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Michael Pollan has been making me think about my food for a long time. Back in 2002, he wrote an article for the New York Times magazine describing his experience of buying a young steer and following it through its entire life -- all the way to a feedlot in western Kansas. There wasn't much in the article that was surprising to me -- I live in Kansas after all, I've helped make sausage, and my father once worked at a meatpacking plant -- until I got to this nugget of information:

Assuming (the steer) continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.

And just like that, I cut way back on my red meat consumption. (I'd cut it out entirely, but damn: I loves me a cheeseburger.) A few months later, I found myself talking to a friend about food. I mentioned that I wasn't eating much beef anymore, and why: The oil factor -- especially as war with Iraq approached -- simply loomed too large in my mind.

My friend paused and gave me a pitying look. "I don't worry about things like that," she told me. "I'm a Christian."

There really wasn't much to say after that. Pollan had, inadvertently, revealed to me that once you start thinking, really thinking about your food, it will expose cultural and political rifts that the average grocery store shopper doesn't -- or doesn't want to -- think much about.

Pollan's story about the steer made its way into his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals -- a work that entertainingly but disturbingly described how the American food chain had become increasingly industrialized since World War II, making the food (and us, the eaters) less healthy over time. This description makes "The Omnivore's Dilemma" sound like homework, but it isn't: Pollan went out and lived the story, hunting boar and living on an organic farm in his attempt to make sense of why, what and how we eat. And the book had a huge impact: Go to any farmer's market on a summer afternoon and you're bound to find at least one shopper carrying Pollan's book in her canvas tote. I've seen a local rancher's face darken mightily when I mentioned "Omnivore" to her. Whatever else he is, Pollan isn't good for the food industry's status quo: You can make a fair case that some of the controversy about the latest farm bill was stirred by Pollan himself.

In Defense of Food

Pollan's newest book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto started out as another of Pollan's NYT articles, this one a sequel of sorts to "Omnivore." He had spent so much energy detailing what was wrong with American food, readers had told him, without offering much advice on how to eat well. The article was great; the morning it appeared in the Times, I ended up reading much of it aloud to my wife as we sat on the couch.

In the book, like the earlier article, Pollan starts out promisingly with three short sentences -- seven words total -- offering this advice to readers:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

"I hate to give the game away right here at the beginning of a whole book devoted to the subject, and I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a couple hundred pages or so." Unfortunately,Pollan gives in to the temptation.

Not that "Defense" is a useless book. On the contrary, it's extremely useful in two respects:

* It introduces a wider audience to the idea of "nutritionism." Pollan explains:

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. ... The widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. Put another way: Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts.

Let me offer another example: A scientist doesn't see a banana; she sees potassium. Nutritionism doesn't let the banana be the banana; it extracts the potassium and puts it in some processed (i.e.: more profitable) product that resembles food, and then puts a label on the package: "Now! Fortified with extra potassium!"

The problem here is that while scientists have identified potassium as a good thing, it might well have overlooked all the other good things in the banana. So the poor schlub eating potassium-fortified Soylent Green(TM) ends up getting only the potassium and, perhaps, a bunch of filler calories: He'd be better off eating the banana -- the real food. Examples of this happening abound in real life: The "scientific" baby formulas of the early postwar period were touted then as offering the best nutrition for infants; it turns out those formulas were dreadfully short of vital nutrients that are found in milk and breast milk. Baby formula has been improved since then, but how do we know scientists got it right this time?

This is where Pollan's book becomes paradoxical -- as he acknowledges. Pollan spends a lot of time using science to explain exactly what early nutrition scientists got wrong, and to explain the continuing limits of science. In tone and in substance, there are times when it sounds similar to the arguments made by "intelligent design" advocates to castigate scientists who teach evolution. That doesn't undermine Pollan's argument, but it is a little jarring at times. It also drags down the book with what feels like filler.

* The shopping rules: The last third of the book offers a list of rules to guide shoppers wanting to eat the best, healthiest possible food.Pollan's advice: Buy fresh vegetables, fruits and leafy plants. Use meat as a side dish instead of the main course. Stay away from processed foods. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Buy locally grown vegetables and meats. And so on and so forth.

But how?

This is good advice. It is also, for many people, expensive advice. And Pollan seems to shrug this off, explaining that we -- and the food industry, ultimately -- will be better off if we spend a little more money and time on our food. That's fine, as far is it goes, but many families simply don't have the option of spending more money to eat well. Are they to be left behind?

The other problem is that the rules, while good, can be intimidating. A friend of mine recently said she'd started making a list of "good" foods and started to despair. My advice to her: Be influenced by the information, but not a slave to it. Buy local where you can, and be judicious about the rest of it. It would've been nice to hear this advice from Pollan.

In the end, though, I was better served by Pollan's New York Times article than by this book. Some ideas don't need 200 pages to explain -- unless, of course, your publisher wants to quickly cash in on the success of an earlier book. And "In Defense of Food" pales, especially, compared to "The Omnivore's Dilemma." In the earlier book,Pollan educated us by sharing his experience of food. Here, he's more of a scold. It's unappetizing.