Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach - what he calls nutritionism - and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.īut if real food - the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food - stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” - no longer the products of nature but of food science. So why should anyone need to defend it?īecause most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it - in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone - is not really eating. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it.

In defense of food an eater's manifesto