I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s (http://www.michaelpollan.com) new bestseller, In Defense of Food. It’s a simple, informative guide to eating well which also tells part of the story of how we came to eat so badly in the first place. Pollan wrote the 2005 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which raised awareness about the importance of local foodways.

The culprit in this book is the ideology of “nutritionism”, or the idea that foods are simply collections of nutrients, rather than complex biological systems whose combined effect is greater than the sum of their parts. If you subscribe to the philosophy of nutritionism, then you believe that the richness of whole foods can be replaced with chemical additives which put back the vitamins, macronutrients and micronutrients which have been lost to food processing and overworked soil. More...