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 simplification, as the big agricultural companies use industrial fertilizers that are equivalent to junk food for plants to grow their crops. Did you know that a modern apple is has fewer measurable nutrients than an apple 50 years ago? And that some food companies think that's great, because consumers will have to buy and eat more of their food to get enough nutrition.
So, what do we do about this? Fortunately, the book is not just doom and gloom about food. It presents strategies, such as shopping the outer areas of the supermarket, where the fresh food is, instead of the processed food in the middle; shopping from farmer's markets where you can find organic, locally grown food and meet the farmers that grow it, and making what we eat count through our food choices.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," is his message.
A short, convincing book worth a look by everyone who cares both about their health, and our food production system.