In Defence of Food Summary

04/06/2019 In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan Review Summary - ConsciousED
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IN DEFENSE OF FOOD
By Michael Pollan
BOOK SUMMARY: WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME? FIND OUT WHY

FOCUSING ON NUTRITION RATHER THAN FOOD LEADS TO
GENERALLY POORER HEALTH.
Why would we need any help in choosing which food to put into our bodies? We all recognize food when we see
it.
Or do we?
In the past 50 years or so, a whole industry has developed around the idea of nutritionism – an approach to eating
based not on food, but on nutrients. This led to what we now call the Western diet – a diet made up of mainly
processed foods, stripped of their original nutrients, and repackaged as “healthy” alternative food products.
The effect of this diet on our health has been nothing less than astounding. Indeed, the industrialization of food
and the Western diet are the principal reason for the large number of chronic heart diseases in the Western world.
The rise of nutritionism has also made it difficult for consumers to distinguish truly healthy foods from those that
merely claim to be so. The result is that we need nutritionists to interpret the ingredients labels of the food
products we fill our shopping carts with.
In this book summary, you’ll learn that it’s possible to escape the dominant dietary approach that nutritionism has
become, and develop instead a more traditional and healthier way of eating.
Also in this book summary, you’ll learn:
that much dietary advice offered today is based on little more than hypotheses;
why we stopped talking about food, and started talking about nutrients; and
why you shouldn’t eat anything that your Great Grandmother wouldn’t.
SUMMARY PT 1: IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WE BEGAN

TO TALK ABOUT CONSUMING NUTRIENTS RATHER THAN
EATING FOOD.
Think back to the last time you wanted to start following a healthier diet. Did you think, “I’ll start eating carrots and
cucumbers and stop eating beef and cheese”? Or did you think, “I need to cut out saturated fats and starchy
carbohydrates, and eat lots more vitamins and minerals instead”?
If you’re like most people, the details of your new diet were expressed in the language of nutrients, rather than
specific foods.
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But when did this shift in focus happen? And why?
In the second half of the twentieth century, the food industry and the US government shifted their focus from food
to nutrients.
Around 1950, a number of scientists believed that the consumption of fat and cholesterol (i.e., meat and dairy
products) was responsible for the rise in heart disease. They called this the lipid hypothesis.
Then, in 1968, the US government set up the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which
produced a report in 1977, “The Dietary Goals for the United States,” based largely on the lipid hypothesis.
One goal of the committee was to advise people to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products in order
to prevent heart problems. However, the head of the committee, senator George McGovern, happened to own
many cattle ranches. Recommending that people should cut out red meat would have been damaging both to his
interests and those of the powerful food lobbyists.
So, the wording of the committee’s recommendations was changed. Where they’d previously advised “don’t eat
meat and dairy products,” they were instead coerced to advise people to “choose meats, poultry and fish that will
reduce saturated fat intake.” Such a recommendation was a much smaller threat to the food industry.
And with this, the discourse of diets began to change: we started to talk about healthy eating not in terms of what
foods to eat but in terms of nutrients.
SUMMARY PT 2: THE CLAIM THAT NUTRIENTS DETERMINE A

FOOD’S HEALTHINESS CAN LEAD US TO MISINTERPRET ITS
ACTUAL HEALTH CONTENT.
You’re at the supermarket, looking to buy pasta, and have two choices: one is “imitation pasta” and the other is
“low-carb pasta.”
Which would you choose? Most people would go with what appears to be the healthier choice: the low-carb
option. Yet, surprisingly, both types of pasta are essentially the same: they’re both highly processed imitations of
actual pasta.
But why is it that we don’t tend to recognize this? Because, at this point in our history, we need nutritionists to
interpret nutrition for us.
Nutritionism is like a religion. We follow commands that we struggle to comprehend, and we need preacher-like
nutritionists to tell us how to interpret those mysterious commands – whether it concerns the amount of vitamin
B12 to consume daily, or why potassium is so important.
Nutritionists translate this information for us in one way only: that the main goal of eating is to maintain physical
health. This promotes an almost religious dualism of good versus bad nutrition – protein versus carbs, carbs
versus fat, animal protein versus plant protein and so on.
Aside from the fact that we need professional help in making decisions about nutrition, it may seem that there’s
little wrong with focusing on nutrients.
However, if we learn to judge food by its nutrients, we may consider even nutrient-rich processed food to be
“healthier” for us than real food.
In 1938, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules on the marketing of imitation food products. One
rule was that the word “imitation” had to appear on the packaging of any such product.
Naturally, the food industry fought this decision. At a time when adulterated food was uncommon, labelling a food
product as an imitation was seen as the kiss of death.
Then, in 1973, the food industry used their influence to change the rule so that imitation food could be marketed
without using the dreaded “I” word, as long as the imitation wasn’t nutritionally inferior.
That’s how we eventually entered an era in which adulterated food products, like “healthy” imitation pasta, came
to be considered food.
SUMMARY PT 3: BASED ON JUST A HYPOTHESIS, THE

DIETARY GOALS OF THE US CLEARED THE PATH FOR A
GOLDEN AGE IN FOOD SCIENCE.
The surprising truth about today’s sophisticated food science is that the original Dietary Goals of 1977 which
initiated it were based not on concrete findings, but on a mere hypothesis.
New research shows that the lipid hypothesis, which associated chronic heart diseases (CHD) with saturated fat
and dairy products, was in fact based on two unconvincing studies. The actual link between dietary cholesterol
and CHD is a thin one indeed.
So why did the Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs produce those guidelines?
The fact is they were under pressure from the food industry, which stood to benefit from the publication of that
advice. Following the US dietary goals meant that people would have to replace certain foods with others. So, as
recommended, they reduced their saturated fat intake, but added processed foods to their plate. The main
message, as people understood it, was “eat more low-fat products.”
Since the 1970s, nutritionism (i.e., food science) has become the dominant approach to food. Low-fat, no-
cholesterol, high-fiber labels started to pop up everywhere. Even simple foods, like mayonnaise and yogurt, which
previously contained just three ingredients were now fortified with a list of new additives to make them more
“nutritious.”
Besides altering certain food products, scientists were able to apply a nutritionist-dietary approach to animals,
which enabled the breeding of leaner cattle and pigs. This meant that even beef and pork could be regarded as
part of a low-fat diet.
Around the same time, one group of foods that could not be altered was neglected: whole foods, such as carrots,
bananas and potatoes.
With the rise of food science, we entered a strange period in which producers could make their products appear
healthy simply by adding “healthy nutrients” to them, while all-natural healthy foods were neglected. After all, it’s
far easier to stick a “healthy” label on a Lucky Charms cereal box than on a carrot!
As this shows, nutritionism might be the best thing to ever happen to the food industry. But is it good for us?
SUMMARY PT 4: SACRIFICING PLEASURE-BASED DIETS FOR

A SCIENTIFIC DIETARY APPROACH HAS NOT HAD ANY
NOTICEABLE EFFECT ON OUR HEALTH.
If you’ve ever stopped eating a favorite food just because you were told it was bad for you, then you’re like most
Americans – a typical victim of nutritionism.
Nutritionism has caused us to sacrifice the pleasure of eating for a more scientific approach to food.
In basic terms, nutritionism tells us what we should eat more of, and what we should avoid. To do your shopping
right, you need to be up on the latest scientific research and learn to decipher increasingly complicated
ingredients labels.
But trying to enjoy food that’s been engineered toward such scientific objectives is futile. That food simply isn’t
created with taste as a priority. In fact, nutritionism has made us think of the most pleasant ingredients of food –
fat, for example – as toxins.
What’s more, to make our food choices more scientific is to rob them of their cultural origins and history. In the
past, our diet was something we learned through our culture and personal taste. But the West tends not to eat this
way anymore.
A saving grace of nutritionism should be that our physical health is improving – yet that’s not the case. Even
though we made the shift from a pleasure-based diet to a more scientific dietary approach, under the pretense
that it would bring better health, the actual results are unconvincing.
For instance, the massive increase of low-fat products on the market has coincided with an astonishing increase
in obesity and diabetes in America. On the advice of nutritionists, we exchange fats for carbohydrates. Yet carbs
interfere with the metabolism in ways that increase our hunger, causing us to overeat.
As for the main goal of nutritionism – a reduction in heart disease – deaths from heart disease have fallen 50
percent since 1969, a fact that low-fat campaigns have as their motto.
However, though such deaths declined significantly, hospital admissions for heart attacks did not. This suggests
that the cause of the decline is not the change in our diet, but an improvement in medical care.
The failings of nutritionism reveal that we’re in need of a new way of thinking about eating. In the following book
summarys, we’ll examine the Western diet and its relation to our generally poor physical health.
SUMMARY PT 5: THE MAIN CAUSE OF OUR POOR HEALTH IS

THE WESTERN DIET.
Both the advice of nutritionists and the practice of modifying food products to increase their nutritional value
distract us from a major cause of poor health in the developed world: the Western diet.
This diet largely consists of processed foods, full of refined sugar and flour. Moreover, it doesn’t include a
sufficient amount of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. In short, the reason for our general poor health isn’t
nutrients – it’s our diet.
Research undertaken around the world has shown that, in general, people who avoid the Western diet also avoid
its associated health risks.
In the 1930s, for example, a dentist named Weston A. Price traveled the world searching for isolated populations
that subsisted solely on a native diet. He discovered that these populations, in places as distinct as the Arctic and
Australia, and with equally different diets, had no need for dental care. Those people who weren’t exposed to
refined flour, sugar and chemical vegetable oils didn’t suffer from chronic diseases or tooth decay.
Furthermore, other studies have shown that when people stop eating the Western diet, their general health
dramatically improves.
In the 1980s, nutrition researcher Kerin O’Dea performed an experiment in which she asked ten Aborigines, who
had migrated several years before to settlements in Australia and adopted a Western diet, to return to their native
lands for seven weeks.
While living in the settlements, the ten men had developed type 2 diabetes, elevated levels of triglycerides (which
cause heart problems) and increased risks of obesity as well as hypertension and heart disease.
But during their time back on the old grounds, the men returned to their native diet: seafood, birds and kangaroo,
and occasionally turtle, crocodile and bush honey. By the end of their stay, all ten had reached a healthy weight,
and lowered both their blood pressure and the risk factors associated with type 2 diabetes.
As this experiment showed, a change in diet, rather than nutrients, could markedly reduce the risks of developing
certain diseases.
SUMMARY PT 6: WE NEED TO START THINKING OF FOOD AS

A RELATIONSHIP, AND HEALTH AS THE PRODUCT OF BEING
IN IT.
As we’ve seen, Weston A. Price reported on the impact of the Western diet around 1939. So why didn’t we listen
to him all those years ago?
The truth is, the food industry has too much power, and for them, Price’s conclusions are just too big a threat.
What Price concluded is that the common factor of people in good health is a diet comprising fresh foods from
animals, and plants from nutrient-rich soils. In other words, the issue of diet and health is one of the relationship
between food and ecology.
Unfortunately, the Western diet is now largely an industrialized process. We know little, if anything, about the
locations or soils from which our food is sourced. Yet it is these very factors that determine a food’s healthiness.
If the soil is deficient (e.g., polluted or lacking minerals), so will be the grass that grows from it, and the cow that
eats the grass, and then the people who drink the milk.
Therefore, we need to start thinking of food not as a thing, but as a relationship between the links of the food
chain.
Physical health is, to some degree, the product of being a part of these relationships. When the health of one link
in the food chain is affected, it can impact all the other links. Thus, the health of the individual can’t be separated
from the health of the whole food network.
SUMMARY PT 7: THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF INDUSTRIAL

AGRICULTURE (FAST PRODUCTION AND LONG
PRESERVATION) HAVE COME AT A HIGH COST.
If we investigate the perspective of food as a relationship, it becomes hard not to notice that the Western diet has
introduced a number of abrupt changes over the last 150 years. One of the most important was the dietary shift
from whole foods (natural) to refined foods (processed).
But what is refined food?
As the food chain has become industrialized, food production has undergone a process of chemical and biological
simplification.
To make food last longer, it’s refined and chemically treated – or, in simple terms, its nutrients are taken away.
And although some nutrients are added, these are just the few that food science recognizes as important.
In order to make longer lasting flour-based products, bran and germ (wheat’s source of nutrients) are removed
when refining flour.
Yet, this simplification of food has introduced a quantity-over-quality approach to a healthy diet. Indeed, studies
show that, today, you’ll have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron provided by one apple in 1940.
The history of refining whole foods has been one of seeking ways to make those foods more durable and
portable, and quicker at releasing their energy. Meanwhile, nutritional content has fallen by the wayside.
People have been refining grains since the Industrial Revolution – for example, to get white flour from wheat.
White flour is finer than whole-wheat flour and has a longer shelf-life. It’s also quicker to turn into glucose – our
preferred brain-fuel.
However, white flour has no nutritional value. So, as its use became more widespread, devastating epidemics of
diseases like pellagra and beriberi followed, caused by deficiencies of the vitamins that the extracted germ
would’ve contributed.
For years, scientists have known that refined carbohydrates increase the risk of developing several chronic
diseases – such as diabetes and heart disease – and that whole grains reduce that risk. But, at this point in our
history, whole grains are not recognized as part of the Western diet.
SUMMARY PT 8: WE NEED TO ESCAPE THE WESTERN DIET

AND RETURN TO A “FOOD CULTURE.”
Before nutritionism, people received their dietary guidance from their cultures. For many people, this responsibility
fell specifically to their mothers, as they were the ones that typically passed on the group’s food habits to children.
And the reason those habits endured was because they tended to keep people healthy.
Yet, the industrialization of food has practically demolished such a food culture, replacing it with ineffective food
science and the unhealthy Western diet.
Instead of looking for alternatives to the Western diet, the food industry has periodically created new theories that
claimed to find the single “problem nutrient” to explain the current failings of the Western diet.
The food industry needs such theories so that it can regularly redesign and repackage processed food products;
with every new theory comes a new line of products. The industry benefits from such theories, as they give them
license to continue to produce processed food.
And it’s not only the food industry that benefits. New theories benefit the health industry too, by giving license to
create new treatments, drugs and procedures to manage diabetes, high-blood pressure and cholesterol. It’s far
more profitable, and a lot easier in general, to have a disease in our culture become part of our lifestyle, than to
radically overhaul the diet of an entire civilization.
Clearly, it’s imperative that we distance ourselves from the Western diet.
A lot of time and energy has been spent on finding the reason that the Western diet doesn’t work. This is how the
general population comes to know about such scientific terms as the lipid hypothesis, refined carbohydrates,
omega-3s and so on.
Yet one thing is clear: people on the Western diet are susceptible to a range of chronic diseases that rarely strike
those on more traditional diets. The solution? Stop eating a Western diet and recover food culture.
Making a clean break with the Western diet doesn’t have to mean embracing nutritionism’s guidance as to which
foods and nutrients to eat or avoid, or how many calories to consume. Instead, it’s about following a simple set of
guidelines for deciding on a meal, or shopping for food, that will result in a more traditional and healthy diet.
SUMMARY PT 9: WHAT TO EAT? 1: CHOOSE NATURAL,

SIMPLE AND UNPRETENTIOUS FOOD.
The next time you’re at the supermarket, doing your weekly food shopping, take a look at what you’ve thrown into
your cart and scan the ingredients of those products. Most likely, you’ll be shocked at the number of food products
you’ve selected that are actually just food-like substitutes.
The problem is that food science has made the task of identifying real food a very complicated one.
What you need are some basic principles to follow, to ensure that you end up with real food in your shopping cart,
and in your stomach.
First, try not to eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t eat.
Remember, we’re trying to go back to our food culture and abandon food science and the Western diet. If your
great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, then it’s probably not food. For example, imagine handing her a
Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tube at the dinner table, and ask yourself, “Would she eat it?”
Second, stay away from products that have more than five ingredients. Food science, in an effort to make
traditional foods more nutritious, is making them more complicated. Yet this doesn’t mean they’re good for you.
Traditionally, bread was made just with flour, yeast, water and salt. Today, however, it’s easy to find breads with
more than 20 ingredients. Following the “five-ingredients-or-less” principle will help you to avoid a lot of highly
processed products.
Third, if a food product makes a health claim, this is a clear sign that you should avoid that product.
Why? Because the majority of these claims depend on questionable and incomplete science. You might recall
that, not so long ago, companies advertised margarine as a healthier alternative to butter – a claim that we now
know is untrue.
Moreover, if corn oil, chips and sugary breakfast cereals are able to brag about being healthy, it’s a sign that
health claims are highly corrupt.
These three simple rules should help you to distinguish real food from the food-like products that manage to pass
for food today.
SUMMARY PT 10: WHAT TO EAT? 2: EAT PLANTS, AS THEY

PROVIDE THE MOST NUTRIENTS FROM THE SOIL, BUT
MAKE SURE THE SOIL IS GOOD.
If you follow the principles laid out in the previous book summary, you’ll be able to distinguish real food from food-
like substitutes and dramatically improve your diet.
However, the truth is that certain whole foods are actually better than others. So, here are two principles to help
you decide which foods should form the foundation of your diet.
First, give priority to plants, especially leaves.
Though scientists may not agree on why plants are such a healthy food, they all agree that eating them is good
for you and certainly won’t hurt you. Particularly healthy are leaves, such as arugula and spinach, whose seeds
have absorbed the soil’s nutrients.
The fact that it’s impossible for humans to live without plants, and that no culture has ever achieved this, should
be reason enough for us to prioritize them. But there are other, more specific reasons, too.
One of the main reasons is that plants provide us with antioxidants that detoxify dangerous chemicals. The more
antioxidants you have in your diet, the more toxins (substances capable of causing disease) you’ll be able to
neutralize.
Prioritizing plants doesn’t necessarily mean cutting out meat from your diet. Even though meat provides just one
vitamin (B12) that can’t be acquired from any other food, there’s no health reason to exclude meat from one’s
diet. Remember, however, that although meat acquires many nutrients due to its place at the top of the food
chain, this means that it also collects many toxins.
The second principle is actually a spin on the old expression, “You are what you eat.” In this context, it is, “You are
what what you eat eats.”
As we’ve seen, the relationship in any food chain is an important one. So, when eating meat, milk or eggs, it’s
crucial that you choose sources that eat more leaves and fewer seeds.
The same logic applies to plants: the better the soil, the better the plants. For that reason, you should avoid high-
fertilized plants that are not organic.
Finally, it’s important to have a diverse diet. Focusing narrowly on a specific food is not conducive to a healthy
balanced diet. The best way to maintain balance in one’s diet is to aim to eat a variety of plants and animals.
SUMMARY PT 11: REMEMBER, EVEN IF YOU FOLLOW A

HEALTHY DIET, YOU SHOULD MAKE SURE YOU DON’T EAT
TOO MUCH.
The focus of nutritionism and food science is so squarely on the chemistry of food that they rarely focus on the
sociology or ecology of eating. As a result, nowadays very few people care about the “eating experience.”
So, if you can afford it, you should pay more for food and eat less of it.
Give priority to quality over quantity, as the better the food, the less you’ll need to satisfy your hunger. So, choose
a worthwhile eating experience over mere functional eating. This means appreciating the taste of your food, and
the atmosphere of a restaurant, rather than aiming to simply consume calories.
Also, eat proper meals and do it at a dining table. People nowadays hardly ever sit down with the sole purpose of
enjoying a meal. Instead, they tend to eat small amounts during the whole day, usually while they’re engaged in
some other task.
This is a shame, since eating a proper meal, especially with friends or family, greatly enhances the food
experience, making it also a cultural and social relationship.
And there’s an added benefit to dining with company: it can also make you eat less and slower, increasing the
chances of you actually enjoying the act of eating.
Finally, cook whenever you have the chance. This is the most straightforward way to abandon the easy and
cheap processed food of the Western diet.
While we tend to consume mostly processed foods, getting into the habit of cooking will help you to eradicate
such products from your diet. It will also extend the experience of eating to the kitchen, where, in preparing your
meal, enticing aromas and sneaky nibbles build excitement and increase your appetite so that you’ll truly
appreciate your meal when it’s finally ready.
As your great grandmother would undoubtedly attest, there’s nothing more traditional than cooking.
IN REVIEW: IN DEFENSE OF FOOD BOOK SUMMARY

The key message in this book:
Although nutritionism’s slogan is to promote health by consuming specific nutrients, it is actually the
main cause of many Western diseases. However, it’s possible to get away from the Western diet with just
three simple steps: eat real food; mostly plants; and not too much.
Suggested further reading: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
We face an overwhelming abundance of choices when it comes to what we eat. Should you opt for the local,
grass-fed beef, or save time and money with cheap chicken nuggets? Organic asparagus shipped from Argentina,
or kale picked from your neighbor’s garden? The Omnivore’s Dilemma examines how food in America is
produced today and what alternatives to those production methods are available.
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Books
04/06/2019 In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Summary - eNotes.com
Synopsis
Following close on the heels of the very successful publishing of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the
release of the movie Food Inc., Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food, is one that attempts to
address, in an even simpler way, the question of what we “should” eat. He examines that question in
depth, trying to navigate through the supermarket, the diet industry, the health food industry, and every
other place where we find and choose food.
The book is not a guide to certain foods that will make you healthy but much more of an examination of
both the philosophy and the science of what food has become in the United States. Pollan takes the
stance that our amazingly complex approach to food and food products is very likely getting us into
more trouble than it is saving us from.
The book grew out of a 2007 article titled “Unhappy Meals,” which was published in the New York
Times Magazine. Like in his other works, Pollan’s description of the issues is thorough and couched in a
great deal of anecdotal and well-researched evidence that help to move along the discussion. He
examines in detail the way that we have constructed an approach to food that he labels “nutritionism,”
an approach that focuses on eating “nutrients” rather than simply food.
Pollan follows the rise of this outlook from its inception to its current state and describes many of the
effects. He describes the low-fat craze (now apparently being debunked) to the craze for fiber. He also
examines the basic idea that we look at food as a compilation of nutrients rather than as something
edible. His basic premise is that we would likely be better off ignoring most (if not all) of food science
and, as he counsels us, simply to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”
Pollan writes that he has given away the entire story in the first line, but again, as he did in Omnivore’s
Dilemma, he continues in great detail and with an intriguing style into what that means and how it goes
from a simple to a very complex question.
The second and third portions of the book are a further examination of how our eating culture became
what it is. Pollan then provides a very straight-forward examination of the ways to escape from the
negative aspects of what he calls “The Western Diet.”
The book has already seen relatively wide commercial and critical success. Published in 2008, it rose to
the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction and stayed at the top for six weeks.
Summary
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04/06/2019
Michael Pollan's In Defense of FoodInstarts
Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Summary - eNotes.com
with a broad sketch of a key social change: how control over
what families ate shifted from cultural factors, such as mothers and traditions, to marketing and the food
industry. The result is that more health claims are made for food than ever before—but people are less
healthy. The goal of In Defense of Food is to analyze the reasons for this seeming paradox. As Pollan
does so, he makes other arguments as well, such as the idea that people should spend less time worrying
about health and food and that the current Western diet makes people sick.
The body of the book is divided into three related sections. Part I, "The Age of Nutritionism," analyzes
the scientific ideology called nutritionism. Part II, "The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization,"
applies the information presented in the first part to widespread issues of public health. In Part III,
"Getting Over Nutritionism," Pollan focuses on the personal level, and he gives specific advice for what
people should and shouldn't eat.
Part I: The Age of Nutritionism
"The Age of Nutritionism" argues that "food" in the purest or most traditional sense has disappeared
from groceries in recent years and is replaced by "nutrients." The roots of this transformation are traced
to nineteenth-century scientists William Prout (who identified protein, carbohydrates, and fat as the core
components of food) and Justus von Liebig (the German chemist who discovered the role of minerals, or
micronutrients). This led to the invention of vitamins and to increasing prestige for nutrition science.
Throughout the twentieth century, scientific understanding of nutrition and health developed new
theories, such as the lipid hypothesis, which argued that increased consumption of fat and cholesterol
were contributing to heart disease. In 1977, nutrition science received a major push from the American
government when a Senate committee tasked with addressing health concerns developed its first dietary
guidelines. These recommended eating less meat and dairy, but under pressure from lobbyists, the
government weakened this recommendation. In part to avoid angering powerful lobbies and in part due
to scientific trends, these guidelines began to speak about nutrients rather than food.
The term nutritionism was created by Gyorgy Scrinis in 2002. It refers to the fact that contemporary
understanding of nutrition is more like an ideology than a science. Its core belief is that the individual
nutrients are the essence of food. Because no one can see nutrients, this belief positions scientists as
essential guides for the daily activity of eating. Like other ideologies, nutritionism divides its world
along black-and-white lines: good nutrients and bad nutrients. However, there is ongoing debate about
which nutrients go in which categories. Nutritionism is very useful for food manufacturers because they
can now hype food as improved and healthier because they have added specific nutrients to it. It also
allowed food manufacturers to finally dispel a labeling law from 1938, which had required any artificial
food to be labeled as "imitation." After all, if nutrients are the essential elements of food, so long as they
are present, they are real. This move removes the older distinction between natural and artificial foods,
opening the door to a flood of newly engineered foods.
In the years since 1977, science, marketing, and regulatory bodies have worked together to create a
golden age of food science. When nutrition fads move through, these disciplines work together to bring
foods containing their qualities, such as low fat or high fiber content, to store shelves. However, few of
the faddish beliefs are based in solid science, even those as well established as the idea that low-fat diets
benefit your health. In fact, during these decades in which America has supposedly been eating a
healthier diet, the American populace has gotten markedly fatter. Nutritionism's tenets have led people
to distrust traditional diets and their own taste buds and have led them to radically misunderstand their
nutritional needs.
Part II: The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization
Part II starts by describing an experiment in Australia in 1982 in which ten Aborigines with various
health issues were taken off a Western diet and lifestyle and returned to their traditional activities and
diet. This seven-week return to tradition helped them lose weight, lowered blood pressure, drastically
lowered signs of diabetes, and in all ways made these people healthier. This supports the idea that
although humans can live on many different diets and stay healthy, the modern Western diet is not one
of them.
Western medicine pours time and energy into curing disease without really acknowledging that in many
cases it is the Western diet (and lifestyle) that causes these diseases. Time and again, when native
peoples adapted civilized diets, chronic and deadly health issues followed. This is true for conditions
ranging from heart disease to dental cavities.
There are several reasons for this. One is that nutrition science treats nutrition in isolation rather than as
part of a larger chain of "ecological relationships." It ignores that people, as animals, eat things as part of
a greater balance and context. A second reason is that the shift from whole foods to refined and
processed foods removes countless nutrients that either go missing or must be added back in. If they are
added back in, they lack the biochemical balance they had in the whole foods. A third reason is that as
the food chain has been industrialized, it has moved "from complexity to simplicity." The soil has a
narrower range of nutrients; our diets contain fewer species and fewer varieties of those. A fourth reason
is that the Western diet emphasizes quantity of food over quality, essentially promoting obesity. A fifth
reason is that of the plants people do eat, they eat more seeds and fewer leaves, which leaves out many
nutrients and unbalances those they do get. Sixth, within intact traditional societies, the human
relationship to food was mediated by culture. As those cultures are disrupted, so is the human
relationship to food.
Part III: Getting Over Nutritionism
This third section of In Defense of Food discusses what individuals can and should do to improve the
health of their bodies, the society, and the planet. The first core suggestion is that one should try to
"escape" the contemporary Western diet. People should eat food rather than nutrients. This means
avoiding any of the new food products: do not eat anything your great-grandmother would not recognize
as food. This means no fast foods, no processed foods, no low-fat or imitation foods, and so forth. Avoid
foods containing multiple food additives or high-fructose corn syrup. Do not eat food that makes special
health claims.
Avoid the center of the supermarket (where more processed foods are shelved) and avoid the
supermarket altogether when you can. Instead, buy food at local farmers' markets, forage for wild food,
grow a garden, and keep a large freezer where you store frozen meats bought and butchered locally. Eat
mostly plants, and pay attention to your food's food chain: avoid factory-raised foods and those raised
with hormones or pesticides. Eat mostly plants and model your eating habits on the Greek, French,
Japanese, or Italian diet. Eat slowly, and eat high-quality foods rather than eating large amounts of cheap
food. Learn how to pay better attention to your internal signals indicating that you're full rather than
using external signals like portion size or an empty plate. Make your meals a social occasion.
A note on characters or historical figures in the work: Given the nature of Pollan's work, there are not
really any characters. The achievements of a few individual scientists are mentioned, such as the English
scientist William Prout (who identified protein, carbohydrates, and fat as the core components of food)
and German Justus von Liebig (one of the founders of biochemistry). However, no one is characterized
as an individual. Instead, Pollan turns his attention on the system and key shaping ideas and ideologies,
such as nutritionism.
04/06/2019 In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Themes - eNotes.com
Themes
Scientific Reductionism
Throughout In Defense of Food, Pollan exposes and critiques scientific reductionism. Pollan argues that
American society has been sold the ideology of nutritionism, which is the idea that when people eat,
what matters are the individual essential nutrients found in the food (macronutrients such as protein, and
micronutrients such as Omega 3). This ideology is the product of scientific reductionism, which is the
scientific method taken to extreme. This approach seeks to determine truth by studying individual
elements in isolation, treating each as a variable in a scientific equation. Such an approach works
admirably well in contexts where the factors can be isolated in such a fashion, Pollan notes, but it does
not work in arenas where the factors cannot be successfully isolated because they are part of a larger
context.
This particularly applies to food for several reasons. First and most simply, nutrition sciences are
strikingly limited. Even scientists working in the field aren’t sure about the effects of individual
nutrients on the human metabolism. Second, outside of the lab, nutrients are not consumed in isolation.
They are consumed as part of complex biological entities: plants, animals, and so forth. Third, in many
cases, nutrients whose function is known do not necessarily function the same way in isolation or in
synthetic forms as they do when consumed as part of plants or animals. Fourth, the nutrient qualities of
those vegetables and meats are changed depending on the context in which they’re grown. Fifth and
finally, people’s eating habits are shaped by many factors beyond science, such as culture and
advertising. Closely related to idea that the science employed by nutrition scientists is more ideology
than science are two other related themes: hubris and bias.
Hubris
Hubris is an overweening pride, a conceit that allows one to overlook the seeds of one’s own downfall in
one’s very actions. Pollan’s critique of contemporary nutrition science shows a discipline distorted by
this very sort of hubris. From relatively humble scientific beginnings early in the nineteenth century to a
complete domination of key government policies and economic and individual decisions about what to
eat, the rise of nutrition science has been nothing short of meteoric. However, a glimpse at the way
theories move in fads through the nutrition world will show just how little this rise is based on actual
science, and the numerous sweeping dictates about what to eat and what to avoid, which are then
followed by equally sweeping reversals, are closer to the mercurial thrashing about practiced by the
Greek gods than to the balanced judgment of a scientific community.
Bias
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The bias Pollan exposes is found both within the nutrition science community and beyond it. Within
nutrition science, the bias is both methodological—the focus on nutrients in isolation—and dogmatic.
Certain conclusions are simply not voiced, and the premise that Western diet is causing the many
diseases troubling Western medicine is close to heresy. The bias outside of nutrition science itself is
easier to understand: it is the bias of vested interests. The first dietary guidelines formulated by the
American government urged people to eat less meat and dairy. However, doing so crossed powerful
agricultural lobbies, so these clear guidelines were reworded to allow for ambiguity. The amounts of
sugar dictated as ideal in the American diet are far higher than that suggested elsewhere, and this is
because of the influence of the sugar lobbies.
These three negative themes running through American society (and Pollan’s book) are balanced by two
positive themes as antidotes: humility and systems thinking.
Humility
People evolved in balance with nature over many generations. What people ate was part of a both an
ecological niche and a cultural context. To reject that as contemporary nutrition scientists and food
marketers do in favor of new foods, improved foods, or invented foods is to act on hubris. One antidote
to hubris is a kind of broad-spectrum humility. Rather than rejecting traditional diets as old fashioned,
Pollan suggests following them. Rather than assuming things created in Western labs and by science are
superior, assume the opposite; things found in nature and grown in the earth are likely to be superior.
Why? Because they’ve been tested over many generations. As humans, we know how to eat them, and
our bodies digest them healthily. Listen to your grandmother, Pollan suggests, and to your planet.
Holistic Thinking
Turning this sort of attentive, respective ear to your heritage will lead your actions to align with the final
theme running through In Defense of Food: holistic thinking. Nutritionism treats nutrients in isolation. It
also treats food items in isolation. As a result, a vitamin is a vitamin, regardless of whether it is created
in the lab or by a plant in nature and regardless of whether it is consumed by itself or in its biological
context (within a naturally occurring food item). Likewise, nutritionism sees an apple as an apple
regardless of the process through which it was grown.
Systems thinking insists on looking at all food items within context. With this approach, nutritional
objects must be evaluated within their larger contexts. These contexts might be organism specific: a
vitamin may have different effects on the body if consumed as part of a plant than in isolation. It may be
digested better, be balanced by other nutrients, and so forth. The context may also be placement within a
food chain. Plants grown through factory farming are nutritionally inferior to those grown naturally. The
context may be an ecological niche: prior to the introduction of the Western diet and modern technology,
people ate foods local to their regions, and they ate a much wider variety of species. The context may be
chronological: in nature plants ripen at specific times, last only limited times, and grow at specific
paces. Taking plants out of these chronological contexts reduces and simplifies their nutritional contents.
Finally, food has a place within human cultures that has been developed over thousands of years. People
have adapted to traditional food processing methods, and their health implications have been worked
out. Within these contexts, food is consumed according to socially generated guidelines. These
expectations guide food consumption, giving it emotional charge and social meaning, and eating food
outside of such contexts leaves people unbalanced, ill nourished, and unhealthy in many arenas of their
beings. Only by treating food, people, and the planet as integrated wholes will people produce a healthy
society.
04/06/2019 In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Critical Essays - eNotes.com
Literary Criticism and Significance
Just as the argument in Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food cuts across a number of disciplines,
touching on nutrition, ecology, science, ideology, health, and culture, so critical responses to it come
from a variety of voices and disciplines. More striking than the range of voices answering Pollan is how
markedly they differ and what these different voices find to praise or take issue with. In fact, the
responses tell us a great deal about who Pollan offends or harms—more about that, in fact, than about
the actual quality of his work.
To begin generally, few books on nutrition science and government regulations get reviewed by
Entertainment Weekly, but this one did: Jennifer Reese found it "witty" and "commonsensical," and had
nothing bad to say about it. The review in Newsweek also praised it and, more usefully, found Pollan's
concerns indicative of a larger cultural shift.
Those working within the nutrition field seem concerned that Pollan will indeed spark such a shift. Mary
Ann Liebert, writing in Obesity Management, praises the book for its writing, the quality of its ideas,
and many of its specific dietary suggestions. However, she takes issue with its tone, which she labels as
"antiresearch, antigovernment, and antibusiness." She also finds his ideas undersupported and lacking
historical context. Finally and interestingly, Liebert locates Pollan on the left, although Pollan himself
does not call for the sort of government intervention that most often defines leftist politics. Ronald
Doering, writing for Food in Canada, labels the book as another "trenchant rant" and says that the book
is "unrelentingly biased and often fatally flawed." Doering's seven years as a food regulator in Canada
leads him to dismiss Pollan's argument about how completely national regulatory bodies have been
manipulated as ill founded. The review for Food Management (a trade journal for the food industry)
referred to the book as a "broadside attack" on current "food culture." It picks out Pollan's argument that
"industrially farmed animals and plants are nutritionally" inferior to those raised by other means as his
most controversial claims, it but doesn't say what flaws his approach might have.
By contrast, those further away from Pollan's target, both geographically and conceptually, seem more at
ease with his work. Reviewing the book for the Australian journal Nutrition & Dietetics, John Coveney
praised the book's style and indicated that some of its recommendations would be useful for many
readers; he also found its history incomplete and its main points not to be new. In a brief review for New
Scientist, Anna Lappe has nothing negative to say about Pollan but instead argues that his work shows
how "pseudo-science" came to rule debates about food and nutrition. Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford
Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, examines the book at greater length for the American
Scientist and is largely positive about it. Shapin praises both Pollan's common sense approach in general
and his debunking of nutritional authorities in particular (although he finds Pollan's methodology
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04/06/2019
inconsistent and self-contradictory,In especially
Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Critical Essays - eNotes.com
at the end of the volume). Rich Heffern, writing for the
National Catholic Reporter, starts his review by addressing the issue of Pollan's potential bias, which he
refers to as a bias in favor of good health, responsibility, and even a spirituality of shopping.
Taken together, these critical responses do not reach a unified conclusion. Instead, they show that food,
rather than being politically neutral, is as charged with politics and ideology as Pollan argues in In
Defense of Food. Take note of the claims of methodological inconsistency and historical
incompleteness, and apply them, but take the charges of bias with a grain of salt. They are lively but,
like Pollan's volume, part of an ideologically charged debate over the nature and place of food in
modern culture.
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04/06/2019 In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Analysis - eNotes.com
In Defense of Food
(LITERARY MASTERPIECES, VOLUME 2)
Since the discovery in the late twentieth century of an American “obesity epidemic,” scientists and
journalists have explored the question of why the United States, one of the most prosperous and well-
educated countries on the planet, should have such a difficult time providing nutritious food for its
people or why its people are not making healthy food choices. Responses to this epidemic, and to the
food industry that many believe fuels it, have included the international Slow Food movement, which
supports small food producers whose work does not harm animals, workers, or the environment, and the
so-called locavore movement, which encourages consumers to eat as much locally grown food as
possible to avoid the damages caused by shipping, packaging, and mass production.
These movements have also produced dozens of books by well-known chefs, journalists, and activists
exploring the question of how to eat responsibly. Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A
Year of Food Life (2007) and Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the
Durable Future (2007) describe their family’s determination to avoid industrially processed food and
instead eat only food that has been produced locally by small farmers and businesses for a year or a
season. Both found that eating this way was at first difficult and time-consuming, but both found new
pleasures in growing and preparing food, working together as a family, and leaving a lighter footprint on
the earth.
Longtime food writer Michael Pollan contributed fascinating information about where the food most
Americans eat comes from in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006). In
that book, Pollan traced common foods back to their sources, focusing on industrially farmed food,
organic food, and food he grew, hunted, and collected himself. He demonstrated that most of the
processed and packaged foods available in a supermarket contain long lists of surprising ingredients
(some form of corn, for example, turns up in almost everything), and that a lot of foods labeled
“organic” or “natural” are also mass-produced industrial products.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a best seller, presented enough unsettling information to make consumers
wonder about the items in their grocery carts, but, as Pollan reports in the introduction to In Defense of
Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, it did not answer the question on many readers’ minds: “Okay, but what
should I eat?” In Defense of Food is a thoroughly researched, nonprescriptive response to that question,
and the answer boils down to seven words that begin the book and appear frequently throughout its
pages: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
To explain what he means by “food”not to be confused with the “other edible foodlike substances in the
supermarkets”Pollan devotes the first two of the book’s three sections to exposing the ideology of “The
Age of Nutritionism” and delineating “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization.” After 1977,
he explains, when federal dietary guidelines first began to describe nutrients instead of food groups,
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food labels began touting supposed nutritional benefits. Claims of “high fiber,” “low cholesterol,” or
“added vitamins” were featured prominently, and consumers came to believe that they could make
healthy food choices by counting one nutrient or another. Today, consumers take for granted that
counting calories or grams of particular kinds of fat, carbohydrates, or protein is the key to healthy
eating, and they have lost sight of food itself. Even when the conventional wisdom about which nutrient
to focus on changes every few years or even every few months, consumers willingly surrender their own
good sense about eating to follow the advice of experts.
There are several things wrong with this approach, as Pollan argues. For one thing, the food experts do
not know as much as they claim to. They observed, for example, that processing wheat into bleached
white flour strips the grain of much of its iron, and they successfully reintroduced iron to create
“enriched” flour. However, what hundreds of other micronutrients are removed with the wheat germ,
and which ones are important to human health? The answer is, no one really knows.
Another problem is that consumers tend to focus on only one or two nutrients at a time, thinking of each
ingredient as good or bad in itself. Someone counting fat grams might buy low-fat cookies and eat an
entire box, ignoring the sugar, processed flour, and other harmful ingredients in those cookies. The
result, as everyone has noticed, is thousands of new cases every year of obesity, diabetes, and heart
disease. To Pollan it seems the more attention the American public pays to trying to eat healthy food, the
sicker people become. In addition, most of the pleasure has been taken out of eating, which used to
bring families and cultures together. Pollan reports that in one study, when people in France were shown
a picture of chocolate cake and asked to comment on it in one word, their most common response was
“celebration”; Americans shown the same picture mostly responded “guilt.”
Pollan lays the blame for the resulting confusion at the feet of three groups: the federal government,
whose shifting food groups and food pyramids promote the ideology of nutritionism; the food industry,
which promotes processed and packaged food that promises to deliver on various health claims; and
journalists, who report without question each new nutritional “discovery,” from oat bran to omega-3
fatty acids. In lucid, often humorous, prose, Pollan describes competing and superseding health claims,
market manipulations by the food industry, and sheeplike behavior on the part of consumers. In these
analyses, Pollan demonstrates one of his great strengths as a writer: the ability to explain complicated
science to a general audience. The way out of the mess Americans find themselves in, he concludes, is
to get back to eating foodtraditional, recognizable, satisfying, pleasurable food.
In “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization,” Pollan describes the typical American diet and
reports on numerous studies linking this diet to so-called Western diseases, including diabetes and
cardiovascular disease. He begins with an anecdote about a group of diabetic urban Australian
Aborigines who returned to their isolated homeland, took up their traditional diet and way of life, and in
only seven weeks dramatically improved their health. Other studies have shown not only that people
who eat traditional diets low in processed foods have lower rates of the Western diseases, but that
greatly reducing the amount of processed food in one’s diet can reverse damage already done. As
Americans have gradually moved from eating whole foods to eating processed and refined “foodlike
substances,” from simple foods to artificial and processed foods with dozens of unpronounceable
ingredients, from small intensely flavored portions eaten slowly to large megameals devoured in the car,
from a large variety of leafy and fruity plants to a few grains, they have sacrificed health for
convenience and economy. As Pollan puts it succinctly, industrial agriculture has driven a change “from
quality to quantity.”
Americans eat more and more calories, sampling a small portion of the seventeen thousand new foods
products brought to market each year, but they derive less and less nourishment from the foods they eat.
While the food industry provides Americans with empty calories and new epidemics, and the nutrition
industry presents a series of conflicting solutions, another industry steps up to the rescue: the medical
industry, with its medications, procedures, and equipment aimed at treating the new diseases.
Pollan achieves a remarkable blend of passion and rationalism in this book; he is persuasive because he
knows how to build a logical case and because he has lived the changes he wants to see. Still, it must be
said that there are passages in the first sections of In Defense of Food that sound just like the books for
which Pollan sees his work as an alternative. All of the popular diet books explain calmly why the books
that came before have missed some essential truth about eating, and they all present a rational
explanation for their own proposals. The smart ones take the time to show how their diet is more natural,
or more traditional, or more like what the Europeans or Japanese eat, and they find a way to make
following their advice seem virtuous, not just vain. Pollan accomplishes all of this and only occasionally
sounds as though he is offering the latest scientific breakthrough diet, a testimony to the clarity of his
vision and the preciseness of his language. In fact, his “Manifesto” aims much higher and much deeper
than that of a diet book, and it nearly always hits its mark.
Having shown persuasively what is wrong with the way Americans eat, Pollan makes several modest
proposals in his third section, “Getting over Nutritionism.” At the heart of the proposals is his seven-
word motto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He revisits the word “food,” offering rules of
thumb to help readers recognize food when they see it. One should not eat anything, he advises, that
would be unknown to one’s great-grandmother; in other words, one should stick to the outer walls of the
grocery store and avoid most of the packaged, processed, enriched, preserved foodlike substances in the
aisles. Even simple foods such as meat and dairy should be avoided if they contain more than five
ingredients or ingredients that the ancestors would not recognize, including the ubiquitous high-fructose
corn syrup.
Pollan advises avoiding foods that contain strange-sounding chemical ingredients, and he lists the few
basic ingredients in the loaf of bread his grandmother would have baked and then the more than thirty-
five ingredients in a loaf of Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread. The contrast is sharp
and persuasive. Next, Pollan offers advice that he admits sounds counterintuitive: “Avoid food products
that make health claims.” The analysis he has already presented in the first two sections of the book
makes his comment that “health claims have become hopelessly corrupt” seem entirely reasonable.
At the end of In Defense of Food, Pollan returns to the ideas that concluded The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Consumers should grow as much of their own food as they can and buy as much of the rest from
farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs). If most of what a person eats
is food (“Eat food”), as Pollan defines it, and portions are reasonable (“Not too much”), then specific
menus should not matter much, as evidenced by the wide variety of traditional diets found in healthy
cultures around the world. For several reasons, including the health of the environment and a desire to
make healthy food available equitably, Pollan encourages readers to eat “mostly plants,” especially leafy
plants. He also advises readers to learn about soils, drink wine, eat the best-quality food they can afford,
cook at homefrom scratchand eat only full meals at a table.
Since the publication of In Defense of Food, Pollan has faced criticism for seeming to ignore the many
people who lack the time and the money to follow his advice, and that criticism is partially fair. He
acknowledges that many Americans eat poorly because sugar and fat have become so inexpensive,
thanks to industrialized food processing and government indifference, but in this book he speaks more to
individual choice than to political action. Pollan is calling for nothing short of a complete overhaul of
the American way of eating, but his manifesto is addressed primarily to those educated and well-off
readers who are already members of the choir.
Bibliography
(LITERARY MASTERPIECES, VOLUME 2)
American Scientist 96, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 243-245.
Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 30.
The Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 2008, p. 14.
Commentary 126, no. 1 (July/August, 2008): 68-73.
Entertainment Weekly, December 21, 2007, p. 87.
Food Management 43, no. 3 (March, 2008): 14.
Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1194.
National Catholic Reporter 44, no. 12 (February 8, 2008): 7a.
The New York Review of Books 55, no. 4 (March 20, 2008): 23-24.
Newsweek 151, no. 4 (January 28, 2008): 48.
Publishers Weekly 254, no. 47 (November 26, 2007): 41.

04/06/2019
The Saturday Evening Post 280, no. In3 Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto Analysis - eNotes.com
(May/June, 2008): 18.
The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 27 (February 2, 2008): W8.

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04/06/2019 In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan Review Summary - ConsciousED

CONSCIOUSED About Top Articles Contribute

BOOK SUMMARY: WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME? FIND OUT WHY

Also in this book summary, you’ll learn:

SUMMARY PT 1: IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WE BEGAN

But when did this shift in focus happen? And why?

SUMMARY PT 2: THE CLAIM THAT NUTRIENTS DETERMINE A

SUMMARY PT 3: BASED ON JUST A HYPOTHESIS, THE

SUMMARY PT 4: SACRIFICING PLEASURE-BASED DIETS FOR

SUMMARY PT 5: THE MAIN CAUSE OF OUR POOR HEALTH IS

SUMMARY PT 6: WE NEED TO START THINKING OF FOOD AS

SUMMARY PT 7: THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF INDUSTRIAL

But what is refined food?

SUMMARY PT 8: WE NEED TO ESCAPE THE WESTERN DIET

SUMMARY PT 9: WHAT TO EAT? 1: CHOOSE NATURAL,

First, try not to eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t eat.

SUMMARY PT 10: WHAT TO EAT? 2: EAT PLANTS, AS THEY

First, give priority to plants, especially leaves.

SUMMARY PT 11: REMEMBER, EVEN IF YOU FOLLOW A

IN REVIEW: IN DEFENSE OF FOOD BOOK SUMMARY

Suggested further reading: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

IF YOU LIKED THIS BOOK SUMMARY, CHECK OUT OUR OTHER

WORK ETHIC VULNERABILITY OVERCOMING

PURPOSE EFFECTIVE ANXIETY MOUSE

HABITS DEPRESSION ON BEING AUTHENTIC

HAPPINESS I HATE MYSELF

Part I: The Age of Nutritionism

Part II: The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization

Part III: Getting Over Nutritionism

Literary Criticism and Significance

American Scientist 96, no. 3 (May/June, 2008): 243-245.

Booklist 104, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2008): 30.

The Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 2008, p. 14.

Commentary 126, no. 1 (July/August, 2008): 68-73.

Entertainment Weekly, December 21, 2007, p. 87.

Food Management 43, no. 3 (March, 2008): 14.

Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 1194.

National Catholic Reporter 44, no. 12 (February 8, 2008): 7a.

Newsweek 151, no. 4 (January 28, 2008): 48.

Publishers Weekly 254, no. 47 (November 26, 2007): 41.

The Wall Street Journal 251, no. 27 (February 2, 2008): W8.

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