 A Thumbs Up Book Review
Real Food: What to Eat and Why
By Nina Planck
Bloomsbury Publishing
Review by Sally Fallon
It's great to get the Weston A. Price message published by a mainstream press, especially by a talented writer like Nina Planck, one whose background gives her a valuable perspective on food and health. Planck's parents were college-educated activists (her father was a university professor) who then chose to be farmers--Planck grew up working on the family vegetable farm and participating in farmers' markets. She expressed her teenage rebellion by becoming a vegetarian for a few years, which made her very familiar with all the arguments for a plant-based diet, as well as the health problems that ensue.
Much of her book is devoted to debunking the lowfat, vegetarian message. She tackles the notion that meat causes cancer or that farm animals are bad for the environment in her chapter on meat--"Why Even Vegetable Farms Need Animals." Planck endorses what even the grass-fed movement has denigrated--animal fat in the form of marbled beef, bacon and schmaltz. There's more on the virtues of saturated fat in a chapter called "Real Fats," and paeons to butter and cream in a chapter on "Real Dairy." Planck extols the health and economic benefits of raw milk as well.
Planck's love of food and robust optimism shine through every page of this delightful book--of course she enjoys life, she eats plenty of good fat. Egg-white omelets and skinless chicken breasts, those darlings of the dietitians, those icons of food puritanism, get the whacking they deserve--Planck calls them culinary abominations--as do soy, vegetable oils, trans fats, farmed fish and corn syrup. Let's all help her get on the best-seller list by buying a copy.
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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2006.
About the Reviewer
 Sally Fallon Morell is the author of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (with Mary G. Enig, PhD), a well-researched, thought-provoking guide to traditional foods with a startling message: Animal fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels.
She joined forces with Enig again to write Eat Fat, Lose Fat, and has authored numerous articles on the subject of diet and health. Through her New Trends Publishing label, she publishes books on nutrition and health, such as The Fourfold Path to Healing (by Dr. Tom Cowan), Honoring Our Cycles (by Katie Singer), The Untold Story of Milk (by Ron Schmid) and The Whole Soy Story (by Kaayla Daniel). The President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and founder of A Campaign for Real Milk, Sally is also a journalist, chef, nutrition researcher, homemaker, and community activist. Her four healthy children were raised on whole foods including butter, cream, eggs and meat.
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