In Defense of Food

Have I mentioned how much I love Michael Pollan? He is so fantastic. I just read his book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. The book is about this: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I've been trying to write a summary of the book now for an hour and I'm failing miserably to communicate anything. So I'll just quote from the book cover. :)

"...most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it --in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone--is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances"--no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan called the American paradox: the more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food--the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food--stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals."


I especially like his rules for eating. They include...

Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food

Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than 5 in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup

Get out of the supermarket whenever possible

You are what you eat eats too

Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism

Pay more, eat less

Do all your eating at a table

Try not to eat alone


Go read this book! And also, if you haven't already, you can read a ton of articles Michael Pollan has written for The New York Times on his website HERE. He is my my favorite!!