Michael Pollan will visit Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Oakley at 1 p.m. Saturday to discuss and sign In Defense of Food, his "sequel" to the best-selling The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Did you ever get the feeling that it's hard to keep up with nutrition science? That what's healthy yesterday is bad for us today? Well, Pollan basically tells us the nutrition emperor has no clothes ... the whole premise that we can consider foods as merely bundles of nutrients is just plain wrong, and has contributed to the obesity epidemic. And, by the way, they DO keep getting it wrong -- it's not your imagination.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is one of many books that helped spur the "eat-local" movement. I can only hope that eat local is truly taking off everywhere, because there is such a backlash against it. Can the Doughboy (and his big friends) be getting nervous? Isn't that a perfectly wonderful thing?
Pollan's defense of food recommends what most of us know, even if we don't always walk the walk -- shop the outside of the supermarket (or, preferably, farmers' market) and don't bother with the highly processed stuff in the middle of the store. More veggies and fruits, some dairy and meat, but forget the granola bars, low-fat cookies, meals-in-a-box, etc. I'm still working my way through the book, but I must say it's a delight to see lots of industry-sponsored food research get so thoroughly body-slammed, trounced, and stomped on.
1 comments:
I really enjoyed Omnivore's Dilemma, and I'm looking forward to reading In Defense of Food. I've been trying to eat more real food. I've been going through my pantry trying to figure out how many items with barcodes I could replace with homemade substitutes or with items from the farmers' markets.
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