Those rules seem pretty simple, right?

With yesterday’s entry where I wrote about how I’ve been losing weight (see the weight loss monitor on the bottom right side of the sidebar) I felt compelled to complete this particular entry – which I began writing back in February. But, before I offer just a few comments, I thought that I should provide those seven food rules that Pollan promotes:

1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce, ask yourself, “What are those things doing there?” Pollan says.
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot. “There are exceptions — honey — but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren’t food,” Pollan says.
5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. “Always leave the table a little hungry,” Pollan says. “Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, ‘Tie off the sack before it’s full.'”
6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It’s a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. “Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?” Pollan asks.
7. Don’t buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

While Pollan’s rules seem very simple, some folks might think that they are exceptionally hard to follow. Well, they’re not. In fact, they’re very easy to follow. All you have to do is use your head and think twice before you pick up certain items in the grocery store. For example, don’t pick up something that is made with a ridiculous list of ingredients. Instead, opt for some fresh fruit or vegetables (which have a single, rather obvious ingredient). And stay the hell away from fast food joints. Talk about a combination of chemicals and stuff that isn’t really food!

From my perspective, I like the second rule the best because it leads to so many other great rules/laws for eating healthy. If you shop around the perimeter of most grocery stores, you’ll be confronted with fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, milks and eggs, etc. That’s the kind of stuff that you should be eating! Of course, you should always opt for the organic version of each of these foods – and don’t worry about the additional dollar or so that you’ll spend on the organic foods. You’ll make that money back by buying less food overall and saving on costly medical care for overweight-related conditions (what’s up Type 2 Diabetes?!).

Anyway, I don’t really have many comments on the rules above, but I did want to share them with you. And if you haven’t checked out either The Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food, you should do yourself a favor and get a copy of those books right away!

However, do not interpret that last sentence as a criticism of this book! No, in fact this is one of the best sustainable living/organic food books that I’ve ever read. Pollan is a master at bringing out the larger issues in our food system. In this book, he manages to achieve that success by following the food from its humble beginnings in the field (or on the industrial farm, as it may be) all the way through when we eat it. The book is a really fascinating look at what happens to our meat and produce before it gets to our tables.

But those with queasy stomachs beware. While Pollan doesn’t talk too much about the gore associated with creating the food that we eat, he talks about it enough to allow the reader to infer just what is going on. From chickens getting their throats sliced and drained of their blood to cows being shot directly between the eyes to kill them, this book will tell you about exactly how our ground beef and chicken cutlets come into being before they hit our dinner tables.

But it’s not all dying animals and blood. In fact, Pollan spends a great deal of time talking about the industrial food system and how we’ve changed the base of our diets from a variety of original sources hundreds of years ago (and even decades ago) to a base of corn. Yes, that’s right – corn. Pollan talks about the ways in which corn is broken down into a whole collection of different components and how those components are used to construct any number of new products. One of the facts that I read in this book that has stuck with me is how we now feed our livestock a corn-based diet at industrial farms and how that diet has changed the very meat of these animals. It all makes sense though, right? If you change what you feed animals that you intend to eat, then you are essentially changing what you intend to eat. There is some discussion about our change to a corn-based system leading to the increasing obesity epidemic in America, too.

Combining Pollan’s natural wit and his great storytelling ability, this book presents the type of information that our society needs to know about in order to create a mass change in our diets. If you’re interested in the slow food movement, local organic farming, or any sustainable living topic in general, then I think that you’ll enjoy this book. Use the link above to read more reviews from Barnes and Noble!