Eat This Book

My latest read, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, is probably my favorite of the past six months. Base upon his previous muckraking work in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan writes a simple manifesto to eat “real food”–the kind your great grandmother would recognize–and not the processed stuff you find at the local Try N’ Save. It starts off with a brutal dissection of the “nutritionism,” the idea that we can break down food into component parts and still get all its benefits, and ends with some mostly practical advice for eating better and living a healthier life. Nutritionism and modern science have replaced real foods–the kind nature makes–with “edible food-like substances,” refined products made mostly of corn and soy. In Defense of Food not a diet book per se, but a work of journalism and philosophy. Pollan shows how the Western diet and our attitudes towards food made people sick. We eat too much, everything we eat is processed and full of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and we think we can reduce food to vitamins and nutrients and still get everything we need (we can’t–call it “irreducible complexity” if you will). His writing makes so much simple sense; we’ve needlessly complicated how we eat in this country, and while nutritionism and the industrial food economy have made food cheaper, it’s less good for you and less good for the environment.

The last section of the book includes some common sense applications of the journalism in the prior sections (and the prior book). It’s made up of ideas like “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” “shop on the outside of your grocery store” (fresh fruit, vegetables, and meats are all on the outside aisles), “buy from a local producer,” (farmer’s markets where you can), “avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high fructose corn syrup,” “cook, and if you can, plant a garden,” and my personal favorite, “don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.” Seriously, try to find a real food other than milk in the Gas N’ Gulp! You’d find corn for your car (ethanol) and corn for your body (HFCS).

The book’s motto is the very true, very Zen: “Eat Food. Not so much. Mostly plants.” I’m going to try to implement some changes in my eating habits based on this book (already started something like it at New Years). Highly recommended.