In Defence of Food (Penguin Books)

Michael Pollan's "In Defence of Food" is a simple invitation to junk the science, ditch the diet and instead rediscover the joys of eating well. This book is a celebration of food. By food, Michael Pollan means real, proper, simple food - not the kind that comes in a packet, or has lists of unpronounceable ingredients, or that makes nutritional claims about how healthy it is.

More like the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize. By following a few pieces of advice (Eat at a table - a desk doesn't count. Don't buy food where you'd buy your petrol!), you will enrich your life and your palate, and enlarge your sense of what it means to be healthy and happy.

It's time to fall in love with food again. "Brings home the real wonder of eating food". ("Sunday Times"). "Instantly makes redundant all diet books and 99 per cent of discussions around healthy eating...Sense, at last".

("Daily Mail"). "Pollan invites us to grab our pots and pans and cook some real food for dinner". ("Time Out"). "Read this witty book for a healthier life and diet". ("The Times").

"Eminently sensible". (Fay Maschler, "Keynote"). "A must-read...satisfying, rich...loaded with flavour".("Sunday Telegraph"). For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture.

His most recent book, about the ethics and ecology of eating, is "The Omnivore's Dilemma", named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post".

He is also the author of "The Botany of Desire", "A Place of My Own" and "Second Nature".