BOOK: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

I wasn't forced to wait long after becoming an omnivore for Michael Pollan to extend another hand to lift my gastronomic philosophy further out of the mire. Though I felt this book should probably have served as a conclusory 100 pages of The Omnivore's Dilemma, it was nonetheless an engrossing and important read.

One of the best things about this book is that Pollan, having given us the tools to liberate ourselves from the RDA Food Pyramid, finally commits to giving us some rules to live by. They are as follows:

•Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
•Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
•Avoid food products that make health claims.
•Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
•Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
•Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
•You are what what you eat eats too.
•If you have space, buy a freezer.
•Eat like an omnivore.
•Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
•Eat wild foods when you can.
•Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
•Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks.
•Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
•Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
•Have a glass of wine at dinner.
•Pay more. Eat less.
•Eat meals.
•Do all your eating at a table.
•Try not to eat alone.
•Consult your gut.
•Eat slowly.
•Cook and, if you can, plant a garden.

Of course I am having to fudge nearly all of them. I cannot grow a garden, buy a freezer, pay more (though I can eat less!), and my great-grandmothers would have to have been worldly indeed to recognize all of the foods I eat (I knew all four of them, and though they came to Cascadia from all corners, they had very little truck with ethnic foods), but the rest of the rules are pretty much doable. I should eat at my table, and more slowly, and replace the stubby bottle of Sessions lager with at least a few servings a week of resveratrol, but I do a bit of cooking, I certainly consult my gut, I eat with friends, and, recently, I eat a pretty respectable amount of fruits (to be joined soon enough by vegetables other than carrots). I have waged total war on HFCS, rarely eat anything with dozens of ingredients (though these wasabi almonds I found recently have more than five, sadly), and if there has ever been anyone who ate like a subcontinental Greco-Franco-Italo-Sino-Japonic, it is this guy.

That said, I have a ways to go. I currently eat more like a scavenger than an omnivore, but I do okay. I expect to do even better seasonally, that is to say, this season. We'll see!