Seven Rules for Eating
While I'm certainly no saint when it comes to my eating habits, I've started to take more care about my diet in recent years. The food activist Michael Pollan has been quite influential in my thinking. His new book suggests basing your eating around seven basic rules: 1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the edges of the store.
4. Eat slowly and try to leave the table a little bit hungry.
5. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
6. Enjoy meals with other people rather than eating alone.
7. Don't buy food where you fill up your cars with gas.
Your thoughts?
posted by The Blue Devil @ 11:43 AM
5 Comments:
One of my grandmothers brought a suitcase full of cans of tuna fish and deviled ham when she visited us in Italy, and the other ate mostly chocolate cupcakes washed down with bourbon. Rule one is out.
As for rule 2, even if I leave out the rat from my ratatouille, I'm still way over 5 ingredients. And so-long Bolagnese sauce. And my chili-lime-marinated barbeque chicken. Nope, stuff rule 2 too.
Fair points about the grannies. I think that Pollan is mainly pointing to the profusion of processed foods that clutter our supermarkets, especially those middle aisles (see Rule #3). I don't think that he meant that you can't cook - if fact, he encourages people to cook more at home, eat out and take out less. Thus I reckon that your ratarouille (with not so much rat in it), pasta sauces and chili-lime chicken are all in. Twinkies, Xtreme Cheetos, Baconaisse and Jimmy Dean blueberry pancake wrapped sausages on a stick are most definitely out.
He's after my Trader Joe's chicken-pot-pies? Oh-no-he-didn't!!!
I think my wife saw this information on a TV Show.Supposedly longevity will result. My wife said I will live to be 100 if I follow all these rules. I admit to having several violations. Bad habits are hard to break.
I just finished Mark Bittman's "Food Matters". Heavily influenced by Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (which I just started) but it includes some great recipes and a very no-nonsense approach to eating. I've adapted a few of his ideas to our regular eating and have already started to see some results.
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