Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Food and rules (especially rules that are numbered) don't mix in my book.

I actually just finished IDoF and found myself mentally editing the rules as I read. the "grandmother" rule I altered to "don't eat anything that ANYONE's grandmother wouldn't recognize" because I do eat lots that dear grandma wouldn't recognize, but someone's Greek or Indian or Japanese grandmother might.
The only one of the rules that I truly break is that I do on occasion use splenda or splenda-sweetened baked goods, which I bake myself. It's not an artificial-sweetener overload, just an occasional thing, but MP would definitely not approve.

@all - It's difficult to summarize this book, and thought I'd put the "rules" in for those who haven't read it. But in truth, Pollan is very much more in the spirit of "no rules." In fact, this is a manifesto against what he calls nutritionism - it's about how we've screwed up our eating by focusing on nutrients instead of food. So the "rules" are just to separate what he considers food from what might not be.

He also said people can stay healthy on any traditional diet in the world, but that doesn't include the Western diet

If you've found my summary off-putting I hope you'll give the book a chance. It's a refreshing plea to return to when we really didn't have to worry about what we eat - when in fact we took pleasure in our food, because it was real food.

I'm a big fan of no rules as well. Maybe the idea is to eat more foods in states closer to the way they grow, but the message gets twisted into its own brand of "nutritionism."

If I had to eat only what my grandmother would recognize as food, I'd be dead in a week. Needless to say, neither one could cook. One ate food from a box, the other ate cornbread and beans--every day.

Ortolan: thanks for the suggestion to make homemade, and the brand suggestion. Is Delouis regional also? I haven't seen it.

@Professor Chaos: I'm in the Northeast, so may have trouble finding Duke's, which I don't ever recall seeing, but I'll look at my coop.

I didn't realize I would touch a nerve with Pollan's book (or maybe I just described it badly). I haven't read Omnivire's Dilemma, but I liked The Botany of Desire as well as this one.

Well if we're going by those rules then my bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios aren't real food...

i think people are missing the spirit of the post, simple message:
don't eat foods that are processed, i.e. cook and eat a beet, don't buy a jar of pickled beets that has corn syrup or other crap in it. that's all.
a hunk of farmstead cheese made with good quality milk might be better for you than kraft american slices....

of course, it depends on what your tastes are and what you like to eat....
some people eat tons of processed foods and don't even give it a second thought.

it's all about balance, if you feel like eating ding dogs and ho ho's for dinner @meat guy, by all means, go for it! i may have a grass fed hamburger with a big bag of potato chips on the side!

happy = healthy - my mom is 85, lives on bacon & eggs (not the organic good kind), ice cream, has candy for lunch .... my grandfather, 94, lived on coffee, cigarettes, donuts and pasta. i think genetics has a lot to do with it.

My regular diet is all real food. But sometimes I'll have nondairy icecream or yogurt or whatev.

oops, double negative...sorry!

About 10 yrs ago I made a pact with myself that I would avoid purchasing items at the supermarket with either artificial ingredients or ingredients I could not pronounce... following this rule I stopped buying a bunch of convenience food I used to love and stopped purchasing most canned stuff. Someone even encouraged me to buy products with no ingredients list at all... meaning trying as much as possible to only eat fresh ingredients from a farmer's market.

I think with my hurried lifestyle that's a but too much, but I know subscribe to a CSA and purchase WAY more produce than I used to before. It's not impossible, but it's something to get used to little by little...

All of these mayos can be found on amazon

I've been cutting out processed foods bit by bit over a number of years, and now I've lost my taste for the stuff. It's not like I'm denying myself anything, it's just that if I want something, I make it, whether it's bread, cookies, ice cream, salad dressing, stock, or anything else. I'm not morally opposed or offended if someone else eats the stuff, it's just that I don't crave the stuff, and there's usually something else I'd rather have.

But if I want junk food, I don't deny myself. Now and then, I want Cheetos. Maybe once or twice a year. But I don't agonize about it, I just buy them.

As has been alluded to before, Pollan is simply using a figure of speech, not literally intending that you shouldn't eat something if your grandmother wouldn't recognize it... my French Canadian grandmother, if she were alive today, would only recognize a small percentage of what I eat daily. He's talking about the food industry, about what we now consider to be 'food', as opposed to what was considered 'food' 100 years ago. You really have to read "Omnivore's Dilemma" to fully understand many of the arguments made in "Defense of Food". I doubt anyone's grandma would think very highly of 'hydroxypropyl methylcellulose', an ingredient in the most processed thing I could find in my cupboard, Dream Whip. I doubt Pollan would say "Never, Ever eat Dream Whip"... though he might say, "don't feed this to your kids in large portions on a daily basis".

I think the grandmother analogy is poorly stated or maybe poorly interpreted. I think what he's trying to say is that you should avoid (not ban...just try to avoid) foods that are created in processes that someone from granny's generation couldn't have accomplished. So, no chemically hydrogenated mutant oils or burgers with a 2-year shelf life at room temp.

By that logic, all natural fruits, veggies, herbs, spices, nuts and meats would be perfectly acceptable because even if granny didn't eat avocados or artichokes, people of her generation somewhere in the world would have recognized those as possible food.

Pressing olives to get oil is understandable. Making butter-like products out of petrochemicals is not. Boiling sugar cane and letting the liquid dry and crystalize is an understandable process. Making sweeteners in a lab is not.

The five-ingredient rule is pretty arbitrary, but the general idea is that if you're going to buy a can of whole peeled tomatoes, the ingredient list doesn't need to have fifteen things. Go for the ones with the shortest list of things that seem to make sense for the product you're buying. If there are a dozen named herbs and spices and you happen to like those flavors, there's nothing wrong with that product, but if it's a bunch of mysterious chemicals and artificial flavors, it might be better to look elsewhere.

For example, I buy instant mashed potatoes that I use in breadmaking. Last time I bought a box, I compared the ingredients in the different brands. One was essentially dried potatoes and something else benign. Another major brand had a long list of ingredients. I went for the one with the short list.

As far as corn syrup, I can see his point in that it's included in so many things that you wouldn't sweeten if you were making it at home. So you're getting added calories when you aren't paying attention. I can make a nice salad dressing with vinegar, oil, and some herbs/spices, but a lot of the store-bought ones are loaded with sweeteners. On the other hand, I have a bottle of corn syrup (regular, not HFCS) in my cabinet for candy-making. I don't feel bad about it at all. I don't use much, and it's for something that's an indulgence. If I was pouring it into my spaghetti sauce, that would be a different story.