Thank. God. For. Michael Pollan. The gospel of common sense is here and, yes, I’m singing (along with everyone else.)
So, maybe you’ve been meaning to pick up the Omnivore’s Dilemma again and finally slog through the rest of the Corn section (and you will be rewarded for that, trust me). Or maybe you’ve seen Food, Inc. or Netflix’ed the PBS version of The Botany of Desire.
Whatever your relationship with the prolific ‘real food’ proponent, here’s an opportunity to snag his newest, shortest book to date: Food Rules: an eater’s manual.
You do have time to read it; I owe three chapters in four days, yet I read the book in its entirety while waiting for the bus and subway in one afternoon’s journey to Park Slope. [Brooklyn wasn’t designed for inter-borough travel.]
My mom read the opening pages after a long travel day, just intending to scope it out, and accidentally read the whole thing that night. She called me the next day and let me know she’s on board with the real food movement, and that she ordered The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a book I’d been chirping about for months, hoping to convince her to read) that morning.
I know what the other half of you are thinking; it’s probably similar to why I didn’t rush out to buy this book when it came out. Go ahead and enter. Even if you’re already “the choir” and you win, nonchalantly pass it along to your most skeptical (or busy) friend or relative. Who knows, you might just end up with a whole lot more to talk about.
He’s funny:
Rule #8: Avoid food products that make health claims. […] Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
He’s right:
Taken together, these rules comprise a kind of choral voice of popular food wisdom. My job has been not to create that wisdom so much as to curate it and vet it. My wager is that that voice has much or more to teach us, and to help us right our relationship to food, than the voices of science and industry and government.
You can’t not stop to think after blazing through this book. To see more about this book, check out the interview with Pollan on the NYT Well blog.
Enter by leaving a comment below by midnight on Sun, August 1 answering this question: What’s a rule of food that you swear by (learned from moms, grandmas, Italians, whomever)? **Don’t forget to leave your email address in the appropriate box on the comment form (or you can’t win because I can’t reach you.)
I’ll start: Salad after the meal means you can eat whatever you please.
Kate