In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Title: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Author: Michael Pollan

Format: Audiobook

Narrator: Scott Brick

Source: Public Library

Rating: 4.75

To be fair I knew where this book was going.  I knew what it was going to be all about because I watched the PBS special LINK . The special was good but the show couldn’t pack in all the details you find in the book.

Pollan has a few simple rules for healthy eating:

• Eat Real Food, just not a lot of it
• If your grandmother would not recognize it, don’t eat it
• Eat things in season, hit up your local farmers market

Now on the humorous side, This book is read by Scott Brick.  Probably 20+ books I have read over the years have been narrated by him.  He does a great job with keeping things intense.  The problem was with him reading me a book about health, I just knew I was dying LIKE RIGHT NOW.

Looking at our US Western diet, there are things in the processing of food that disconnects us from what our ancestors ate.  Bread is not just water, yeast,  flour and salt anymore.  Now there may be up to 20 or 30 ingredients.  And its profitable because taking out some of the natural aspects of food and finding a new process it makes the foot keep longer, which means companies do not lose as much money with food spoiling.  The problem is this Western diet has started making some health issues that in years past were not quite as prevalent as they are today.  Pollan discusses that since science has an understand of what makes up most of our food, they push nutrients more than the actual food itself.

Pollan does not claim to have some new idea, or that he has a scientific breakthrough to great health.  He is more looking at how in the past 100 years food has changed so much, so quickly, that we have not evolved enough to compensate for them yet.  He discusses how Type-2 diabetes is pretty preventable and even has been reversed with a change in eating and exercise.  But because our western diet is so ingrained in our life it is easier to now treating the diabetes and let people going on eating what they already know and love.  Pollan sees this as a bad move and this book is an attempt to get people back eating the regular food grown in their area.  He discusses how so much in supermarkets now is not real food anymore.  That most products have been engineered or added to with chemicals instead of just using regular items.  He also discusses how we need to have a more diverse pallet.  That if we were eating items grown locally, and in season, that the biodiversity would be good for our body and for the environment because fields would have diverse crops and not need as much chemical fertilizer as they do now.