Have You Read?: Author submits manifesto about eating healthy

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Jennifer Basye Sander
April 25, 2008

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"In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press, $21.95)

One would hope for a zingier manifesto than this one, which takes many chapters and many pages to get to the "meat" of Pollan's idea that in order to be healthy, we should "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants."

Unlike his best-selling books "The Botany of Desire" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma," both filled with anecdotes to move the reader along and paint a vivid picture, "In Defense of Food" comes with a large helping of the scientific. He has written a good deal about the prevalence (and the health dangers) of high-fructose corn syrup before and serves up that theme again. Pollan also gives much of what can be found in the grocery store today - "an unending stream of foodlike substances" - a very thorough grilling.

Are these foods your great-grandmother would recognize? If not, skip them. His theory is that anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food is filled with all kinds of chemicals and other nonsense that your body doesn't need. Look in the dairy case ... yes, she would recognize a simple yogurt, but she would be baffled by the list of ingredients on a Go-Gurt - portable yogurt in a squeezable tube.

"How did yogurt, which in your great-grandmother's day consisted simply of milk inoculated with a bacterial culture, ever get to be so complicated? Is a product like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a while food? A food of any kind? A food product?"

So, eat food, but only real food. Pollan recommends shopping only on the periphery of the grocery store, where the produce, meat and dairy can be found, and skipping the long aisles of sugary cereals and instant soups. Better yet, stay out of the grocery store altogether and stick to the foods at a farmers market. Your great-grandmother would feel right at home there.

As for his dictum, "Not Too Much," he does admit that this is easier said than done. Stick to eating only meals, and it might be accomplished. He says, "I may be showing my age, but didn't there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between-meal snack? Well, it is gone."

And lastly, "Mostly Plants," is his final piece of advice. Pollan doesn't advocate total vegetarianism, but he does caution that "eating meat in the tremendous quantities that we do (each American now consumes an average of 200 pounds of meat a year) is probably not a good idea ..."

You will be able to eat plants galore when the local growers with the Certified Farmers Market return to South Lake Tahoe on June 3 at the American Legion Hall parking lot.

- Jennifer Basye Sander, co-author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published," offers Write by the Lake retreats at her Al Tahoe home.