Tag: food

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (review: 2.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 7 Comments

in defense of food
By now you’ve probably heard Michael Pollan‘s seven words of advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the book he spends 150 pages talking about nutritionism, reductionist food science, and the negative health effects of the Western diet. In the last 50 pages he finally gets around to expanding just a little bit on those opening words.

If I may do my broken record routine, there are some books that are/would be much better as a long article. This is one—Pollan wrote it a year and a half ago in his New York Times Magazine article Unhappy Meals. Or you can get the gist from Pollan’s entertaining talk at Google. In making an excellent 12-page article 20 times longer, he retreads a lot of the same ground.

One prime example is this bit of repetition, within the space of 2 pages, when he’s writing about farmer’s markets and locally grown produce: “What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality.” And one paragraph later: “When you eat from a farmer’s market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious.” And in the very next paragraph: “Local produce is typically picked ripe and is fresher than supermarket produce, and for those reasons it should be tastier and more nutritious.”

It kills me.

Not to say he’s a bad writer. He isn’t. (I did enjoy The Botany of Desire.) This one comes up a bit thin and repetitive. Maybe he wrote it to turn a buck. Maybe just because he’s fascinated and loves to write about it. Maybe he did it to have good ideas spread even wider and with a longer lifespan (and these are good ideas). But it’s frustrating to read.

On the upside, I like his mention of parking lot science:

“…for a long time cholesterol was the only factor linked to heart disease that we had to the tools to measure. (This is sometimes called parking-lot science, after the legendary fellow who loses his keys in a parking lot and goes looking for them under the streetlight—not because that’s where he lost them but because that’s where it’s easiest to see.)”

And I really liked his suggestion that Wonder Bread “scarcely waits to be chewed before transforming itself into glucose”.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

The Dining with Notebook Manifesto outlines an ingenious way to get a better dining experience, with some effort and preparation:

Because I’m a bit of a food-geek, I always had a notebook to take down my observations in text and drawings. I semi-noticed that the chefs and staff would become aware of my scribbling in the notebook and that the level of dialogue and service would go up – but it never quite surfaced in my mind why this was happening. It was not until one chef finally asked me what magazine I wrote for that the light bulb clicked on – they thought I was a critic. Cool.

The Botany of Desire (review: 3.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 4 Comments

This Sunday I read Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire. The book is a natural history of man and four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. Now that I think of it, this might be the only life-science book I’ve ever for recreation, but there are certainly worse places to begin.
Michael Pollan is not only a writer, but a gardener. Throughout the four sections he draws on history, biography, genetics, economics, biotechnology, and culture at large in a delightfully consilient manner. The high botanical drama of man’s Apollonian quest for order versus his yielding to Dionysian revelry is interwoven with Pollan’s own personal experience.

While it is not a dedicated study of eco-issues, the work is nicely book-ended with thoughts on the man-environment interaction–the plants we domesticate, and the ways we are subtly domesticated in turn. I particularly like the discussion of “wildness” and “wilderness,” and some provoking thoughts on intoxication. I thought the apple section was the most interesting, but Pollan reaches his most filligreed and gushing moments in the chapter on the tulip. The potato section was a bit bland, but perhaps that is to be expected. Overall, the book is an interesting romp.