Pollan gives good, sound and often logical advice on how to reinsert food (think non-processed, fresh stuff) into our diets. His main theme is "eat food. Not too much. mostly plants."Some of my favorite 'rules' he developed are: don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, don't eat food that doesn't rot (watch out french fries!), and only eat at the table (a desk does not count). A good positive reinforcement of those food principles everyone should be following to escape the 'western diet' and all it's accompanying health problems.**I'm giving this book 4 stars because you can still remember what you read at the beginning of the book once you get to the end (it's pretty short)! Unlike his other works which are basically just doorstops. ( )

People that read The Omnivore's Dilemma are going to rush out and buy this before opening to find ... a slightly rancid, re-cooked smell. Kind of a mess really for such an experienced writer. Who, in heaven's name, does he think is reading this? People a lot dumber than those that read OD, apparently.

He goes on long jags citing huge percentage of Americans that are obese, that are consuming more of x, y or z. And the people most likely to read this, including me, are thinking: "I'm not fat. I don't eat stuff like that. They don't resemble my friends or cohorts. Who precisely are we talking about? Would hints about a particular region or class help out?" Does anyone now reading this need to be told to avoid eating Twinkies and nondairy creamer? Pollan thinks so! When he launches into Wonder Bread, you start to wonder if he's back in a time warp, say circa 1970. He may next have disclosed shocking news about Pringles, fast food, TV dinners, and Cheez Whiz, but I admit I didn't read the whole book. I'm pretty sure, though, that he never explained where transfats are lurking.

He does mention the problems of aborigines and Native Americans, their sudden shift in diet, high rates of diabetes ... and how an experiment in back to nature reversed many of their problems s ...but once again, how many of those folks are reading this book? The big appeal of OD was that the middle-class, picky eater reader could vicariously accompany the author on his quest and in his cooking.

OK, I didn't finish it, but I read almost the whole thing, including the final two chapters and I didn't learn much after the first few chapters. For example, apparently animal fat (for cooking, in meat and in dairy products) isn't as bad as was once thought. Yet Americans drastically reduced consumption of it in the past few decades. Maybe cooking with corn oil is worse, Or maybe not. Nevernonetheless, does he mean it doesn't make much sense to be drinking soy milk instead of cow's milk? Or 2 percent cow's milk instead of the whole milk? What kind of oil should one be cooking with? Only olive oil? You do not get answers to such questions. Butter can be substituted for margarine with a clear conscience? Not that I've ever bought the stuff but ...

Of course there are interesting parts. Such as: how the wholesale shift to grains was relatively recent in human existence. And how we're very suddenly consuming a great deal of soy products (so tofu? and tempeh and what have you?) and soy ingredients ... but what should you do about that or how much is too much? Well, he doesn't get into that.

Late in the game he refers approvingly to "the ancient Asian practice of fermenting soy and eating soy in the form of curds" (but isn't too much soy bad?). My mind wandered off ... Indians don't eat tofu, or any soy products that I can think of.. To the extent that Thais, Malaysians or Indonesians do, they've picked it up fairly recently from Chinese immigrants. Even in Japan, the word for tofu is obviously Chinese.Shouldn't he know how it fits into Chinese cooking?

I just opened the book, near the end, where we get back to his ahem sage advice about not eating too much and to mostly eat plants (so soybeans are ok?). And he goes into a chapter re "don't eat what your grandmother or great-grandmother wouldn't recognize." Starting with some kind of tube yogurt.

Now altogether readers are griping, "But I don't eat that crap!" After all, it's so easy to make yogurt at home. (Except, wait a minute, are we or are we not supposed to be consuming whole fat/2 percent and/or skim milk?) Only one of my grandmas is likely to have recognized yogurt or any soy foods. Neither would have eaten yogurt. Definitely none of the great-grandparents. So I shouldn't? Next item on the shopping list he mentions is something like a sugary "breakfast bar." Are warnings about such processed food really news for his readers?

The warning about great/grandparents is also stupid because today in markets there are so many veggies and fruits and spices and grains and noodles and such that are wonderful, even better foods than our grandmothers regularly consumed. How many of them had refrigerators their whole lives?

Seems especially dumb when so many, maybe the majority, of readers, like Pollan himself, have immigrant grandparents. When it gets to great-grandparents, that probably is a majority of Americans. He himself mentions how quickly the diet changed--from his Eastern European grandmother to his mother to his present household. then he seems to forget all about it. In my case, cabbage and potatoes doesn't sound like an especially healthy or appealing diet. Corned beef was a real luxury, Grandma said. And an orange only for Xmas? I doubt her family ever had that.

Thinking of great-grandmothers and foods I frequently eat is a subtraction exercise: out rambutans, mangos, probably grapefruit and pineapples, definitely guava, pita bread, chick peas, eggplants, bulgar, everything in fatoosh, olives, various mushrooms and seeds. Even manaw, the spherical limes I use in tea everyday. Tonight I was eating some humble 50 cents phat thai, surely fried in palm oil (supposedly bad for the heart, but you won't learn from this book). Maybe the great-grandmothers would recognize the noodles as food, but the tofu? chillis? bean sprouts? Definitely not bamboo shoots or little greens from banana plants.

When you start thinking about why people emigrated ... look for ideas of the narrow diet and nutrition related illnesses in the developing world.

I also have my doubts about some of the trad'l cuisines he applauds in passing. Take the Japanese. I've lived in Japan. Fish sounds fine, tho I don't know about such huge amounts of raw fish. But the trad'l way of consuming vegetables is by pickling them. Having gotten refrigerators rather late, and having very small cooking facilities, whatever ... Japanese still eat a lot of pickled and salted stuff. Is that so healthy? Ditto frying (not just stir frying) so much fish and chicken. Not to mention the very decided preference for white rice (to the extent brown rice is appearing, probably gaijin are to blame).

It's not a culture that you associate with leafy greens (that would be Vietnamese) or year-round fresh fruit. When Japanese started getting microwaves, they had never had convection ovens. Do we really want to throw out the lore through the ages of oven cooking?

Do I sound too picky? Well, I'm not a foodie, I don't know much about food, I don't really cook. Yet I know that, any food critic would, and I want to read someone that knows more than me, an authority.

But the biggest problem is the lack of focus. The earlier book looked at the ethical dimensions of our food choices, This one is supposedly built around how to make healthy choices, I think, but he got sidetracked by an arguably more interesting idea: how a lot of nutrition advice of recent decades is faulty, misguided. or discredited. The he got sidetracked by food habits and evolution and so-called civilization. imho ( )

Michael Pollan takes a fresh look at the American diet and pronounces it unfit for human consumption. The food he defends is food our grandparents would recognize--fresh (or frozen), grown close to home, 5-items or less on the nutritional label, ingredients you can pronounce. Avoid corn 'products' such as corn oil and high-fructose corn syrup, additives, artificial flavorings and other chemical additives. Words of wisdom we have all heard before, but this time with a resounding voice. Well done. I made an impression on me that no 'diet' book has ever done before. He does an effective job of getting across the point that eating right is essential to good health and we shouldn't be misled by food marketing ploys of 'low-fat', 'low calorie' and 'enriched'. ( )

Interesting and instructive. I object to the way he used the term "reductionist science".
There's good science and bad science; having a narrow focus might lead to irrelevance,
but is not a sin in itself. ( )

Pollan, Michael. (2008). In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin. ISBN: 978-1-59420-145-5

How much actual food do you eat? That is the somewhat disconcerting premise that underlies this book. Michael Pollan suggests that, because of the great many processed food products with many additives and the policies of seeking to make more food at a lower cost, much of the food in the American diet today is not actually real food.
He suggests that if we made it a point not to eat any foods or food products that our great grandmothers would not recognize as food, we would go a long way to helping world ecology and our own health (p.148). He says we should also avoid ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, and products with more than five ingredients. He says we should also avoid high fructose corn syrup. Pollan is quick to point out that these thins by themselves are not necessarily bad for us, “but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed” (p.150).
Great detail is taken in this book to explain all the nasty details of why corporate food manufacturing, contemporary farming practices and government policies have conspired to make the things we eat not as healthy and nutrient rich , plus more harmful to the environment, than in the past. He explains why the various traditional and aboriginal diets are good models to copy, because these cultures discovered over a long period of time what food combinations work well together in terms of health and longevity. Contemporary and nontraditional foods have not been tested by time, and their effect on our bodies cannot be measured.
The book outlines eating guidelines that are basically a balanced approach, and common sense: eat more plants, especially leaves; eat meals rather than snacks (preferably at a table and not alone), eat slowly, and don’t look for magic quick solutions to dietary issues.

In addition to the practical advice, the book is an eye-opening view at the way our thinking about food has shifted from food itself to the nutrients food provides, and how we have begun trying to replicate these nutrients with synthetic substitutes. Pollan paints a picture where the cult of nutrition has taken over and allowed us to be jangled around by marketing claims of health issues that may or may not be true.
His argument against nutritionism is worth considering and his practical points worth beginning to implement. ( )