If there’s anything I hate more than a diet book, it’s a LONG diet book. Let’s also distinguish a diet, a short-term plan to lose weight, from Diet, the way you eat every day, forever. I have no interest in the former, but a lot of time for the latter.
All that said, Michael Pollan penned this little book “Food Rules” in 2009, after his “Omnivore’s Dilemma” got everyone talking about what actually made the most sense to eat, not that humanity has ever stopped talking about exactly that. “Food Rules” is a short, sweet, practical guide, not so much a work of prose but a collection of aphorisms.
For example:
Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature. Read the ingredients on a package of Twinkies or Pringles and imagine what those ingredients actually look like raw or in the places where they grow: You can’t do it. This rule will keep all sorts of chemicals and foodlike substances out of your diet.
Food Rules, p31
As you read, all of Pollan’s dicta will seem just like common sense to you, but then we all know that common sense is an oxymoron. There is nothing common about good sense. And this book is one you might need to have, if only as a refresher course on the basics, a modest come-to-Jesus about the things you decide to eat.
I got my copy out of a box of books with a big ‘FREE’ sign stuck on the front, but you can get yours here for a song, or here for slightly more. Mine was a fortuitous find, just because I was rapidly approaching my personal event horizon when it appeared.
