Customer Rating: 
Summary: Beyond eye opening... a must read for food consumers
Comment: What has happened to the food over the past 50 years? Plenty. This book outlines in great detail the
ol'mighty dollar and its influence on our food chain. Food is no longer food.
This
book breaks down in detail what happened (which by the way is never boring) and ways for your family
to eat healthy and partake in REAL FOOD.
The advice is sound. This is something you
need to read. It is time to understand what has happened to FOOD and in a small way, account for the
many alignments we face with modern western diets and the society who eats it.
Customer Rating: Summary: Just Eat Food. Real Food.
Comment: "Don't you want any of this good food?", my Great Aunt Margaret beams at me over the buffet aisle. I
answer, "If any of it were good, I would want it."
It is the 1970's and a new kind of
restaurant came to our rural county: the smorgasbord. Adult eyes widened at the sight of aisles of
food, a melange of red, orange, brown and white gooey side dishes punctuated by varieties of tough
grisly meat. They wonder that I don't want to load my plate as they do. I equally marveled over
their reaction. The food tasted off; powdery when it should be toothsome, salty where it should be
savory, and blandly gelatinous when it should be creamy.
Anything Aung Margaret cooked
was a hell of a lot better than this and now I know the reason behind what even my uneducated seven
year old palate was perceiving. Aunt Margaret's meals were simple, always a meat, potato and
vegetable, cooked simply; but the meat was fresh from the butcher's pack, the potatoes from the bag,
and the vegetables from our garden in summer, or from the can or freezer in winter. At my uncle's
request, Aunt Marg cooked just like his mother did, and his mother was born in the 1890's.
Unknowingly we were living Michael Pollan's dictum to only eat food that our great grandmothers
would recognize as food.
Throughout the work Pollan explores how our Western
understanding of food has been reduced to calories and nutrients, a movement he calls nutritionism.
He asserts that Westerners have forsaken and maligned the social, emotional and sensory aspects of
eating and asked science to dictate our diets. But science has not been successful at curing our
ills and limiting our waistlines through diet due to the inherent reductionism necessary to most
scientific research. Also, so much of the processing of food has brought with it ingredients such
as high fructose corn syrup and hydrongenated vegetable oils, ingredients that are not doing us any
favors.
Pollan cuts through the proliferation of dietary advice based upon managing
various nutrient levels, and calls us to a simpler, more enjoyable approach to food: just eating
food. Real food. Food that you don't have to add water to and stir. Food that doesn't come in a
plastic bubble pack. Food that looks and smells and tastes like what it really it. What could be
better?
If you are a bit of a foodie already, you will be nodding your head in
agreement all through this this book. If you are tired of trying various dietary regimens to no
avail, then this work will set your heart at ease. If you are the impatient sort, skip the chapter
on nutritionism's history and delve right into the guidelines in the final chapters. However you
use this book, it definitely serves up food for thought. Bon Appetit!
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