“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” These are the opening lines of Michael Pollan’s newest book, In Defense of Food. During the introduction of the book, Pollen displays his disgust with the way our current society consumes food. He believes our society has broken away from its traditional eating habits of home cooked meals, made from such things as homegrown garden vegetables, and transformed into a society whose diet is made up of processed garbage and imitations of the real foods that we used to enjoy.

I would have to agree with Michael Pollan when he says that we are breaking away from the aspects of homegrown foods and homemade meals. Take a second to think. What was the last thing you ate? My guess is that it wasn’t something grown out of a garden, or even something that could be put together from the outer aisles of the grocery store. Our current society thrives on fast food and other foods that we can grab and eat on the go, creating a much more unhealthy population than ever.

Next we have the dilemma of nutrients. In our current age of food engineering, scientists can transform the foods we once knew into imitations with the same nutritional values as the real deal. However, as proved by the margarine, the imitation for butter using partially-hydrogenated oils, these processed foods are often far more unhealthy in the long run than their in their natural form. Sally Fallon also discusses these problems in her article “Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry,” helping us to further understand why we need to change.

To undo the damage we have caused ourselves, Pollan believes that we must go back to our old ways of growing our own real, unprocessed food, free of all of these new nutrient additives, or our population as a whole is going to suffer physical and health consequences far worse than it has ever seen.