Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan

Sometimes, you need some ground rules, sometimes simple ideas need to be spelled-out orderly and succinctly for one to take notice. Learning how to eat again is no different.

Author of the bestseller, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it's distilled version, In Defense of Food, Pollan has further refined his arguments and crusade for mindful food into a slim, 140-page list of sixty-four rules to keep as a pocket guide for your meals, or a conscience sitting on your shoulder as you devour another can of Pringles.

A writer who had been most likely at the forefront of the "slow food" ethos which has begun to arise in recent years, Pollan has been a guru of sorts to a small group of Americans who have seen food, eating, and cuisine move farther and farther from its natural purposes of (1) nourishment and (2) enjoyment. In fact, much of the thesis of the earlier Omnivore's Dilemma is "why do we eat?" from which the reader begins to consider what foods are "worth" eating. I realize that the last sentence sounds a bit condescending, but the emphasis of the books is more of the nature where food is approached as an experience, rather than a necessity-- something to be enjoyed rather than simply done.

(in addition to those mentioned above, the 2001 Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World is worth picking up)

As for the text itself, I was reminded of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu in the simplicity and straightforwardness of its advice: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. All of the text (as well as the other two above) can be boiled down to those three simple directions. The rules themselves in Food Rules are elaborations on each of these points, often just as simple (avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients; pay more, eat less; spend as much time enjoying a meal as it took to prepare it), which in fact, need little explanation in of themselves.

The spare "directions" for selecting what you eat, how you eat, and why you eat it are koan-like in their nature, as they were meant to be something you can mutter to yourself in the kitchen, rather than ideological advice to be preached. Often, the reader's great-grandmother is invoked, as a ghost born over a century ago clucking over your shoulder about whether or not you need that second cookie, or asking why you didn't eat your vegetables, or simply being uncertain as to what Pop Tarts are and how they should be eaten. Like the manner in which the advice is given, the advice itself is simple in that it asks for simplicity-- would anyone be able to recognize GoGurt or Squeez Bacon or this thing as a food in 1910?

By this point, my review has likely not been longer than the book itself. Brevity is an art in writing when it is well-done; read this book because for no other reason that you can do it in an hour. For a time-to-read/quality-of-material quantification, Food Rules is well-worth your investment (not to mention that I also bought the book for about $7 too).

You get out of life exactly what you put into it; your dinner plate is no different.

Ranting-- Good for the soul

Good Monday, everyone!

It's an awfully hard thing to manage to find time for independent reading, but if you get the chance, I would recommend The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It's a sinclaireqsue journey to the source of the American meal. No sausage-factories per se, but it is an exploration of our society's natural propensity for abundance, and how a nation of poor in the land of plenty eventually got exactly what they wanted-- everything.
If you have spoken tome personally at some point in the last couple of years, the odds are good that you have heard at least one diatribe on the evils of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This chemical, derived from the nutrient-rich portion of a zea mays seed (corn kernel) has found its way into just about everything most Americans eat. It is added as a sweetener, as a replacement for imported sugar by all-American midwest-grown, agricorporate-owned formerly prairie farmland. In our world, there is an eternal web of interconnectedness (i.e., I could go into a rant about the abusive power of the agribusiness lobby, but I think that would distract me from... whatever it is that I'm talking about), but in the United States, HFCS is cheap, plentiful, and artificial.
"So what if it's synthetic, Phil?"
HFCS is just the most well-known example. Looking at the back of most foods, we are familiar with the laboratory-eqsue terms such as "xantham gum," "lecithan", and others. At the heart of this matter, is that most of these are derived from corn. That's just the vegetarian-friendly fare.
Chickens eat corn. Duh. That's what they do. They're chickens. Their job is to eat things they find on the ground (corn, bugs, crap) and eat it. Later, their job is to lay a few eggs and eventually populate the stir-fry I'm planning for tomorrow night. But, we as a people are the red-meat loving, leather-wearing cowboys who like beef, which like anything else is good in moderation. Bovines, however, are ruminants, in that they are evolutionarily geared to eat grass and have a lovely symbiotic team with this undigestible-by-humans plant. But as corn is cheap & plentiful, factory cows (yes, I'll use factory, long ago, they stopped being animals and started being raw material to process) are fed only a slurry of corn/pharmaceutical-derived... something for a few brief, miserable weeks in their accelerated lives from calf-to-steak.
There is much, much more in Pollan's book, but this overdependence on maise worries me deeply. The Aztecs, who were the original cultivators of this tropical grass, literally worshiped corn as the source of all life-- they had no illusions that they were anything other than "corn people" in their own words. Yet it's this monoculture as the basis of our society's food system strikes me as highly unstable. An over-reliance on anything is dangerous; I will admittedly say that I don't know all that much about biology or agriculture, but I have a disturbing feeling that we are setting ourselves up for a Malthusian- like catastrophe in the event of a crop-collapse.
This is the sort of thing that makes me begin to consider some of the back-to-the-land movements in the '70s with some sort of quasi-utopian fantasy of a self-sustaining community up in the Green Mountains. I am often concerned about the state of the world. Or, specifically, how long we can keep going at the pace which we are. Often, I have faith that some sort of balancing forces will ultimately keep things in check, but it is likely that a proper solution would be a worldwide motion toward a sustainable planet. We certainly have enough to support everyone, but there needs to be a concerted leadership, a greater sense of unity. Goodness knows that the knowhow and funding and technology and will is out there, but so rarely do these things come together for a truly great cause. But hasn't things like this been the bane of humanity since the dawn of civilization? Are there real solutions? Or should we all just withdraw into our Ron Paul-wannabe enclaves and simply not interact with our neighbors?
To be lazy, we need a deus ex machina.
To be hopeful, we need tomorrow