Now that the season for stuffing ourselves silly is over and we’re coming out of our collective food coma, everyone’s talking (or at least thinking about) going on a diet.Well, everyone except Michael Pollan, that is. In his latest book, In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto, the best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma goes off on the Western diet and tells us why we should go off it, too.Don’t be fooled by this book’s subtitle; “manifesto” doesn’t do it justice. In Defense of Food is an out-and-out assault on the way America eats. Pollan documents how “real” foods”i.e., the unprocessed whole foods that filled our grandparents’ pantries”have been replaced by packaged pseudo-foods full of gobbledy-gook ingredients brought to you by food scientists and Agribiz.Pollan notes that the meat-heavy Western diet inevitably leads to high rates of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes in every culture that adopts it. His conclusion? The only way to achieve a truly varied diet of predominantly plant-based, naturally nutritious foods is to step away from the supermarket. Buy your food from farmers’ markets instead, Pollan advises. Sadly, many Americans lack access to fresh, local, affordable produce, but the number of farmers’ markets around the country is rising every year, and books like this one will only help feed the demand.His other prescriptions for our overweight, undernourished nation? “Pay More, Eat Less” “i.e., choose quality over quantity, and lose the Paul Bunyonesque portions, if you don’t want to look like a lumberjack on steroids. And what’s up with the 24/7 snacking? As Pollan points out, there’s really no mystery to the so-called French paradox”French people just don’t snack, or help themselves to seconds.We, on the other hand, consume soda, chips, cookies and candy all day long, but haven’t got time to prepare a decent meal, much less to sit down and savor it with friends or family. Pollan finds the antidote for this sorry state in the Slow Food movement, which, he says, “offers a coherent protest against, and alternative to, the Western diet and way of eating, indeed to the whole ever-more-desperate Western way of life.” Pollan’s final piece of advice is my favorite: “Cook, And, If You Can, Plant a Garden” “two things that people have been doing for centuries, until World War II came along. Before then, growing your food organically was the norm. But when the war ended, its leftover chemicals and poisons got redeployed as fertilizers and pesticides, and industrial agriculture took over. This method of food production—which totally defies nature, and is destroying our health and our planet—is what’s now known as “conventional.” In fact, though, it’s a terrible aberration from the way we were meant to feed ourselves, and that’s why Pollan advocates a wholesale rejection of the modern American food chain. It’s a radical proposal in a time when “cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.” Pollan’s just the latest agri-culture warrior to call for a return to real foods; In Defense of Food, he admits, is “a work of synthesis, built on a foundation of research and thinking laid by others.” Including, obviously, one of his mentors, NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle. Pollan’s taken her ten word mantra, “eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables,” and reduced it to seven words: “Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.” In this era of ever shorter attention spans, I guess that’s a public service, although he left out the part about exercising. Oh well. If Pollan can persuade more Americans to exercise better judgment about their eating habits, that’s good enough for me: In Defense of Food could transform the way America eats, and not a minute too soon, because we’re ruining our health—and the planet—in the process.