Pollan’s beef is mainly with the scientists, food marketers, and government (and all of the sketchy, mutually beneficial alliances they’ve formed) who have, over the past several decades, usurped authority over the dinner menu from “mom,” or in other words, the medley of cultural traditions that have guided us for much of human history. He attacks the “edible foodlike products” that feed so many of us (and, infuriatingly, plaster themselves with health claims), as well as the great triumvirate that spawned them—and dictated American nutrition for the past hundred years—the food industry, nutrition science, and journalism.

To help readers rediscover health and happiness as eaters, Pollan then offers up his eloquent defense of eating—not just the ingestion of simple (or complicated) calories, but the whole gamut of cultural practices and reasons to eat other than survival: pleasure, community, our relationship to the natural world, identity, and then some. “Nutritionism,” the word Pollan gives to the ideology that has convinced us that what nourishes us can be quantified into submission, “prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place.”

Ultimately, Pollan looks to history, culture and tradition to teach us about food. He applauds the resurgence of farmers’ markets, the organic movement, and the country-wide celebration of local agriculture currently underway. And he does it in such a subtle, masterly way that we never notice his own sneaky agenda: the propagation of that movement. It couldn’t pray for a better mouthpiece.