the weight I've set as a goal.
Five weeks eating 3 meals a day...and by week two much of the chronic 24 hour a day pain was gone and I began walking the elliptical and the woods. Five weeks and 30 pounds lighter....with more energy than I've had in 20 years. Buy this book, learn it, live it, tell your loved ones.

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Olga L. Kramar

Covers the shift from fresh to processed food and its deleterious effects on our collective health

June 15, 2018

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Well-organized and well-written, this book covers how we got to where we are, buying processed foods labeled with various health claims that are meaningless. We find out about the rise of the nutrition industry and how they’ve led us astray. We’ve all heard that fresh, less-processed is better, but the author does an excellent job of explaining why. Living in Switzerland decades ago, I said, half jokingly with no scientific basis in my head, that the cheese and chocolate was excellent because of happy cows, all roaming the hillsides looking content indeed. The author validates my offhand comment and explains the science behind it. I’ve been buying eggs from pasture grazed hens, for the sake of the hens. The author tells us that the nutrition content of eggs from grass-grazed eggs is vastly different from those of grain-fed hens. I’ve been buying grass-fed beef after cringing at the conditions in El Paso and Central California feed lots after driving past, again for the cows’ sake. The author explains how the meat from grain fed cows is very different nutritionally from naturally grass-grazing cows. Interesting how consideration and care for the animals in our food supply chain dovetails with our own health. This book is a must read for anyone who believes that what you eat effects your health and wants a simple framework for making better eating choices.

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Amy Lamp

Want to reset your food and eating mindset?

July 10, 2017

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This book was life-changing for me! I found Pollan's writing style to be thoughtful, clear, and relatable. And I can't tell you how many times "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." has run through my head in the years since first reading it. I appreciate how he challenges so much of what we hear about diet -- every time researchers think they have the key to nutrition or weight loss, something new is discovered to turn it on its head.

The book helped me explore my interest in more traditional diets made up of pure/whole foods, leave behind food-like (and gimmicky) products in the stores, and switch to cooking & baking from scratch. After reading it, I was inspired to buy a grain mill for my kitchen so I could grind my own flour and truly bake from scratch using whole grain flour (and wrote a get-started guide to help others do the same). Being able to control what goes into my food has improved my health and energy. I can't recommend this book enough.

I also like the companion book "Food Rules" Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, which I'd recommend if you want a brief "just tell me what to do" book. But for more detailed information that may help you change your food and eating mindset, "In Defense of Food" is the way to go.

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Laura Smith

Tight, concise, well-written guidebook on what to eat

July 26, 2012

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If you've read other books on food, you'll find this to be written better but not containing much new information. It's as if Pollan took the other information out there and regurgitated it in a more digestible format. Which can be a good thing, if you consider the huge tomes out there that are difficult to read.

Pollan covers baby formula and how it's essentially an experiment (p.32). Techno-foods: "modern cornucopia of highly processed foodlike products." (p.14) Public confusion: "thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished." (p.81) This first section covers monocultures, the industrialized food model, distraction of the real message, and detachment from our food. Pollan seems to be driving home the message that any food that purports to have health benefits really ought to be avoided, that it's "a strong indication it's not really food." (p.2) Later he tells us quite simply to "watch out for those health claims." (p.40) This really got my mental juices flowing and made me consider the counter arguments to that.

The most impactful take-away as I finished was the idea that we really don't need books on what to eat. At one time, he tells us that nutritionism has done us no good, "At the behest of government panels, nutrition scientists, and public health officials, we have dramatically changed the way we eat and the way we think about food [...this] has done little for our health, except possibly to make it worse." (p.40) Gee, that is so inspiring. As a parent, I think I'd rather take this message, with a nice positive spin and which reinforces the message that we're smarter than we think we are, "most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know." (p.13)

He tells us that "seventeen thousand new food products" are presented to us every year (p.133) "Although an estimated 80 percent of cases of type 2 diabetes could be prevented by a change of diet and exercise, it looks like the smart money is instead on the creation of a vast new diabetes industry." (p.136) "Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick." (p.135) "Don't eat anything incapable of rotting." (p.149) "Ordinary food is still out there, however, still being grown and occasionally sold in the supermarket, and this ordinary food is what we should be eating." (p.147) Don't eat anything my great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. (p.148)

This book boils down to a lot of rules for better eating. Some of them, for me, are doable. Some of them are not. What I can adopt is a mesh of several of his uidelines... "eat meals" and "try not to eat alone" and "do all your eating at a table." My great grandmother would think it silly, though, if those were guidelines at all.

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