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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Pollan
Creator: Scott Brick
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $11.63
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Avg. Customer Rating:  166 reviews
Sales Rank: 85670
Format: Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 5
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0143142747
Dewey Decimal Number: 613
EAN: 9780143142744
ASIN: 0143142747
Publication Date: January 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, January 2008: Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it's at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food? What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that's come to typify our food culture. Many processed foods vie for a spot in our grocery baskets, claiming to lower cholesterol, weight, glucose levels, you name it. Yet Pollan shows that these convenient "healthy" alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient: our health has a nation has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats--even fruits--from our daily meals. His razor-sharp analysis of the American diet (as well as its architects and its detractors) offers an inspiring glimpse of what it would be like if we could (a la Humpty Dumpty) put our food back together again and reconsider what it means to eat well. In a season filled with rallying cries to lose weight and be healthy, Pollan's call to action—"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."--is a program I actually want to follow. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 161 more reviews...
 Leaves out the most damning facts about processed food August 29, 2008
It's a pretty good book, but doesn't hit hard enough. If it really told the whole story, most readers would really take a step back and reevaluate whether or not supermarket food is okay to eat. He points out that 1982 marked a turning point in the US. Before that, most supermarket food would be considered food. After 1982, food became loaded with adulterants, and really can not be called food. If most food on the shelves toady were subject to the "imitation food" labeling law that was repealed in 1973, most everything today would be labeled "imitation". Certainly anything sold by General Mills, Kraft, Nestle, and the other big processors would be labeled imitation. They do not have any products that could ahve avoided the imitation label. That is why the law was repealed, so that they could start adulerating food, e.g. removing the nutrients, selling them off separately for profit, then adding in synthetic nutrients, which are very cheap to manufacture. Nearly all supermarket food is now imitation. He does point out, that most of our food is made from corn, soy. But he fails to point out that all artificial colors, and most artifical flavors, sweeteners, and preservatives are made from by-prodcuts of petroleum refineries. Here is how artificial colors are made (this applies to all colors with the prefix FD&C: Benzene (a very toxic solvent)is the by-product of refining crude oil into other products such as diesel and gasoline. Sulfuric acid and Nitric acid is added to the benzene to form nitrobenzene. This is then turned into aniline. Aniline is extremely toxic, and is the building block for all artificial colors. And this is not the worst thing that is put in food. I really wish he would have discussed this issue. He does say that 2/3 of all calories in the US come from 4 plants: wheat, corn, soy, and rice. This should really concern us, as at no other time in history have human eaten so much grain and soybeans, and the fact that it is so highly processed makes it that much worse.
A watered down version of The Omnivore's Dilemma August 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a watered down version of Omnivore's Dilemma with the same message (eat locally, eat more plants, etc.). The message is good, and the argument is solid, but this slim volume is not nearly the great achievement that The Omnivore's Dilemma was.
 In Defense of "In Defense of Food" August 28, 2008
I loved this book!
It takes a different perspective from Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemna". Here, Pollan is principally concerned about eating from a perspective of personal health/nutrition. Fortunately, the conclusion that he comes to is that someone who is thoughtful about their eating will make many of the same decisions whether their starting point is ecology, environment, personal health (and I'd add to the list labor rights and animal rights, much of the time). Yes, between all these different viewpoints, there are A FEW places where advocates might disagree, but it seems that a thoughtful eater will benefit all of these areas in general.
our diets are sorely lacking because of the process Pollan labels "nutritionism." August 27, 2008
Book Review:
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
New flash: When whole foods are broken down into their nutritional components and then reassembled as processed food, the new product is not nearly as beneficial to our health as the original. In the mid-twentieth century, who would have thought it? Weren't we sold on "better living though science?"
Well, as it turns out, our diets are sorely lacking because of the process Pollan labels "nutritionism." This reductionist way of thinking about food assumes that the key to understanding food is through the individual nutrients it contains. Wrong! Whole food is greater than the sum of its parts!
As a holistic chiropractor and a motivational speaker on health and wellness, I'm excited about Pollan's book. He discusses with clarity, supported by extensive research, something I've been advocating for years: a return to the Paleolithic diet of our ancestors 40,000 years ago! Pollan states it succinctly; Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Furthermore, eat mostly the leaves of the plants, not the seeds. What about meat? Meat is nutritious food, yet when it comes from a highly industrialized food chain, it brings with it extra chemicals and hormones that do not serve us well at all.
If you care at all about the food you ingest, buy this book and get out your highlighter! You'll want to mark passages to refer back to as you become pro-active with your diet!
Michael B. Roth, D.C.
Clear, entertaining, science-based August 25, 2008
Just the kind of information I needed to clear up the murky questions I had about the american diet. A great book for every modern person to read.
AEmeryMD
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