Synopses & Reviews
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-nutrientapproach. 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.
Synopsis
Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food is a simple invitation to junk the science, ditch the diet and instead rediscover the joys of eating well.
This book is a celebration of food. By food, Michael Pollan means real, proper, simple food - not the kind that comes in a packet, or has lists of unpronounceable ingredients, or that makes nutritional claims about how healthy it is. More like the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize.
By following a few pieces of advice (Eat at a table - a desk doesn't count. Don't buy food where you'd buy your petrol ), you will enrich your life and your palate, and enlarge your sense of what it means to be healthy and happy.
It's time to fall in love with food again.
'Brings home the real wonder of eating food'
Sunday Times
'Instantly makes redundant all diet books and 99 per cent of discussions around healthy eating ... Sense, at last'
Daily Mail
'Pollan invites us to grab our pots and pans and cook some real food for dinner'
Time Out
'Read this witty book for a healthier life and diet'
The Times
'Eminently sensible'
Fay Maschler, Keynote
'A must-read ... satisfying, rich ... loaded with flavour'
Sunday Telegraph
For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. His most recent book, about the ethics and ecology of eating, is The Omnivore's Dilemma, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire, A Place of My Own and Second Nature.