For the past twenty years, journalist Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect. He focuses on such interesting areas as food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. Other award-winning bestsellers by Pollan, such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, argued a new understanding of our relationships with food.

Pollan’s latest work, In Defence of Food covers huge ground and takes issue with the modern, industrial characterization of food as largely a batch of chemicals, nutrients, vitamins and proteins.

According to Pollan, “modern nutritionism has led to a hell of a lot of confusion. A modern dietary irony is that the more that food industry sells us on nutrition, the less society seems to be able to understand eating healthy. The modern prevalence of obesity, heart disease, cancers and diabetes seems to confirm this.”

So what’s the savvy solution? It’s actually easy - eat the things your great-grandmother would have! In Pollan’s words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”