Michael Pollan's advice on healthful eating is refreshingly straightforward: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Pollan, who has written tomes on food including the best-seller The Omnivore's Dilemma, said he deliberately kept his latest book, In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto, short and simple.
"The deeper I delved into the whole field of nutrition science and the whole issue of what you should eat, the simpler it got," Pollan said in a phone interview from Berkeley, Calif.
"I was able to cut through the underbrush and discover that those seven words say it all. That was a little alarming to my publisher because she was expecting 50- or 60,000 words.
"But it really did come down to eating real food," he said, the kind of unadulterated whole foods, not snacks, that our great grandparents ate. He also found "that there is no good reason to worry excessively about specific nutrients, that you could safely tune out 99 percent of the nutritional advice that was out there, whether it was corporate, governmental or medical. There has been so much noise, so much static about nutrition," he said. "When you look at the science behind some of these nutrient claims, it did not hold up."
That is a part of the speech Pollan is planning to deliver Saturday evening at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Witty and erudite, Pollan is to able to discuss the big issues of food and the environment in an approachable, lively style.
Take Meatless Mondays, for instance. It has been known in academic circles for some time that a meat-based diet requires twice as much energy to produce as a vegetarian diet, said Robert Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The Hopkins center promoted the idea of going meatless one day a week to reduce the burden that food-production practices place on the environment.
But the concept took off after Pollan endorsed it during an appearance on Oprah.
"We were particularly pleased when Michael Pollan recommended to Oprah Winfrey's viewers that to help the environment, they should refrain from eating meat once a week," Lawrence said in an e-mail.
While Pollan's family has adopted the Meatless Monday regime, he acknowledged it has not come without cost. "I have a son who is 16 years old and who craves meat. For him, it is not a meal if an animal has not died to produce it. We struggle to have that meatless day with him."
