Books : In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
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Binding: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 613
EAN: 9780143142744
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0143142747
Label: Penguin Audio
Manufacturer: Penguin Audio
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 5
Publication Date: January 01, 2008
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Sales Rank: 38796
Studio: Penguin Audio
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times.
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
What has happened to the food over the past 50 years? Plenty. This book outlines in great detail the ol'mighty dollar and its influence on our food chain. Food is no longer food.
This book breaks down in detail what happened (which by the way is never boring) and ways for your family to eat healthy and partake in REAL FOOD.
The advice is sound. This is something you need to read. It is time to understand what has happened to FOOD and in a small way, account for the many alignments we face with modern western diets and the society who eats it.
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This book is welcome. I use it together with the Yale University School of Medicine Dr. Frank John Ninivaggi book: Ayurveda: A Comprehensive Guide To Traditional Indian Medicine for the West. Both give practical info about how and what to east for great health in body, mind, and spirit. I recommend them both.
Rating: -
"Don't you want any of this good food?", my Great Aunt Margaret beams at me over the buffet aisle. I answer, "If any of it were good, I would want it."
It is the 1970's and a new kind of restaurant came to our rural county: the smorgasbord. Adult eyes widened at the sight of aisles of food, a melange of red, orange, brown and white gooey side dishes punctuated by varieties of tough grisly meat. They wonder that I don't want to load my plate as they do. I equally marveled over their reaction. The food tasted off; powdery when it should be toothsome, salty where it should be savory, and blandly gelatinous when it should be creamy.
Anything Aung Margaret cooked was a hell of a lot better than this and now I know the reason behind what even my uneducated seven year old palate was perceiving. Aunt Margaret's meals were simple, always a meat, potato and vegetable, cooked simply; but the meat was fresh from the butcher's pack, the potatoes from the bag, and the vegetables from our garden in summer, or from the can or freezer in winter. At my uncle's request, Aunt Marg cooked just like his mother did, and his mother was born in the 1890's. Unknowingly we were living Michael Pollan's dictum to only eat food that our great grandmothers would recognize as food.
Throughout the work Pollan explores how our Western understanding of food has been reduced to calories and nutrients, a movement he calls nutritionism. He asserts that Westerners have ... Read More
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This book transformed how I think about food. It also revealed the extent to which we are socialized to have such misunderstandings about food. This is a must-read for anybody who wants to eat better. It raises awareness as to what is really food really vs. what is simply food-like product.
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This should be mandatory reading. I like the structure: tripartite, 1. breaking down the emergence of 'nutritionism' (the doctrine that food should be measured by the recognizable component nutrient values), and debunking it, brilliantly through the lipid hypothesis (fat is bad), 2. The pathological component: 'Western Diseases' and the search for a unified field theory nutritional equivalent, then 3. Getting Over Nutritionism, which is a set of prescriptive ways to avoid the foregone horrors, delivered as a fusion of deadpan and Lutherian theses.
What's great about this book is that, without an ounce of (deserved) hysteria, it empties both barrels into all the culprits whose role in what has become institutionalized mass murder has been for whatever reason off limits. Surprisingly, it's in some of the indictments that don't go far enough that the only disappointments lurk. For example, there's a longish discussion of the nurses studies that were the source of many of the errors, but no discussion of the worst such mistake: the emergence of HRT as a general purpose solution for menapause, which literally ended up killing millions (when HRT was finally stopped in its tracks, breast cancer rates dropped 15%).
Actually, the best thing about this book is that the devolution of food (through corruption) that is detailed here can be read as an allegory for the culture at large: reductionism, the subjugation of all things to the short term interest of the sellers, ... Read More
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