In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan builds an entire manifesto on seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. His argument is that the Western obsession with individual nutrients — driven by food science and industrial processing — has replaced real food with engineered substitutes and made us less healthy in the process. The critique of nutritionism is well-researched, the prose is clear and sharp, and the central thesis is genuinely memorable and repeatable. It debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction list and became a PBS documentary. The honest limits: some nutritionists dispute the broad critique of nutrition science, and the advice to spend more on quality food is not equally accessible to all readers. But as a framework for thinking about what and how we eat, it remains one of the most useful books of the past two decades.