|
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto |  | Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
Buy New: $9.49 ($~13.78 NZD)
as of 9/7/2010 05:16 NZST details
New (100) Used (109) from $6.29 ($~9.13 NZD)
Seller: Amazon.com
Rating:  399 reviews
Sales Rank: 193
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0143114964
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.2
EAN: 9780143114963
Publication Date: April 28, 2009
Shipping: Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780143114963 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
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
The companion volume to The New York Times bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan's lastbook , The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. Pollan proposes a new answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 399
 Okay. But not his best work. September 2, 2010
Jenny Clark
In comparison to his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, this book was somewhat boring. Many things are repeated in this book. Worth reading if you are studying nutrition or America's food system. But, if you had to read one of his books, I would recommend to read The Omnivore's Dilemma over this book.
 Great intro on the Food Industry and "Food Science" August 22, 2010
hac500 (North Hollywood, CA United States)
This is a pretty concise, well organized book covering the biggest problems in our food industry and "food science". It's not a long read at all, and totally informative without being a "do this, do that" type book.
In fact, if anything Pollan is great at letting you figure out the value of what it is you eat and how it effects you and your family.
More than "An Eater's Manifesto" August 15, 2010
Jackson K. Eskew (USA)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I aspire to be a traditional Catholic. Part of this necessarily involves a rejection of today's reigning death cult and its diabolical effluvia: nihilism, relativism, contraception, infanticide, suicidal tolerance, homosexual "marriage," etc. etc.... Alas, this kind of traditionalism is beyond the bounds of our blessed cognoscenti's famous tolerance. Well within its bounds, however - given today's growing neopagan cult of the body - is the embrace of various traditional diets. The promotion of this truncated traditionalism is what Michael Pollan's gospel is all about.
The problem, in part, is the paradoxical totalitarianism of Pollan's traditionalism-lite. If you let it, Pollan's gospel will consume your life. The chaotic echos of your descent into the orthorexic maelstrom will sound like this: Is this sufficiently organic? Was this beef grass-fed? And was it grass-finished? Are these eggs from free-range chickens? Where can I buy wild game? Must I really buy a freezer? How many ingredients are in this food? More than five? Were these vegetables/fruits grown locally? What's sufficiently local? What's the ecological profile of this food? Should I spread this gospel? Should I shun those who don't? And so on.
See, this book is not simply "An Eater's Manifesto." As the word "manifesto" indicates, it's as much about politics as it is about gastronomics. This is clear throughout the book, and Pollan has also made this clear in interviews. For example, in an interview on PBS with Bill Moyers (search Youtube), Pollan says this: "We need a food policy czar in the White House." In other words, as I suspected he would, he implicitly advocates the Oprahist matriarchy of the Nanny State (consisting of many eunuchs, of course). On a related note, it's no accident that throughout this book Pollan gives no credit to fathers for their role in the maintenance of food traditions. He gives all the credit to mothers. This annihilation of the role of fathers is, alas, at the center of today's death cult - this in a book ostensibly promoting life! Much more could be said about all of this.
And it's not simply a political manifesto. Even more, it's a quasi-religious manifesto. Brilliantly, Pollan's soteriology is trinitarian; it boils down to three commandments: 1) Eat food. 2) Not too much. 3) Mostly plants. To the extent that this gospel promotes life in its fullness, as he convincingly argues that it does, I must embrace it. What and how we eat does indeed reflect our view of creation, and traditionalism in its fullness (which is nothing other than traditional Catholicism) recognizes that God got it right. We need not, and should not, appoint industrial food processors as substitute gods. Whole food is God's food.
Incidentally, as Pollan rightly strives to reject scientism (scientism, not science), his rejection of "nutritionism" (the reigning orthodoxy that food can, without loss, be reduced to its constituent elements) makes sense. What doesn't make sense is his simultaneous pervasive, utterly uncritical embrace of the theory of evolution, which is itself rooted in the ideology of scientism. Antidote: Darwin on Trial. An unfashionable suggestion, I know. No matter.
You can see that I'm conflicted about this book. On the one hand, in Part III Pollan offers a variety of excellent and charming rules of thumb to follow in eating. And it's a refreshing rejection of the myth of progress and the rampant chronological snobbery it breeds. Yet my skeptical antennae tell me that this book is - in a world that has largely cut off any sense of the truly transcendent - part of today's desperate push towards a totalizing neopagan, Oprahist agenda in service of the Brave New World. I'll again resist saying more about this, other than to refer you to my Resist the Brave New World guide here on Amazon.
In short, I recommend that you just buy his Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, which is simply a collection of the rules offered in Part III here, along with some others. Following such rules, it seems to me, is a necessary, though insufficient, part of genuine traditionalism. One's adherence to these rules - without their baggage - should be a part, but only a part, of one's ascent to the heights.
Common food sense for the masses. A MUST READ. August 15, 2010
G. Kline (Hoboken, NJ)
The American public has long been a captive audience of food industry corporations. They push onto our grocery store shelves inexpensive food dressed up to dazzle and seduce, all the while telling us it is good for us. The main name of the game is profit. And the clever foods corporations figured out cheaper and faster ways to produce a number of "building block material" they could use to craft all kinds of food products. Most of processed food is comprised of bleached flour, corn syrup, sodium, and hydrogenated oils. The techniques to create them have been heavily optimized so that it is cheap to create enormous quantities. This "stuff" is then used to create all kinds of things like cereals, breads, cookies, chips, snacks, and a myriad of prepared foods. On their own, the food would be mostly lacking in nutrition. So, the food companies dump in all kinds of vitamins and minerals (confirmed by scientists to be essential to our good health) to then lay claim to these things being more nutritious than old fashioned "real" food. The marketing folks tasked to help with selling these products create all kinds of attractive packaging and advertisements to lure us to the purchase. But these products are far from healthy. The inserted vitamins and minerals are not sufficiently absorbed by the human body. And the constituents of the foods consumed create other problems that outweigh any possible nutrition that might be received.
The main problem is that these companies become incredibly rich while America becomes fat and undernourished. And the side effects of this are insidiously slow to realize... it takes many years before the symptoms occur, like the massive chronic illness called diabetes. But, the pharmaceutical industry is more than happy for this to happen, for now THEY get wealthy by creating a continuous supply of the drugs needed to counteract the illnesses spawned by the poor American diet.
Michael Pollan's book goes into useful detail about how all of this happened... how America's diet became hijacked by the massive foods business and sent us on a horrible path to ill health. In the second half of the book, he gets into the basics of how we can rescue ourselves from our bad eating habits. How we can be smart to select "real food" that is really good for us.
You will find that if you follow Pollan's guidelines, you won't need to be constantly chasing after the latest diet craze. You will be healthy and fit, as long as you eat the right foods in concert with regular exercise and sufficient sleep. Don't look for an overnight change. It will be gradual. But you will notice it and hopefully live much longer (and healthier) than you would have if you had continued your previous dieting habits.
Thanks to Michael Pollan for his books that are helping to wake up America. I imagine the foods industries will try to confuse us into thinking they've fixed it all and we've nothing to worry about... but at this point, I wouldn't trust them any longer. Stay away from highly processed foods and they can't bother you. Stick with what nature intended. Don't fear all things processed... a little bit of processing is OK, as long as the ingredients are basic. But try to eat natural foods as much as possible.
 common sense August 15, 2010
Matsuda
Should be required reading for anybody health minded.
Traditional dieting is not the way to go. For survival and to thrive, one must eat wholesome foods that are capable of rotting. It is plain and simple.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 399
|
| UNITED STATES TO NEW ZEALAND SHIPPING |
To estimate the cost of Standard Shipping to NZ from the U.S. enter the quantity of each type of item.
|
Search for this book by ISBN in other catalogues:
Fishpond
inKiwi is a web service provided by Plexus Communications Ltd. inKiwi is an Amazon storefront—the products referenced on this site are manufactured and sold by parties other than Plexus Communications Ltd. Products listed within inKiwi are priced in U.S. Dollars and any purchase completed will be charged in USD, however purely for your shopping convenience alongside the actual USD price the approximate New Zealand Dollar equivalent is listed. Plexus Communications Ltd makes no representations regarding either the products or any information vendors offer about their products. Any questions, complaints, or claims regarding the products must be directed to the appropriate manufacturer or vendor, or to Amazon.com. Plexus Communications Ltd endeavours to keep the information on this site accurate but makes no warranty regarding the content contained herein.
|
|
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
