Rules for Omnivores

This summer, I've read a number of fascinating books about food, including two by Michael Pollan. The first is called Omnivore's Dilemma and talks about where food comes from. In this hefty book, Pollan discusses the origins of 4 distinct meals. First, he follows a McDonald's hamburger from the corn fields, to a ranch, to a feedlot, to a slaughterhouse and examines where the lettuce and tomato come from on industrial agriculture operations. The biggest issue he addresses is the methods of coaxing more products and meat out of corn and cows that they would not naturally provide, which in turn damage the environment.

The next meal is an organic meal from Whole Foods, and so Pollan goes to the beautifully-described, quaint organic farms to research the reality of the "supermarket pastoral" genre of writing that plasters organic food packages. (Not quite as small or "pastoral" as you might have imagined.) In a related meal, he looks for a less industrial organic experience and finds a "beyond organic" farm in Virginia, in which cows, pigs, and chickens are all grown on the same small farm, as well as small amounts of various kinds of crops. Essentially, he describes how all of the animals and organisms work together to create the most productive farm possible, while still living the lives they were more or less intended to.

Finally, Pollan goes all the way back to the beginning and decides to hunt and gather his own meal near his home in San Francisco. He describes his adventures into hunting wild boar as well as how to gather fresh mushrooms as they're in season. This leads to an excellent discussion of the merits and demerits of eating vegetarian, and whether or not he has personally come to feel that he should or shouldn't eat a vegetarian diet. The entire book was good, but this chapter made the book for me. It really addressed a lot of questions I had and provided a good rationale for eating and appreciating an omnivorous diet. I'd definitely recommend this book if you want to ponder where our food comes from and why we eat the way we do.

However, if you want a quick, down-and-dirty, just-the-basics description of the kind of foods and habits that will keep us most healthy (and least miserable), Pollan's latest book is called Food Rules. In the introduction it  discusses how populations all over the world stay surprisingly healthy with all manner of diets, but how overwhelmingly unhealthy the western diet has become. The book discusses the collective wisdom that our culture has seemed to have lost over the years, which has led to our downfall (or up-gain, as the case may be). After the short introduction, it is literally 64 rules, with about a paragraph of explanation of each one. I read the entire thing in an hour. The book is categorized into three broad guidelines, which are 1) Eat food. 2) Mostly plants. 3) Not too much. I loved the simplicity of this book so much, I'm going to write a few following posts on my favorite rules from the book. Either way, I highly recommend this if you're looking for a quick read on healthy food habits.