Who would have thought food needs defending? And yet Michael Pollan manages to do just that in his acclaimed book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. The book’s recommendations appear in the first sentence (and on the cover): “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Pollan book makes the case for these dicta in three sections. The first traces the rise of “nutritionism,” the ideology that what we should eat can be reduced down to a set of studied nutrients, the proper proportions of which will be made known by technocrats. It was in this section that my biggest beef with the book is most prominent: Pollan seems to blame “science” in general for our sorry nutritional state, and in so doing almost appears to have a neo-Luddite reverence for the Wonderful Way Things Were. I think his case would be just as strong if he focused the blame where it belongs: in an industrial era hubris that we were unlocking all the mysteries and could synthesize the perfect way to live, in an industry concerned with profits above all else, and in a government that finds it hard to resist lobbying. That recasting of blame out of the way, his chronicle of the history is informative and his conclusions sensible.

The second section explores what makes the “Western diet” (actually, the typical American diet) so bad. He cites:

• The shift from whole foods to refined
• The shift from nutritional and chemical complexity to simplicity: over and over we think we’ve identified all the crucial nutrients, only to find out later that there’s something else, or some unknown synergistic effect that we don’t understand.
• The shift from quality to quantity
• The shift from leaves to seeds, the latter of which are more calorie-packed but don’t contain the same diversity of nutrients
• The shift from food culture (your family and environment telling you what to eat) to food science (the high priests of nutrition pronouncing that you need this or that nutrient).

The third section contains recommendations for the individual food consumer. He suggests that we abandon the “Western” (sic) diet and take the time to get to know, prepare, and savor real food slowly, as other cultures do. Specifically, we should

• Eat food. This means real food, not “food-like substances”:
  • Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother would not recognize as food
  • 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
  • Avoid food products that make health claims
  • Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle to get the fresh food and avoid the pre-packaged goods.
  • Get out of the supermarket whenever possible and go instead to farmers’ market or your own yard. Get to know your food source.
• Eat mostly plants:
  • Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Near-vegetarians are just as healthy as vegetarians. Leaves are less calorie-laden than seeds.
  • You are what what you eat eats too: the value of your own diet depends on the value of the diet that your own foodstuffs consume. Pastured animal foods are much more nutritious than grain-fed animal foods. [And indeed, the eggs that we recently bought at the farmers' market had bright orange yolks from, apparently, the beta carotene in the green grass.]
  • If you have the space, buy a freezer so you can shop in bulk and in season at the farmers’ market and have good food year-round.
  • Eat well-grown food from healthy soils. Organic [is that where the food term comes from?] rather than chemical fertilizers are best for the plants and the entire food chain, including us.
  • Eat wild foods when you can. They have to be versatile and defend themselves from biological predators, and are likely to have a wider variety of healthful nutrients as a result.
  • Be the kind of person who takes supplements (that is, someone concerned about their health), but then save your money (except for a multivitamin as you get older).
  • Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks. Just eat foods the way cultures generally have, because they have accumulated and tested preparation knowledge over the years that turns out to be quite effective in extracting nutrition from their comestibles.
  • Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism
  • Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet. Whole dietary patterns appear to matter much more than isolated nutrients.
  • Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• Don’t eat too much:
  • Pay more, eat less. Quality over quantity.
  • Eat meals. Stop snacking already! Sit down and make the meal a ritual.
  • Do all your eating at a table. A real table.
  • Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does: no gas stations.
  • Try not to eat alone.
  • Eat slowly, both literally and in the Slow Food sense.
  • Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. Get to know your food.

This was an informative, inspiring, and fun book to read. Recommended.