Publication Date:April 28, 2009 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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ISBN13: 9780143114963
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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
Product Description The companion volume to The New York Times bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan's lastbook , The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.
pleased!July 27, 2010 emilie The condition of the book when i received it was absolutely fine for what i needed it for! I had to annotate it so i wasn't needing it to be in perfect condition... and I found that the online description of the book's condition was accurate! Overall, I was very pleased with my order!
In Defense of FoodJuly 26, 2010 M. Reynard(Montana) This was a good book. Sadly, it was largely what should be common sense but due to the fact that the book needed written, it must not be so common anymore. Pollan addresses the problems with modern meals and the Western diet in this book.
There are three main sections. The Age Of Nutrition-ism talks about just that. Pollan goes over some of the studies and thoughts out there that are modern view of nutrition came from. Especially noticeable are the concepts of vitamins and nutrients. We all recognize that our bodies need these things to work properly, but Pollan's point is that supplements alone aren't going to solve this problem. There is something out there undefined as of right now that makes whole foods as nutritious as they are and not just the sum of their nutrients. He doesn't say that vitamins are worthless, he just says that they are not the best trade-off for whole fresh food.
The next section is the Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilation. He touches on how most people eating a western diet (considered processed food, not a lot of variety, etc.) tend to have higher incidences of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other long term diseases. When he goes back to research other diets that have been established for centuries, he finds that they have lower incidences of these types of disease.
The last part is called Getting Over Nutrition-ism. This section basically gives his rules for good eating. He says to eat "food" and while this seems silly, what he means is actual food, not processed engineered food. He goes over how whole food may not actually be as good as you think, such as meat that is fed processed or bad for it type food. Eat mostly plants, meat should be an accompaniment, not the main course. And lastly, don't eat too much. People should learn when they are full and take cues from their body, not from the portion sizes. Enjoy the meals, that's what is most important.
Pollan makes several good points in this book. He does get repetitious at times and I think the book could have been shorter if this had been left out. He is also a writer, not a scientist so all his writing is not backed up by claims. But this is ok because it is interesting to speculate that the French are thinner because they take time to enjoy their meals even though its relatively similar to what the Americans eat.
The writing was easy to understand although it did get tedious in some parts. He uses a lot of the scientific names for things (i.e. lipids instead of fat) and sometimes this can make for longer reading as you have to remind yourself of what is what. He provides sources and scientific referrals for his work and this can be seen as credited in the back or footnotes within the book.
It should be common sense; but Pollan does a great job of directing this book towards people who maybe were never taught the proper way to eat. It does the research for those who might not know all that goes into their food and what they are ingesting. Truly a complicated educational read.
In Defense of Food
Copyright 2008
201 pages
At the end there are acknowledgements, sources, and an index.
It was an ok read, lacked depthJuly 24, 2010 K. Derosa(upstate,ny) The book was long on promise, short on delivery. I took maybe 6 salient points away from this one, nothing spectacular. The benefits of Omega 3's was probably the best part of the book and most scientific, the rest was random, long-winded & subjective blabbering.
Starts out great... but then...July 23, 2010 Eddie Landsberg(Tokyo, Japan) The book has an interesting history of how and why food devolved into industrial chemical compounds as well as a description, or at least theory regarding the chaos it has wreaked on our bodies... The book also decries "nutritionist ideology" in which foods are broken down into parts, but in which their totality is not considered, leading companies to isolate whatever the most or least popular compound in the ingredient is, then create synthetic foods which fail to take into account the original foods as a whole... - - The book also includes not only a look at nutritional pseudoscience (yoghurt enemas... yum!) but how fine lines between nutritional ideology and politics merge to create a type of pseudoscience that cause embarrassment to the very same researchers and nutritionists when they have to reconcile the facts.. -- As the book progresses it demonstrates how the situation has gotten so bad that even "natural" unprocessed foods, from poultry and meats to vegetables have fallen victim to the industrialization of food... and how so called "organic" products suffer too.
The conclusion of the book is to basically not to obsess so much over the high fat/low fat, high carbs or whatever trend of the moment is (*one of the biggest which he argues to be a conspiracy), but instead he advises us to eat REAL food ("Avoid anything with more than 5 ingredients... avoid foods with ingredients you can't recognize...") = = ... Some of the advice is very simple, but sensible. ("Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food...") Read labels... and be wary of foods that make claims. The book also decries the Western diet, but discusses the natural diets of other cultures, including the French Paradox and its relation to another interesting element... not just what they eat, but how.
Overall, the book is engaging, however, it devolves into a rant that may possibly made be worse by the reader's condescending tone of voice... so by the end one forgets the great ironic history lesson and gets drawn into a personal rant involving his personal habits, such as keeping a garden and not necessarily praying but remember where the food comes from before he eats it.
All in all... probably an excellent book in writing, but needs to be reproduced... I'm really serious... The voice of the narrator borders on obnoxious at times... as a result, even though the book is full of a historical outline of the decline of real food, it sounds like an angry rant at times... As I've only heard the audible production, I can't say whether this is true of the book itself, but do feel I left with greater historical insight into advice that even I've known for a while: try to avoid processed foods, and be careful, because food labels are out to fool you.
Why eating for maximum convenience is a losing gameJuly 21, 2010 Marion R. Kee(Redmond, WA USA) What this book has to say is summed up in its first line: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I had a hard time understanding why this requires 201 pages of elaboration (not counting the end matter.) Still, as a longtime adherent of a vegan diet I hadn't realized that most people in our society have become so vastly alienated from what they eat. The fact that this book and its predecessor "The Omnivore's Dilemma" became best sellers speaks volumes about that alienation and the potential for healthy change. Readers seeking to become more food-aware will find a great deal here to think about and take action on. Recommended for those concerned about one of the most intimate choices a person can make: what to ingest.
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