In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan · 2008 · 9 ideas · 9 min
Real, whole food beaten to a pulp by nutrition science and food marketing is quietly making us sicker — the fix is to stop eating like a chemistry experiment and start eating like your great-grandmother.
Why this book
Pollan's argument arrives as a rebuke to his own profession: for thirty years, journalists, scientists, and the food industry have jointly convinced Americans that food is really just a delivery vehicle for nutrients, and that eating well means parsing labels for omega-3s, antioxidants, and grams of fiber. He calls this mindset nutritionism, and pins on it the paradox at the center of the book — a culture more anxious about food and more nutritionally confused than any in history, and getting fatter and sicker the whole time.
The stakes are bigger than any one diet. Pollan traces how nutrition science, however well-intentioned, keeps discovering nutrients, villainizing and then rehabilitating fats and carbs in turn, and handing the food industry a new health claim to print on a box every few years — while rates of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease climb regardless. His fix deliberately refuses the whole apparatus: eat food, mostly plants, not too much, and trust several-thousand-year-old food cultures over a science that hasn't yet figured out how nutrients actually work together in a whole food.
Who should read it
Anyone exhausted by conflicting headlines about which foods are secretly poison this month will find this book a genuine relief — its answer is refreshingly simple, if not always easy. It's also essential for readers of Pollan's other food books, since it distills the philosophy underlying The Omnivore's Dilemma into direct, practical guidance.
About the author
Michael Pollan is an American journalist and professor at Harvard and UC Berkeley whose writing on food, agriculture, and the food industry includes The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and How to Change Your Mind.