Food Rules, an Eater’s Manual, by Michael Pollan, Penguin Group, 2009, 139 pages.
Michael Pollan has long been captivating and upsetting those who eat. He entertained us with the historical evolution of four major crops in the Botany of Desire. He provoked and disturbed us in The Omnivores Dilemma, telling us that much of what we eat is bad for the environment and bad for the body. He also contributed to the documentary, Food Inc. (Coming to PBS in April) which chronicles the environmental and health pitfalls of the extensive factory farm. Pollan began to answer readers questions about what the heck can we eat with another James Beard Award winner: In Defense of Food.
In Food Rules, readers experience another historical evolution. What’s the bottom line in terms of healthy eating? You won’t find extensive facts, statistics, or pleas for the environment. This book is for those who have already decided to make a change. Here’s a blue print for exiting the Western Diet, which supports the Western epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. These 64 rules with concise explanations could help you to live a longer and healthier life, while living a little lighter on the land.
Pollan divides the rules into three sections. In the first section “Eat food.” We are given a set of rules that point us back to real food. Some of this advice is counterintuitive to the food rules of the modern grocery store, “eat food that would eventually rot.” Forget all the hype; “don’t take the silence of the yams” as a sign that it has less to offer you than the convenience product pushed at you on billboards, commercials, and the middle shelves of grocery stores. In the second section we are given more specifics about what to eat. This advice often harkens back to old values, sometimes as far back as Chinese proverbs “Eating what stands on one leg (mushrooms and plant foods) is better than eating what stands on two legs (fowl), which is better than eating what stands of four legs (mammals.) Some of the simple advice is fun—don’t eat cereal that changes the color of your milk. By the third section, we are given advice that tells us that how we should eat. We shouldn’t eat too much, and his simple advice tries to give you rules to make this easier. By the time we get to the final section, perhaps the reader has learned that nutritious food won’t leave us so empty that we can’t seem to get enough.
Amy Lou Jenkins is the author of Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting
"If you combined the lyricism of Annie Dillard, the vision of Aldo Leopold, and the gentle but tough-minded optimism of Frank McCourt, you might come close to Amy Lou Jenkins...I, for one, would follow her anywhere."—Tom Bissell author of The Father of All Things
"Jenkins' polished literary style makes it, sentence by sentence, a joy to read." - Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront
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