Food Rules: Pollan for the pool

Seriously, I have got to get this book back to the library. So in the interest of being allowed to check out new material again, I give you my cheap and easy review of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.

Cheap and easy is fitting here. As people who’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, can tell you, his other books on this subject are filled with research and statistics. Food Rules, however, is light: what to eat and how to eat it, all in 64 simple rules. This short paperback is quick entertainment, perfect for reading at the pool, or perhaps at church, if the sermon is boring and you’ve already tried the obvious time killers like searching your conscience or counting floor tiles.

It’s broken into three parts: Part I: What Should I Eat? (Eat food); Part II: What Kind of Food Should I Eat? (Mostly plants); Part III: How Should I Eat? (Not too much). The answers given in parentheses will be familiar to Pollan fans as his three main rules for eating. And in each main part are short sub-rules, each giving a practical hint pertaining to the subject, all in one paragraph each.

Here is an example from each segment:

Part I: What Should I Eat? (Eat food)

• Rule #9: “Avoid food products with the wordoid ‘lite’ or the terms ‘low-fat’ or ‘nonfat’ in their names.” (Note: “wordoid” is not a typo.)

Part II: What Kind of Food Should I Eat? (Mostly plants)

• Rule #22: “Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.”

Part III: How Should I Eat? (Not too much)

• Rule #61:”Leave something on your plate.”

As you can see, this isn’t rocket science. In fact, what Pollan has been saying all along is that making food too complicated is what got us into this mess, so it makes sense that the principles outlined here are ridiculously simple.

I read this book in under an hour, all during a single tennis lesson. (Not my lesson. It’s not that light.) It’s an interesting and non-taxing read, but I’d recommend borrowing it from the library before deciding to buy it, just in case it’s not the kind of book you’d want to read more than once.

Note: This post is riddled with Amazon affiliate links. That means if you click on a link and make a purchase at Amazon, I will receive a percentage of the purchase price. My writing is in no way affected by this. If it were, I would write a whole lot better. Thanks for your time.

Tags: An Eater's Manual, Book review, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma