In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

A book defending unfairly persecuted food groups doesn’t exactly leapt out from the shelves, but one with a campaign to end ‘the silence of the yams’, to reject everything you ever believed about nutrition and with three tantalizingly simple rules that will change the way you eat, and turn around major health crises of Western society sure does.

A call to arms in an age of packaged and processed food, ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto’ by Michael Pollan tells us why Western society, with the most advanced scientific and nutritional information available, is still getting fatter and sicker and what we can do about it. The way we eat, he says, is the result of ‘a history of macronutrients at war’ where protein, fat and carbohydrates rotate as ‘demon’ foods.

The development of food science has led to our unhealthy obsession with healthy foods, a condition Pollan calls ‘orthorexia’. This, he says, has resulted in us turning away from natural food and instead relying on ‘edible food like substances’ such as margarines that can lower your cholesterol, omega-3 enriched bread and vitamin water. Health claims on food packaging, he says, ‘should be our first clue that something is anything but healthy’.

‘As a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound "whole-grain goodness" to the rafters.’

So what to do? Luckily Pollan is as much pragmatist as anything else, and lets the facts do the talking before he lays down a few guidelines for his manifesto, which is seven simple words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Tantalizingly simple, no? And this is the solution to the obesity epidemic, soaring rates of heart disease and my own lard? There’s only one way to find out. I will qualify this section for you a little more, because unless you’ve read the book, you’ll be wondering what else you possibly could eat. Shit maybe? No, by food, I mean real food, not the processed crap that’s making big corporations lots of money.

Below are the qualifiers and some explanation to help you on your way. I know it all sounds a bit hippy to begin with, but it all starts to make sense if you join the dots between why you eat like you do, how you feel and what impact it has on society, the environment and your wallet.

How to: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly plants. (Adapted from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto)

• Anything with a health claim – out. You won’t see a lovely ripe tomato or a bunch of bright green bok choy with a 99% fat free label, mainly because they’re less likely to be packaged.

• Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting. Ever seen Super Size Me and those fries from Macca’s? That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.

• In order to eat real food, avoid anything containing ingredients that are (a) unfamiliar, (b) unpronounceable, or (c) more than five in number. They’re all pretty good indicators of a ‘food like substance’.

• Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize. That’s the most recent time when people weren’t all fat and sick, so we’re aiming for the sort of food they were eating then too. If you’re pretty sure your great grandmother wouldn’t know whether to eat a tube of yogurt or apply it to her face, for example, don’t bother.


• If you’re in the supermarket, stick to the edges. All the packaged, preserved and processed stuff is in the shelves in the middle, while the fresh and refrigerated stuff is around the outside. You’re more likely to eat healthily just by avoiding the middle. Interesting, huh?

• As a side note, if possible stay out of the supermarket all together. We have a supreme choice of fresh food markets in Adelaide, so get on down to the Central during the week and the Adelaide Showground Farmers market on the weekend. The Brickwork Markets, Willunga…there’s one near you.

• Remember, you are what you eat, and what you eat eats too. So buy the best free range meat you can, because if your steak was fed crap quality food and antibiotics, you’re eating it too. You’re looking for grass fed beef and true free range chickens.