Book Club

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We had a great time in our 2009 book club reading four great books. So in 2010, we’ll explore and enjoy four more!

The next book of the 2010 Simple Living Book Club is In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan.

Here are the details…

discussion dates:
• May 6 – Part I: The Age of Nutritionism
• May 13 – Part II, 1&2: The Aborigine in All of Us; The Elephant in the Room
• May 20 – Part II, 3: The Industrialization of Eating
• May 27 – Part III, 1&2: Escape from the Western Diet; Eat Food: Food Defined
• June 3 – Part III, 3: Mostly Plants: What to Eat
• June 10 – Part III, 4: Not too Much: How to Eat

description:

“Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

“Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

“But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.”

Club Guidelines:

• Each week, new questions will be posted for the club’s weekly discussion, specific to the previous week’s reading assignment. You can answer questions, start discussions, and reflect with your fellow readers all the next week, and anytime thereafter. The platform for 2010 will be announced soon.

• While a proactive book club will benefit from timely reading, you should never let the schedule keep you from joining the group. Contribute to the discussion wherever you’re at!

In other words, the reading assignments and calendar are set in stone, but you can join in at any time. Discussions about chapter one will remain posted throughout the entire book assignment.

• The Book Club is open to anyone and everyone, though the discussions and application will be geared towards moms, home managers, and women in general.

• All the book club selections are in the Simple Mom Amazon Shop. By purchasing the books through these links (along with any other Amazon purchases), you’ll support this site. This blog being about simple and frugal living, however, I also encourage you to check your local used bookstores and libraries for these titles.

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You can also use this 125×125 pixel button — here’s the code:

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2010 reading selections:

2009 reading selections: