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: You Are What You Eat--And HOW You Eat
Summary: 5 Stars
Michael Pollan is something of an alarmist, but he is writing on a topic about which alarmism may be the appropriate response. Pollan has made a career (in addition to his day job as a journalism professor at UC Berkeley) out of writing not only about food, but about the human relationship with nature in general, and plants in particular. In this book he takes on "nutritionism," a term he did not coin but which he finds useful in describing what he sees as the modern scientific tendency to look at the components of foods rather than the whole foods themselves. You can get a summary version of much of Pollan's thinking in the brief Food Rules (2009), but it is worth making the slightly greater investment of time to digest the longer argument. Nutritionism, he says, is not so much a science as an ideology (hence the "ism") that, like most ideologies, operates on the basis of unexamined assumptions but which also captures the imagination and compels action. In an attempt to discover the key to healthy eating, Pollan contends, nutrition scientists have disaggregated foods into mere collections of nutrients, and have focused on a few macronutrients, specifically carbohydrates, fats, and proteins--elements that can easily be chemically manipulated in processed foods but without the beneficial results that come from eating unmodified whole foods. He sees a profit-driven cabal at work that involves nutrition scientists, government, journalists, and especially processed-food producers and marketers, all of whom have some interest in touting the supposed health benefits of the latest super-processed food that can be produced inexpensively and in large quantities. Pollan, in fact, cringes at the thought of calling these products "food," referring to them instead as "foodlike." Why, he asks, is the American population increasingly obese and in other ways unhealthy if modern science has discovered the key to good eating and food processors have filled their products with it? Pollan himself may be guilty of falling into an ideological trap at times, but in the end I found his discussion of food very appealing. It certainly made me reexamine the way I eat. At the same time, it made me realize how hard it would be to completely change my eating habits, given how busy life is and the stranglehold that the processed food industry has over the food choices one has (particularly where I currently live). Pollan will have considerable appeal to readers who appreciate the work of Wendell Berry (as I do). Particularly in the second half of the book, he encourages readers to think of food less as a thing or an industrial product or a set of selections at the supermarket, and more as a creator of relationships--between producer and consumer, and ideally between individuals sharing the experience of eating. Like Berry, Pollan takes an organic view of food and eating, one that is cognizant of the complex webs that the purchase, preparation, and eating of food involves--at least ideally. In the last section of the book, he briefly discusses eating habits, bemoaning the loss of the family meal as a time of conversation, gratitude, and socialization into patterns of manners and what might be termed "family citizenship." This is a book that will undoubtedly be dismissed by many as naïve, wishful thinking, and as an oversimplified view of the modern food-producing industry. For my money, I'd like to move a lot closer to Pollan's ideal--"eat food, not too much, mostly plants"--even knowing that it would take major adjustments in tastes and habits, and even with the increased commitment of time and money that this would involve.Book Review: Worthy Successor to Omnivore's Dilemma with Caveats
Summary: 4 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.
Book Review: You'll never look at food the same
Summary: 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.
Book Review: Common food sense for the masses. A MUST READ.
Summary: 5 Stars
The American public has long been a captive audience of food industry corporations. They push onto our grocery store shelves inexpensive food dressed up to dazzle and seduce, all the while telling us it is good for us. The main name of the game is profit. And the clever foods corporations figured out cheaper and faster ways to produce a number of "building block material" they could use to craft all kinds of food products. Most of processed food is comprised of bleached flour, corn syrup, sodium, and hydrogenated oils. The techniques to create them have been heavily optimized so that it is cheap to create enormous quantities. This "stuff" is then used to create all kinds of things like cereals, breads, cookies, chips, snacks, and a myriad of prepared foods. On their own, the food would be mostly lacking in nutrition. So, the food companies dump in all kinds of vitamins and minerals (confirmed by scientists to be essential to our good health) to then lay claim to these things being more nutritious than old fashioned "real" food. The marketing folks tasked to help with selling these products create all kinds of attractive packaging and advertisements to lure us to the purchase. But these products are far from healthy. The inserted vitamins and minerals are not sufficiently absorbed by the human body. And the constituents of the foods consumed create other problems that outweigh any possible nutrition that might be received.
The main problem is that these companies become incredibly rich while America becomes fat and undernourished. And the side effects of this are insidiously slow to realize... it takes many years before the symptoms occur, like the massive chronic illness called diabetes. But, the pharmaceutical industry is more than happy for this to happen, for now THEY get wealthy by creating a continuous supply of the drugs needed to counteract the illnesses spawned by the poor American diet.
Michael Pollan's book goes into useful detail about how all of this happened... how America's diet became hijacked by the massive foods business and sent us on a horrible path to ill health. In the second half of the book, he gets into the basics of how we can rescue ourselves from our bad eating habits. How we can be smart to select "real food" that is really good for us.
You will find that if you follow Pollan's guidelines, you won't need to be constantly chasing after the latest diet craze. You will be healthy and fit, as long as you eat the right foods in concert with regular exercise and sufficient sleep. Don't look for an overnight change. It will be gradual. But you will notice it and hopefully live much longer (and healthier) than you would have if you had continued your previous dieting habits.
Thanks to Michael Pollan for his books that are helping to wake up America. I imagine the foods industries will try to confuse us into thinking they've fixed it all and we've nothing to worry about... but at this point, I wouldn't trust them any longer. Stay away from highly processed foods and they can't bother you. Stick with what nature intended. Don't fear all things processed... a little bit of processing is OK, as long as the ingredients are basic. But try to eat natural foods as much as possible.
Book Review: An enlightening, perhaps shocking, revelation that shattered my views of eating properly
Summary: 5 Stars
Reading this book has resulted in a profound change in the way I view eating and buying the food that I eat. It didn't take me long to realize that much of the "food" that I eat is not really food at all, but a highly processed food product concocted by the intricate, industrialized, contemporary food chain. What a revelatory book.
The first words in the Introduction to the book had me hooked: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." From these simple words, the author expands, using a trove of resources, to an expansive treatment of each of the three short statements.
I suddenly realized with striking clarity that what the author is stating is, in retrospect, glaringly obvious. We have been hoodwinked by the entire food industry. "Nutritionism" has defined the rules that we use to gauge how well we are eating. We've become slaves to the nutrition labels on packages and are buffeted to-and-fro by the constantly shifting dietary guidelines and ensuing diets that dictate what we should and should not be eating. Not to mention what supplements we need to add to our diet.
The author lays all of this out in an engaging, well-documented and at times funny way. While not a recipe book in any way whatsoever, the author finally presents in the final chapters a succinct list of "rules" that can help guide you in making wise food purchasing decisions. For instance, you are to "avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup." As an illustration he takes a look at bread which in its simplest form uses only flour, water, yeast and a pinch of salt. In comparison, Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain Wheat Bread contains over 36 ingredients, including things like azodicarbonamide and ethoxylated monoglycerides. He goes as far as to claim that this isn't even bread but an imitation of bread. I'd totally agree.
It is difficult to argue with the fact that our [American] society and the Western Diet that we engage in has caused us to be a people with a multitude of chronic diseases that are seldom seen in the people of cultures that eat more traditional diets. As Michael Pollan states, "Scientists can argue all they want about the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon but whichever it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very much the same: Stop eating a Western diet."
This is an important book. And it is sadly true that it is more costly to eat more healthily. That makes following a healthier diet more difficult for those people at a lower income level. But everyone can make positive changes in their diet by following at least some of the guidelines in this book. Instead of the 2-pack of Twinkies, buy an Apple. Instead of a bag of chips, buy some grapes.
This book is changing my life and I will never view food in the same way again. It truly is a food-chain and once you realize that what you eat is the culmination of what the animal ate beforehand, or what the quality of the soil was like that the plant grew in, or what pesticides or growth enhancing drugs the animals were given.... well you'll get the idea once you read this book. Absolutely an eye-opener and life-changing book.