Pollan's revolutionary cry: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Let's take a journey into the past: think back to your great-grandparents' generation and the foods that would find a home on their table.

If you're background is Mexican, as it is for many Brownsville residents, beans, tortillas, beef, corn, and avocado were likely cooking in your great-grandmother's kitchen.

Your relatives probably ate the majority of their meals together, over conversation, and most of the foods that they enjoyed were unprocessed, bought in bulk, and contained less than six ingredients.

Great-grandmother didn't likely contrive her recipes with a careful eye on folic acid content and grams of protein, but knew intuitively from her parents' kitchen what foods combined well together and what would promote the health of her own family.

In his new book, "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto," Michael Pollan follows up his scathing critique of the industrialization of food in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," with a down-to-earth appraisal of how and why American tables are now filled with all manner of "food-like products," or even absent of food all together, with meals relegated to the solitude of the car, the cubicle, and the couch.

This is not a diet book, a genre of literature that now occupies whole sections of bookstores and libraries. Rather, it is Pollan's deconstruction of what has drawn us away from the nourishing, communal nature of our great-grandmothers' tables, and into a hurricane of food-related Western health problems like obesity, heart disease and cancer.

Using his clear, common sense approach to journalistic inquiry, Pollan asks a few simple questions that demonstrate how bizarre the Western diet has become:

-Since when did the basic question of "what should I eat" get so complicated?

-Why do the healthiest foods in the supermarket, like broccoli and spinach, make no health claims?

-Why is the United States, the country most concerned with healthy eating, the country with the greatest number of food-related health problems?

-And, ultimately, from what or whom do food and eating need defending?

Pollan investigates the science of nutritionism and follows how the deconstruction of foods into their vitamin content has been used to manipulate the American notion of healthy eating.

Pollan contends that just adding Omega 3's to a sugary cereal or eliminating trans-fat from processed food does not make up for all of the complex ways that whole foods work together to deliver true nutrition to the body.

Manipulating our psychological relationship with food by painting some attributes as good and others as evil and creating mass hysteria around entire food groups like fats and carbohydrates, makes it easier for companies to use food science to sell their products.

Many of the examples he points to, like the Atkins diet craze, the belief that margarine was far superior to butter (in fact, we now know that margarine contained trans-fats, responsible for many heart attacks along the way), and the oat-bran trend, are all within recent recollection.

The French paradox - that a society that consumes red wine, foie gras, creamy cheeses, and bread on a regular basis, could be so healthy and slim - has puzzled Americans. Pollan suggests that eating is more than its fat content, but how much of it we consume, how we do it (slowly so we know when we're full, or alone in front of the television without paying attention to its real taste?), and how often.

Pollan warns through dozens of examples, of the dangers of swallowing media reports on scientific nutritional claims. He points out that while one day, a study may show that a low-fat diet promotes a healthy heart, the next a conflicting study could show that it has no effect at all.

In the book's final chapter, Pollan poses a few suggestions for eating food - whole food that is, not food-like products.

Much of this advice is easy to use:

1. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

2. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

3. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. (Most supermarkets have produce, meat and dairy around the periphery and packaged, processed foods in the middle.)

Refreshingly, in posing a new way of eating, Pollan does not demand that readers drop their Big Macs and take after the French, existing on a diet of brie, baguette, and Merlot.

One culture, he says, has never had the tried and true solution to nutrition, but "through a long, incremental process of trial and error, cultures discover what works," creating eating systems that have sustained their people.

"Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally much healthier than people eating a contemporary Western diet. This goes for the Japanese and other Asian diets as well as the traditional diets of Mexico, India, and the Mediterranean region, including France, Italy and Greece."

Though a traditional Mexican diet is easily accessible in the Rio Grande Valley, some of Pollan's other suggestions are difficult to follow outside of either a farming community or large urban center where a local food movement has developed:

1.You are what what you eat eats too.

This one is tough. Pollan discusses the many vitamins and antioxidants that are lost when animals are fed cheap grain instead of grass. He also suggests that a more psychologically nourishing experience can by had by eating the egg of a chicken raised outside on a farm, rather than one with its beak cut off so it doesn't peck out the eyes of one of a thousand other chickens stuffed inside the cages of a massive poultry plant?

But free-range eggs, dairy, and meat are more expensive. Which leads us to his next suggestion:

2.Pay more, eat less.

Yes, it's possible and yes, it's a sacrifice.

In Brownsville, the poorest city of its size in the United States according to the 2006 census, paying more than is required by the rising prices of groceries and eating less probably seem preposterous.

But there are practical applications of this. For example, stop buying and drinking soda, which does nothing for your body, and pay a dollar more when you buy organic milk.

Pollan notes that higher quality foods are more delicious bite for bite, so take more time enjoying the foods you do eat instead of eating lower quality, less nourishing foods more quickly.

"In Defense of Food," suggests that while it would, indeed, be optimal to just stop thinking about food so much and simply get back to basics, the way that food, production, advertising, and our grocery shelves are arranged today, it's downright impossible to eat well without making an effort to avoid processed food and nutrition pseudo-science.

In this sense, reading Pollan's book is profoundly liberating. It unshackles eaters of the manipulation advertisers use to paint foods as sexy or appealing, and allows eaters to appreciate again, or possibly for the first time, the joy of unadulterated whole food.

"To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing," Pollan says. "Indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts."

Eat food, then, and become a revolutionary.