Michael Pollan Informs About Healthy Eating
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The Botany of Desire
Omnivore’s Dilemma
In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto
Food Rules
Review by Christa King
You’ve heard him on NPR or seen him on Oprah. Michael Pollan begins his Eater’s Manifesto by saying “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This seems like a simple concept, doesn’t it? His newest book Food Rules had its birth with this concept, which in turn had it’s birth in Omnivore’s Dilemma, which had its birth in The Botany of Desire. All four books are hugely popular with attendees of farmer’s markets and proponents of organic, local and healthy food culture.
Pollan is a journalist and I fell in love with the way his mind works when I read Botany of Desire several years ago. In it, he proposes that plants, not being able to move around much on their own, convinced humans to carry them along. The three plants whose history and culture he examines—potatoes, tulips and marijuana—make use of the human desire for taste, beauty or alternative consciousness to increase their propagation and range. It was the common potato with its horrifying pesticide culture (see Andrew Weil’s 12 Foods You Should Always Buy Organic at www.drweil.com) that led Pollan to investigate the industrialization of our food supply.
The result of that investigation, Omnivore’s Dilemma, deals primarily with the way our food is produced and delivered and what that means to our environment, our spirit, and the economy. In Defense of Food looks at what the things we eat mean to our health. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, it turns out that what is better for our environment is also better for us as individuals.) And finally, Pollan makes simple with the little pocket-sized Food Rules.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t often think of something called a “manifesto” as entertainment. Pollan is preaching, no doubt about it, but he’s so funny, witty, smart and on target, that these books read like…well, like good books. Of course, it helps that I completely agree with him—today, we mostly eat what he calls “edible foodlike substances,” and we ought not to be.
Although he preaches, Pollan doesn’t make a religion of the rules. He encourages you to have all the junk food you want if you cook it yourself. Think of the process to bake and ice a cake for example. How often would you eat cake if you had to cook it every time, rather than stopping by the bakery? Not so much.
The top four killers in our country are “lifestyle diseases.” They’re all related to us being fat and eating things that are bad for us. We can change that one meal at a time by using the Pollan rules. My personal favorites are “It’s not food if it arrives through the window of your car,” and “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
I imagine my great-grandmother walking beside me in the center aisles of the grocery store puzzled by all that stuff in cellophane bags and boxes. What would she think about it? I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t call it food.
If you enjoy these books, you might also like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver and Steven Hopp, Bringing it to the Table by Wendall Berry, and The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.
Michael Pollan, http://www.michaelpollan.com/
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