In the Buddhist tradition there is a level of hell whereby the dead, known as hungry ghosts, are trapped with enormous stomachs and tiny throats unable to swallow anything but the smallest bites of food. Their particular brand of torture is that they are always eating and yet their hunger is never satisfied. These hungry ghosts sound an awful lot like the modern American eater trapped in the unhealthy western diet demonized in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

You may be More...

Actually, there is enough good stuff in this book that it probably warrants another star or two. But I was so alarmed at the amount of misinformation here that I can’t bring myself to say that the book is “okay.”

Michael Pollan is right about some of the big stuff. Nutrition research is badly flawed. It has sometimes led us down the wrong road (although it has also provided life-saving findings). The government is far too slow to change its recommendations and has strong ties (to put it mildly) More...

I am conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I agree with Pollan's thesis: food science has not served us well over the past 100 years, and we really should "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I believe that partially because of Pollan's arguments, and the revelatory reporting he did for The Omnivore's Dilemma, but mostly because I've studied biology, and have at least a limited idea of how complex human bodies and human food can be, and how evolution may not have prepared us for Twin More...

I hated reading this book. And that's sad because I agree with his basic premise. Just eat real food. Not too much. Mostly plants. And I would add, try and get off your ass once in awhile. But this book was excrutiating to read. I read the first 50 pages, gave up, and went to the last section on his very basic food rules, gave up again. His language was all black and white with blanket condemnations and blanket recommendations, ironic since that's what he condemns in scientific thinking and food More...

I am deeply ashamed, depressed, and embarrassed by the fact that such a book as Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food need be written, much less published, critically acclaimed, and enjoyed by someone such as myself. Pollan himself acknowledges the perverse state of affairs saying, “That one should feel the need to mount a defense of ‘the meal’ is sad, but then I never would have thought ‘food’ needed defending, either.”

We should be collectively mortified as a culture because though Pollan greets More...

Last night, I watched Pollan -- who looks just like one of my uncles -- on TV promoting this book. Something wonderful and empowering he said: the food industry pays very close attention to what consumers want.

In fact, they're terrified of us.

For instance, it only took a little over 100 concerned McDonald's customers writing to ask if it were true that the chain served genetically modified potatoes -- that was enough
to get the issue on the agenda at their shareholders' meeting.

Another example More...

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Those are the first sentences of Michael Pollan's delightful little book In Defense of Food. In fact, as Pollan himself admits, there's not much more to it than that. So, how to fill up a whole book when those three first sentences tell it all?

Well, as simple as that advice seems, the first sentence is more complicated than it may appear. Eat food. Sure. Of course. What else would we eat? But as we all know and often try not to think too much about -- what More...

I’m a huge fan of Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, (see review here) but only a big fan of In Defense of Food. The first two sections of Defense, “The Age of Nutritionism,” and “The Western Diet and Diseases of Civilization” fit perfectly with Omnivore’s posture of investigative journalism. While Omnivore included Pollan as a character, it came across as a non-biased, or relatively low-biased, intro to the foodstuffs served across America. The first two sections of Defense adhere to this eve More...

Thanks for the reminder to update, Ethan!

This book was really eye opening. I think (or thought) of myself as having a pretty healthy diet-- I have the whole wheat blend flaxseed enhanced pasta, the total cereal with nonfat soy milk, the bran muffins and the fish oil capsules.

I AM A DUPE! I've been sucked into the cult of "nutritionism" as Pollans calls it, the belief that what's healthy about the food are the identified micronutrients it contains, and that foods are either healthful elixers or n More...

Michael Pollan is absolutely on to something with his central thesis; namely, that the American diet has been taken over by "edible foodlike substances" (ie, hyper-processed foods) and the American approach to health as it relates to eating has been taken over by "nutritionism" (ie, the idea that food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrient parts). He makes an excellent case that the current epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. are the inevitable result of this perverse relat More...

**My full review is posted on my blog at: http://citingthetext.blogspot.com

Michael Pollan summarizes his latest book, published January 2008, on the cover and in just seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He admits on the very first page that he has pretty much "given the game away" with that summary, but that he plans to complicate matters a bit in the interest of "keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages." Since I began the book at the start of a four hour bus ride More...

This is an excellent book about how to reclaim control of what you eat from the food industry and nutrition science. The tenets for doing this come at the end, but it doesn't read at all like a diet book with strict rules and regulations. The tenets are meant to inspire rather than regulate, and collectively come to this - "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants." Nutritionists and their followers will probably complain that Pollan doesn't use controlled experiments to make his claims. He doesn't More...

Part of the idea behind this whole 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge was to branch out into genres and topics that I might not normally try. While I haven't read anything about perky single British chicks trying to make it on their own and find love in the big city or perky single British vampire chicks trying to fight crime and find love in the big city, this book by Michael Pollen about nutrition and eating well does signal a bit of a departure for me.

Pollen's manifesto here isn't actually that m More...

I've been reading tons of books about food and the American food industry. I was afraid that this one would cover too much of the same ground as Nina Planck's Real Food, but Michael Pollan's take was quite different. He was more interested in how Americans got to this state of being so insecure about what to eat that we are willing to eat chemically engineered food substitutes marketed as "healthy" and "nutritious" instead of actual food that tastes good. Nina Planck has a real platform that say More...

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
So begins In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan's informative, frightening, and ultimately inspiring new book. Pollan explores the dangers of nutritionism and traces how we became a culture of fat people eating "Heart Healthy!" Fritos in our cars--and/or a culture of eaters obsessed with health, and yet eating food-like substances that are in fact incredibly harmful to our bodies. He urges us to to ignore the noise of diet fads and journ More...

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Michael Pollan's succinct dietary advice is so simple it's practically insulting, but thanks to a combination of bad science and government influence, Americans are more confused than ever about how and what to eat. Our ancestors wouldn't recognize most of the "food" we eat today, things like refined pasta fortified with omega-3s or diet soda spiked with vitamins. By refining and processing our food and trying to add the nutrients back in, the modern food More...

Interesting and a quick read; almost like an extended magazine article, something you'd see in the New York Times magazine or Utne Reader. Some of his suggestions are common sense and things I've been doing for years--i.e., if the list of ingredients requires a chemistry degree to understand, IT IS NOT FOOD! Other points Pollan brings up were less obvious and more problematic. I would have liked to see him delve further into the inconvenient (and perhaps not merely accidental) truth that eating More...

I don't know how he does it, but Michael Pollan makes the story of the food chain and diet fads a page-turner. This book is perfect for those who want to read the much longer Omnivore's Dilemma, but just can't seem to get through all that corn. I love how he sums up what we as omnivores should eat: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." It helped me resolve to be a better steward of my body and my family's health. We already avoid anything with HFCS or hydrogenated oil, but could do better abo More...

I get it. We are all going to die from either high fructose corn syrup poisoning, or the oodles of other chemicals in the food-like substances we eat on a daily basis. This book was extremely interesting and educational, yet makes me feel as if it's completely an uphill battle to eat healthy. As a single mom, I surely can't afford to buy only organic and grass-fed foods, and I can assure you that I won't be giving up my microwave any time soon. But at least I found some small changes I can make More...

I finished reading this book just this morning. It's less lengthy than the other books of his I have (and have not yet read: The Omnivore's Dilemma and Botany of Desire). I do look forward to those other books, but I was invigorated by In Defense of Food as it takes an informed activist approach to looking at how and why we eat the way we do, and what "forces" are interested in maintaining that zeitgeist.
The option Pollan counters with is so simple, so logical, so easy (once one gets past some n More...

This book does a very good job of pointing out the ills of the Western diet. It all makes good logical sense and he presents research as well that has convinced me that I should try to make a major diet shift.

He advocates a slower paced lifestyle with more attention and time spent on preparing and eating food. I really like the following line in the final few pages where he talks about gardening: "Much of what we call recreation or exercise consists of pointless physical labor, so it is especia More...

This was The It Book in food a couple years ago, and I can see why. Its prescriptions are succinct and comprehensible, if not actually easy to follow. Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. The "eat food" bit is about, y'know, food, and how much of what we eat is actually the nutritional equivalent of Styrofoam packing peanuts. It's a nice thought, and a pretty sound theory, but Pollan vastly overestimates the degree to which people below the upper middle class have access to food, as he defines More...

Covering similar ground to his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan discusses ways to eat healthily despite a marketplace flooded with over-processed food and food-like products. He makes a very convincing case that food science has been oversimplified into "nutritionism", which reduces the idea of food to its component nutrients. The problem is that we still don't know everything that food does, and cannot adequately replace it by artificial means.
Even fresh food is suffering from this simplifi More...

I KNEW it!! I knew what the govt has been spoon-feeding us about food was wrong and this book shows it. We need to quit eating junk that is manufactured, no matter how "good" they say it is for us. The more claims a box or bag makes about it's nutritional value, the worse it is for you. That goes for margarine, too. Quit eating that crap. There is NO SUCH THING AS MARGARINE WITH ZERO TRANS-FAT, no matter what the container says. And hey, I'm not even done with the book yet ;-)

ETA: I've finished More...

I was somewhat wary of what I assumed to be yet another condemnation of food. Instead, I was treated to Pollan's tremendous plea for the average American to eschew the modern "nutritionism" and reconnect with food as a whole, deeply rooted in culture and pleasure rather than paying heed to the monikers advertised by the food police and big industry, which, more often than not, is driven more by profit than valid health concerns. Pollan urges readers to forgo modern science's constantly shifting More...

I don't read much nonfiction. While reading this, I felt it could have been edited down to about 10 pages and I would have enjoyed it more. I realize he had to illustrate his points, but those examples of bad science or corporate dominance of the food industry were at times frustrating and weak.

Using one of his examples, if I had to go out and find my own food, kill/harvest it and prepare it, I would most definitely find myself heatlthier thanks to many factors intrinsic to that overall lifesty More...

American society as it is portrayed in movies or news footage back in the 40's 50's 60's and early 70's was not that fat. In fact we looked to be pretty fit and healthy as a people as far as I can see. That has always confounded me. What caused this mass transformation of us as a slim and trim clan of cigarette smoking, butter spreading, steak eating, lard using people into a 21st century group of fatties who live off of fast food, sugar puffs, wonder bread and microwavable eats? Michael Pollan' More...

I came to this book predisposed to give it 3 or 4 stars. The subtitle, "Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants" sounded like something that (as a vegan) I could get behind, even if Pollan himself isn't vegetarian. I liked "The Botany of Desire," and also am liking "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (haven't finished yet).

This book is well written and contains much that I agree with. But it's not in the same category as these others because of his attitude towards science. Michael Pollan can do better.

The r More...

I found this book to be quite convicting. And, let me tell you, I needed a kick in the rear!

Over all, we eat quite healthy. However, this past year or so I have become a bit lazy. I had my second child, my husband travels, healthy food must be searched out, etc. begins my long list of excuses. Needless to say, tightening up the pantry (so to speak) is one of my goals for this coming year. This book has provided me with much needed motivation to proceed!

Yet while I feel motivated, I once again fe More...

Full of great and memorable anecdotes about how the human relationship with food has evolved -- for the worse, in the Western world in the last hundred years. How grain used to turn rancid a few days after it was turned into flour because it was ground with stone and still had yellow husks in it, and at the turn of the industrial revolution we could all use steel to make the powdery white flour that only the rich had before! Of course, the reason the powdery white stuff didn't go bad is because More...