In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating [Hardcover]

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food. 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. 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 bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we might start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives and our palates and enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy.

From the bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma comes In Defence of Food and the Omnivore's Solution for a new way of eating in the New Year...:

1: Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food

2: Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce

3: Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot

4: Avoid food products that carry health claims

5: Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle

6: Better yet, buy your food somewhere else: farmers' markets or the CSA

7: Pay more, eat less

8: Eat a wide diversity of species

9: Eat food from animals that eat grass

10: Cook and, if you can, grow some of your own food

11: Eat meals and eat them only at tables

12: Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure

Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages or so. I'll try to resist, but will go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recommendations. Like, eating a little meat isn't going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're always better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to "eat food," which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible food-like substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counter-intuitive, piece of advice: if you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

You can see how quickly things can get complicated.

I started on this quest to identify a few simple rules about eating after publishing The Omnivore's Dilemma in 2006. Questions of personal health did not take centre stage in that book, which was more concerned with the ecological and ethical dimensions of our eating choices. (Though I discovered that, in most but not all cases, the best ethical and environmental choices also happen to be the best choices for our health--very good news indeed.) But many readers wanted to know, after they'd spent a few hundred pages following me following the food chains that feed us, "Okay, but what should I eat? And now that you've been to the feedlots, the food processing plants, the organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what do you eat?"

Fair questions, though it does seem to me a index of our present confusion about food that people would feel the need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question about the conduct of our everyday lives as humans. I mean, what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat? True, as omnivores -creatures who can eat just about anything nature has to offer, and who in fact need to eat a wide variety of different things in order to be healthy--the "What to eat" question is somewhat more complicated for us than it is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom, has for most of human history been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to children without a lot of controversy or fuss.

But over the last several decades, Mom lost much of her authority over the dinner menu, ceding it to science and food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance of the two) and, to a lesser extent, to the government, with its ever-shifting dietary guidelines, food-labelling rules, and perplexing pyramids. Think about it: most of us no longer eat what our mothers ate as children, or for that matter what our mothers fed us as children. This is, historically speaking, a highly unusual state of affairs.