In Defense of Food

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

These are the basic food rules author Michael Pollan devised, which form the basis for this small book. It was published in 2008 as a follow-up of sorts to his 2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma.

In the first part of the book, he discusses “nutritionism,” that is, considering food as the sum of its nutritional parts, which has become the basis of our relationship to food in the Western diet. He traces this way of looking at food from the discovery of the macronutrients – protein, fat, and carbohydrates – in the early nineteenth century, to the discovery of vitamins in the early twentieth century, through the nutritional science of today. As we learn more and more about the food we eat, it makes sense to me that we can’t possibly know all the components of each fruit, vegetable, grain, etc., because we are constantly learning new things about them all the time. It makes sense that we should look at food, not merely the components of food that we know about now.

In the second part of the book, he discusses the Western diet and the diseases of civilization, as well as the industrialization of eating, which he sums up in five concepts: (1) from whole foods to refined; (2) from complexity to simplicity; (3) from quality to quantity; (4) from leaves to seeds; and (5) from food culture to food science.

In the third part of the book, Pollan goes into detail concerning his basic food rules, defining what he considers to be food, as opposed to the foodlike substances that are the bulk of the contents of a modern supermarket, explaining why he suggests eating mostly plants, and giving suggestions concerning how not to eat too much. His personal rules of thumb do help someone living in the United States in the twenty-first century to counteract the Standard American Diet (SAD).

Reading this book will give you a different way to look at food, and some rules of thumb to think about as you consider what you eat. I highly recommend it.