Michael Pollen, the wildly popular food activist and award winning author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, spoke and read from his slim new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual at the Barnes and Noble in Tribeca. His talk was filmed for a future segment on Democracy Now!, a collaborative media website you can visit here.
Being a remarkably short book for Pollan, Food Rules is his attempt to cut to the chase and simplify many of the complex ideas surrounding food and nutrition.
His book identifies 64 rules, each with a paragraph long description, divided into into three sections that reinforce his concise food manifesto: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.
Three of the 64 rules are:
• Don’t buy food advertised on TV.
• Eat food made by humans, not corporations.
• Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
Pollan also focuses on 3 simple facts:
- Populations eating a Western diet develop chronic diseases.
- Traditional diets around the world producing healthy populations are very diverse in nature.
- Getting off of a Western diet will improve your health.
To explain his second fact, Pollan cited the Inuit in Greenland who eat a high fat diet of seal blubber. Africa’s Maasai eat a high protein diet of blood, meat, and milk. Central America’s indigenous groups eat a high carbohydrate diet consisting of corn. All three of these traditional diets fail to produce the epidemic rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes which plague Western populations.
Pollan concluded with a powerful statement that culture has as much to teach us about nutrition as science. And by culture, Pollan was referring to the food ways of your grandmother.
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