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Entry tags:	food and health, non-fiction

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (2008)

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. Pgs. 256.


Being someone who has struggled with food and eating throughout most of my life, I know how hard it is to find a proper diet and routine that will help shed excess baggage and help me live a healthier life while being able to still enjoy food, one of this world’s great pleasures. Well, I am not the only one who struggles with this in the nation of Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Taco Bell, because over 60% of Americans are either overweight or obese. Why America and why is the collective weight of America growing so much in the past few decades? Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto attempts to answer these questions and more.

I was a bit skeptical buying the book at first, because I thought that it was going to be nothing more than yet another diet book telling its readers that they need to cut bread from their diets, or red meat from their diets, or a combination of both from their diets while they should engorge themselves on various products from various companies. Pollan’s book is not like that. His book does not center so much on what one should eat, but how one should eat and he sums up his entire book with one simple statement “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” And it is with this statement that Pollan takes the ready on a journey throughout the twentieth century history of food in America and how a good portion of Americans have become obese albeit malnourished at the same time.

Pollan believes that the main problem concerning food and eating in America is that the food that most Americans consume is not food, but instead some mass pressed into a shape resembling food, and some cases not, so chock full of chemicals and added nutrients that this food does not resemble natural food. And what is natural food? Food that someone’s great grandmother, not mother or grandmother so much anymore because they were often raised or shifted to processed food as well, would recognize as food, so therefore real food. It is for this reason that Pollan states to “eat food,” but this is easier said than done because of the food industry and big business. Only so much can be done with a tomato or an eggplant, but breakfast cereals and fad foods can make money and it is these products that gain much of the support of big business and customers, like cattle, follow where they are told to go.

To counter this, Pollan states that Americans should look to the diets of other countries, and in his book Pollan concentrates on countries such as France, Italy, Greece, and Spain whose diets are quite high in fat, but whose people tend to be thinner and healthier. Why is this, because they are people who appreciate the value of traditional foods, natural foods, and unlike America, the citizens of these countries take the time to eat and to enjoy their food without gulping down as much as possible in as short of time as possible. Pollan believes that Americans should move away from their diet “The Western Diet” and come to enjoy food again for its quality not its quantity.

Food and eating is a touchy subject because many toes can be stepped on. Overweight people can be quite sensitive about their weight, and a book informing them that most of what they eat is wrong can be taken the wrong way. However, Pollan possesses an easy, humorous style of writing that while it harshly criticizes how America and its money conscious diet is killing its own citizens does not offend individual readers by picking on individual eating habits. Instead, it gives a larger picture of how big money and government policy has led to a great amount of the obesity in this country because food has moved away in America from being something of pleasure and communion into a business.

It should be noted that Michael Pollan is a journalist and not a scientist. For this reason, I think that some of his writing must be taken with a grain of salt, but with the prevalence of processed foods, cheap fast foods that do not rot, and America’s turning away from healthier foods to ones that provide cheaper more abundant calories, his view might benefit the reader more than many of the scientific studies performed in the last thirty years.