IN DEFENSE OF FOOD by Michael Pollan

I'm back!  Long story...laptop died, switched to a Mac, forgot to transfer all my bookmarks & passwords...but computers are making our lives easier, right?

I love food.  I love to eat it, I love to read about it, I love to look at pictures of it.  Some people have porn.  I have food.  So I tried to read Michael Pollan's earlier two books, THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA and THE BOTANY OF DESIRE but just couldn't ever work my way into them, despite the provocative title of the latter work.  IN DEFENSE OF FOOD is his latest so I gave it one more shot.

He almost lost me on the first page.  His premise is this: "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  Who doesn't know this already?  It's going to be another slog, I thought.  I'm happy to report, however, that I was wrong.  (Okay, I'm never happy about being wrong, but no one actually knew about it until now, so I didn't feel diminished by the experience.)

Pollan begins by pointing out how we have ceased to look at food in any kind of wholistic way.  Rather, we think about what we eat in terms of nutritional components.  Like, this food has a lot of fat.  That one is good for me because it's low-carb/sugar/sodium.  This focus on the pieces instead of the whole has created a perfect set-up for food manufacturers to generate boatloads of profit by manipulating their products to contain the nutrient du jour.  Wonder Bread leaps to mind.  Kids won't eat fiber?  No problem!  We'll just put some in the Wonder Bread, and now everybody's happy.  Kids still get squishy bread, parents feel like they've made a healthier food choice, and the Wonder Bread people?  They're the happiest of all.

I like it when someone turns a paradigm on its side and asks me to look at it.  Pollan goes on to discuss the diseases of Western civilization and the way our diet has contributed to their proliferation.  Again, this doesn't sound like news, but he presents supporting data that I hadn't read before in a way that was fun and accessible.  In the final section of the book, he outlines some strategies for eating -- NOT a diet, just some thoughtful suggestions, including the possibility that if you're checking the nutrition label, the thing you're eating probably isn't food.  This is my favorite book of the year so far.

~Michelle