Title: Food Rules, an eater’s manual
Author: Michael Pollan with illustrations by Maira Kallman
Publisher: Penguin Group
Michael Pollan released the first edition of Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual in 2009 and it became a bestseller, initiating a national dialogue about America’s notoriously poor food choices. The 2011 edition features a new introduction and a handful of additional rules, some of which were provided by readers, and beautiful illustrations by renowned artist Maira Kalman.
In Food Rules, Pollan suggests that instead of listening to the latest, always-changing nutritional advice from government agencies and web MD’s, we might be better off listening to the food wisdom passed down to us through the generations. After all, that colloquial wisdom kept the human race alive for thousands of years.
But why do we need rules to eat by? Because we’ve clearly lost our sense of what constitutes real food. Obesity and heart disease are conditions we’ve mostly eaten ourselves into and with some guidelines and self-discipline, we might be able to reverse these epidemics. Pollan hopes that some of these rules will become “sticky” in readers’ minds, so when you’re faced with that dazzling array of frozen entrees in the supermarket, you remember:
Food Rule #57: If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry,
…and opt for the produce aisle instead.
As consumers, we’re barraged with food marketing messages all day: billboards, radio, television, magazines, newspapers, online ads, web streams, mobile devices. Intended to influence our food choices, they certainly succeed. Americans have not only veered away from eating fresh and local, but we eat our meals in our cars, at our desks, waiting for trains, on the couch, in front of a screen, when we’re bored, and when we’re anxious, and we do it as fast as we can.
We have come to view food simply as a utilitarian device, like putting gas in the car, instead of gathering around a table, sharing the day’s events with our family or friends and savoring our meals, prepared in our own kitchens. Speed eating is pointed to as a major culprit in the obesity epidemic, as we reach for high sugar and starch “food products” to find quick satiety and eat so fast that the “full” message from our stomachs doesn’t reach our brains before we’ve stuffed ourselves like a Christmas goose.
Food Rule #55: Stop eating before you’re full
In Food Rules, Pollan suggests that we spend more time in the kitchen preparing meals and that we start a garden. He says that when we prepare our meals personally or grow our fruits, grains, and vegetables from seed to harvest, we develop a deeper connection with our food and an appreciation of how much work is required to grow it and prepare it before it lands on our plate. The result is that we actually eat less of it.
For instance, he says, fried chicken used to be a meal served only for special occasions, because it involved so much effort: quartering the chicken; seasoning the chicken; dredging the chicken in flour; frying it; and preparing the biscuits, gravy, and greens. It was a meal meant to be shared with family, fussed over, and thoroughly enjoyed. Now fried chicken comes in a box from any number of fast food franchises. The qualities that made it special have been completely wrung out of it. As a result, this high fat, calorie-dense meal which used to be eaten infrequently is consumed anytime, day or night, special occasion or no. As a result, our bodies pack on the calories which our sedentary lifestyle can’t shed.
Food Rule #22: It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car
If we develop an appreciation for what we put in our bodies, we’ll make better food choices-ones that don’t involve drive-up windows.
This food-anytime-I-want-it culture is a sudden (in evolutionary terms), paradigm shift in the way our bodies evolved to digest food and store calories, and it places Americans on a steep health decline. Food Rules is an attempt to re-align that paradigm with common sense.
(FTC Disclosure: book purchased for review)