[Miss Emily]

This book is NOT about Celiac. However, it has a lot of great knowledge and insight into healthy eating and following a healthy lifestyle. I believe it will grealty benefit those of us who suffer from the negative effects of processed food, reactions to preservatives/additives/MSG, digestive upset, etc. Please read and give me your feedback, I found this book at my local library!

Michael Pollan
"In Defense of Food"
http://www.michaelpo...m/indefense.php

Below is an excerpt of the introduction to the publication.

INTRODUCTION
AN EATER’S MANIFESTO

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages or so. I’ll try to resist, but will go ahead and add a few more details to flesh out the recommendations. Like, eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it might be better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to “eat food,” which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication
it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
[…] The introduction to "In Defense of Food" was 16 pages long so I cut out the middle to give you the jist. To download the full PDF version of the introduction, here is the link:
http://www.michaelpo...nse_excerpt.pdf
Most of my suggestions come down to strategies for escaping the Western diet, but before the resurgence of farmers’ markets, the rise of the organic movement, and the renaissance of local agriculture now under way across the country, stepping outside the conventional food system simply was not a realistic option for most people. Now it is. We are entering a postindustrial era of food; for the first time in a generation it is possible to leave behind the Western diet without having also to leave behind civilization. And the more eaters who vote with their forks for a different kind of food, the more commonplace and accessible such food will become. Among other things, this book is an eater’s manifesto, an invitation to join the movement that is renovating our food system in the name of health—health in the very broadest sense of that word. I doubt the last third of this book could have been written forty years ago, if only because there would have been no way to eat the way I propose without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot. There was really only one kind of food on the national menu, and that was whatever industry and nutritionism happened to be serving. Not anymore. Eaters have real choices now, and those choices have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture—all of which, as we will see, are inextricably linked. That anyone should need to write a book advising people to “eat food” could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

Michael Pollan
"In Defense of Food"
http://www.michaelpo...m/indefense.php

[munchkinette]

I just read this while I was in Europe a few weeks ago. At the same time, I was eating some really awesome produce. I realized that even in California, we just don't get very good produce in the grocery stores. I started shopping at farmer's markets and buying more grassfed.

He doesn't have to tell any of us about problems with packaged foods. I think it's a good book for other people though. I've been spending twice as much money on food as my friends for quite a while now. With the changes above that I mentioned, it's really not that much more expensive. Farmer's markets are cheap... the imported out of season produce in the grocery store isn't. I can do without apples for 3 months. I tried a lot of new fruits by doing this.

[OptimisticMom42]

munchkinette, on Jun 30 2009, 09:15 AM, said:

I've been spending twice as much money on food as my friends for quite a while now.

I've been putting my food right on the counter at work so it's easy for me to see when some one brings in that box of doughnuts or pk of dollar store cookies. So my co-workers have been checking the price stickers on my food and commenting on it. Yes, juice costs more than corn syrup. Yes, peanut butter costs more than soy butter. I've started taking the stickers off. They would choke on their cookies if they knew how much I paid for those pretzels!