Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - Michael Pollan

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - Michael Pollan
  • Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:04:35 -0600


In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - Michael Pollan
http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should
anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're
consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is
not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike
substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of
them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are
anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced
by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael
Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the
less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize
as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From
the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both
stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question
that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert
help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans
healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us
sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) 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. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the
prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and
proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and
ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he
argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are
part.

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape
Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet
and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can
relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our
appetites, and return eating to its proper context -- out of the car and back
to the table. Michael 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.

Pollan's last book, 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.

Read the introduction to
In Defense of Food (PDF)
http://www.michaelpollan.com/in_defense_excerpt.pdf





  • [Livingontheland] In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto - Michael Pollan, Tradingpost, 04/03/2008

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page