Recreation

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan has produced five books but it is the last two, In defence of food: an eater's manifesto and The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals, that have taken him up into the higher reaches of bestseller lists around the globe. His books take us back to the old 'you are what you eat' argument and it seems Americans have become very much what they eat. No surprises here as we've been told a lot of this before but Pollan manages to take a sharp and individual slant on the food industry. He believes that “nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of food. And it's not a science. It is an ideology. And like most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that we're totally unaware of.”

His twelve commandments for serious eaters may sound comical but they are as good as you'll get and hopefully after his session a few people may go away and think carefully about their next meal.