In Defense Of Food

Appearing later this week in lieu of the weekly restaurant review:

This space is usually devoted to appraising the kinds of food that we eat pretty much every day, served by people who devote their lives and livelihoods to its preparation. Rarely do I delve into the nitty-gritty of America’s relationship with food. It’s a complex subject, easy to ignore in the face of so many damn fine things to eat.

In some ways, 2006’s Omnivore’s Dilemma — arguably the best food book of the decade — changed all of that, at least for me. In Omnivore, author Michael Pollan broadly set the scene for dietary self-examination, detailing the history of our unhealthy relationship with corn and soy and lamenting the distance (both physical and psychological) between our plates and the sources of our food. In the process, he fleetingly raises a couple of troublesome questions: Why do we eat what we eat? And, perhaps more important: What should we eat?

In Defense of Food, Pollan’s latest book, is his answer.

This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.