In Defense of Food – Michael Pollan – Book Review
Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants.
Pollan intelligently addresses our present confusion about “what to eat (?)” and suggests this confusion is product of the new era of “nutritionism”. – The ideology that our species has lost touch with our traditions, our food culture and our ancestral roots, all of which had the answer to this question.
We focus on nutrients, not foods, and while science is all-powerful, we just don’t know enough, certainly not more than Mother Nature herself. Instead of looking at our heritage, we turn to nutritionists, scientists, journalists or government food pyramids.
I particularly relished Pollan’s unyielding conviction to relevant and recent research that supported his position. Moreover, he devotes an entire chapter to explaining nutritional scientific research, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.
Pollan aim is to help us “reclaim our health and happiness as eaters” (pg 7) by providing the reader with recommendations “more like eating algorithms, mental devices for thinking through our food choices.” (pg 12)
At the risk of taking the following excerpts out of context, I have a few poetic, insightful and heartening quotes from this book.
- “Sooner or later, everything we’ve been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study.” (Pg 5)
- “Sorry Marge” [an essay written by an Australian sociologist in 2002] looked at margarine as the ultimate nutritionist product, able to shift its identity (no cholesterol! one year, no trans fats! the next) depending on the prevailing winds of dietary opinion.” (pg 27)
- “The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another: Liebig [ref provided] missed the vitamins and amino acids, and this successors missed the omega-3s, and still to this day babies fed on the most “nutritionally complete” formula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk.” (pg 31)
- “Yes as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their new found “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters.” (pg 39)
- “At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification.” (pg 114)
- “These days most of us think chronic diseases as being a little like the weather – one of life’s givens…” (pg 93)
This was a great read, one for the library. As put by The Boston Globe, “Pollan’s accessible, meticulously researched book will be essential reading for anyone who takes food seriously.”
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