Farmbrarian

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Michael Pollan, author of the wildly successful The Omnivore’s Dilemma, presents readers with simple rules of eating healthfully in his new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. The mantra of his last book In Defense of Food (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”) forms the backbone of the new book, which features a collection of sentence-long personal eating rules. For example, “If it came from a plant eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t,” and “the whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

The book can be read in its entirety in less than an hour, which is certainly worth doing. Fans of Pollan’s work will not encounter new ideas, but rather a greatly abbreviated and cleverly presented reiteration of his work. The rules were either created by Pollan, submitted to him by those who read his request for food rules via a New York Times blog, or are long-standing, cultural ideas about eating.

This “eater’s manual” is an enjoyable read for all, but especially for those unfamiliar with Pollan’s work.

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As a society we should abandon the industrial food system and eat food in its natural form, as put forth by mother nature. This is a strong conviction of Nina Planck, who spells the idea out over 352 pages in her book Real Food. Her arguments are convincing and very closely mirror those expressed by the recently famous journalist Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire).

Real Food presents a strategy on eating based on unprocessed food that is sensible and will be beneficial to those who implement it. Planck essentially places no restriction on foods as long as they are in their pure form. Pie made with lard in the crust and topped with cream? Certainly. She claims that the rise of health issues in Western culture parallels the rise in processing our food (many people however have drawn similarly competent, yet different parallels to the rise of Western diseases). She goes on to refute the longstanding idea that saturated animal fats and cholesterol lead to heart disease and obesity. Planck is not alone in this stance as there is a growing contingent in the field of nutrition who have shifted blame away from so called “bad fats” and cholesterol.

This book is a great read for anyone interested in nutrition and will likely encourage you to improve your diet. I strongly suggest you balance her views with those of other authors (new and old), because her ideas are far from scientific fact.

This book was sourced from the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Notable quote: “If beef and butter were to blame for heart disease, heart disease wouldn’t be new. We’ve been eating them for too long.”

Read this book if:

• You are concerned with the shortcomings of our industrial food system
• You enjoy the work of Michael Pollan
• You are a vegetarian or vegan and would like to hear a contemporary and somewhat compelling argument against your diet