In Defense of Food
Here are the first few paragraphs of In Defense of Food, a manual for eating by Michael Pollan:
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 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 foodlike 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 counterintuitive, 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.
Pollan skewers “nutritionism”: our obsession with diets based on quantities of fat, carbohydrates, protein, and other nutrients. He claims it is bad science; a faulty form of reductionism which overlooks the complex relationships between the many ingredients that make up food.
The book is indispensable; I can’t recommend it enough.
But how is the book different from The Omnivore’s Dilemma? I’m afraid of trying ‘In Defense of Food’ and finding out it’s nearly the same as his previous book, and possibly to ploy to sell more..
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