Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

4. "Avoid food products that carry health claims."

Wouldn't sushi and the raw bar be included in this?

I've read all of Michael Pollan's book and this is considered more guideline than commandments. The first one is just the first general step. He's referring to, say, Go-Gurt. She wouldn't know what to do with it - brush her teeth? As for eating healthy - I'm a busy college student but I make it a conscious decision to eat right since I've done enough reading to know that poor diet high in animal-based proteins and fats is what is driving the obesity, heart disease, diabetes and even cancer in our country. Don't eat organic - it is often shipped from very far away so it's not always that good for you since it's not fresh and has a high carbon footprint due to transportation. I go to the grocery store twice a week and spend about $30 ($60/wk) on fruits and vegetables and seeds/nuts mostly. It would be convenient for me to just eat at fast food restaurants and get my quick heavy fix of calories, but if i ate twice a day at Taco John's, McDonalds, Burger King, etc.. it would cost me about ten dollars a day ($70/wk). Or even eating on campus costs about $50-60 so it's looks like it's better to just make my own food at home. And it's MUCH cheaper to make your OWN pizzas instead of ordering them out all the time. It's just less convenient. I actually love the time I spend making my food... cutting the vegetables. It creates so much anticipation for what you're about to eat you're about to explode by the time you finally get to eat it.

The problem with corn-fed beef is that the cattle are literally sick when slaughtered. A grass fed cow reaches slaughter weight around 4 years (~48 months), but a corn fed cow is grass fed for 6 months and then sent to a feedlot where they are fed a corn/grain based diet until slaughtered at 14-16 months (about 8 months to reach 48 month equivalent). The grain, that their digestive tracks aren't meant to digest, can make them very sick. The biggest health problem seen on feedlots is bloat from all the grain that they're systems just can't properly break down which creates large amounts of gas (leading to methane that gets in the air). Because the corn makes them so sick, they are injected with antibiotics (which you then eat). Your food is only as good as what your food ate. Of course the beef tastes different - corn is the basis of almost our whole diets by sweetening up this or that or making foods more appealing. But the meat tastes so empty compared to properly prepared grass-fed beef. It's not really the humanity of these operations that keeps me from eating beef, it's knowing that the food I'm eating would have died within a few months after if not slaughtered at 14 months from health complications due to force fed corn.

You find once you care about what you eat and where it's coming from, all of these guidelines are pretty much common sense and come pretty easy to follow. Most of the rest of the world consider food always near the top of the priority list - and they don't have the rates of disease as we see in this country. Wonder why?

you can't even pop corn in a microwave can you? i mean, don't you need a special bag? hence, hoax.

I am SO tired of hearing people complain that eating healthy is expensive. Eating ORGANIC is expensive, but buying and eating lots of fresh produce and cooking at home is much cheaper and better for you than processed, fat&sodium laden crap that is turning the poor/middle class fat. Fast food is a convenience - if you take a *little* time to cook real food, you'll find that it doesn't break the bank and will do wonders for your health. Yes, this can be difficult for those working two jobs or just otherwise stretched to the max, but there are PLENTY of people who aren't so overburedened that they can't cook a simple meal.

He actually said "great-grandmother," not grandmother. And he doesn't mean to exclude things like sushi--it's made of fish and rice, which is obviously food. What isn't "food" are basically the items referred to in #2--things that aren't whole foods.

Okay, as a general guideline I like the rules. I think that they would be very difficult to adhere to all the time, and perfectly, as they are written, but they're generally decent rules. There is one exception, and it's as much about the other comments as the rules. Everyone is very keen to help "The Poor" eat healthier - get more fresh foods, less processed foods, etc. In principle, I'm bang alongside that. In practice, that won't necessarily help. Having a refrigerator stocked to the brim, for free, with good things won't be all that useful to a lot of the working poor. If you're working two jobs, trying to get your kids to and from school, possibly caring for a sick relative, etc, food is just going to slip to the bottom of the priority list. (I have a very good friend going through all that right now). You're going to pick up convenience foods that probably taste like feet, but fill you up and get you out the door quickly. Given that there will always be a certain segment of the population that is dependent on convenience foods, perhaps there needs to be more focus on making those foods less harmful than on eliminating them from use.

re #10: I brought my potted jalapeno into the house this fall (we live in New England) and it recently started flowering. I've got two little peppers on the way! Peppers are self pollinating, so one plant is enough, but I would think two would be better. We have been using tufts of dog hair as a sort of paint brush to move pollen from one flower to another since we don't have bees in the house. So, it is possible to grow a little bit of food indoors in the winter.

Regarding #1, in the book he says your great-grandmother, or if you're middle aged or older, your great-great grandmother. And the point is that it's a decent mnemonic for discerning what's food and what is a food product, not a literal rul to live by.

Here they are, Michael Pollan's Twelve Commandments for Serious Eaters, from his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

Did Pollan use the term "Twelve Commandments"? It doesn't sound like him.

It makes a difference, rhetorically. Ethos, Logos, Pathos.

Pathos is being strung out to a vibrating chord with the use of the term "Twelve Commandments", which alters the perception of those reading the phrases.

There's also the fact that context sometimes can be everything. Take one of these KISS statements out of context and it might appear different than it is exactly meant to be in the original context of the complete written material.

I think we can all shape our individual living footprint into the maximum food producing space. 1) If you own a lawn get rid of it, even the smallest yard plotted correctly and planted with the season will more than sustain a family of 4. 2) Living in Alaska taught me that a good grow light can produce a plentiful supply of tomatoes, lettuce and herbs. The cost of operation is approximate US$22 per month for 2 lights.
3) Grass fed beef is great, but better yet when in New Zealand eat the grass fed venison and your in food heaven.
4) Even if your in NY city you can shop at farmers market of small produce shops where the travel from farm to retails is at a minimum.
Cheers

2. "Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce." Hey, what about bouquet garni?

I abide by that one... and one further, I once was told why even buy food with an ingredient list? I guess that goes along the lines of always trying to buy stuff that would eventually rot...

KarmaFree Cooking

Seyo,
in terms of cost per calorie, fresh food is indeed more expensive in the US. a bag of chips has way more calories than a (bigger) bag of carrots, for example, but it probably costs the same or much less. so purely in terms of energy you'll get out of it, it's much cheaper . . which can be important when you're trying to wring the most out of every cent. but eventually of course it has an impact on health.

Ed,
corn-fed beef might taste better, but it's a pretty indefensible practice nonetheless. in this country, corn-fed usually means industrially-produced, which is a disaster in several ways:

- environmentally, because of pollution from the cows themselves, monoculture and pesticide use on the corn, gas used transporting things all over the country, and a number of other reasons.

- economically. governmental policies are dicatated by agribusiness, and are good only for the companies that process food and sell pesticides and etc - they're not good for any farmers, even the ones who work for them. agribusiness almost completely fails to deal with externalities like pollution and etc, which are not reflected in the cost to the buyer - we pay it through taxes or we leave it for our children to deal with.

- internationally. the industrial growing of corn requires pesticides and etc that are derived from petroleum. it takes something like five barrels of oil, iirc, to produce one slaughter-ready industrial cow. if corn is grown on non-industrial farms, practices like crop rotation eliminate the need for that kind of chemical input. our petroleum use is, to say the least, a factor in a number of worldwide conflicts, not to mention global warming and etc.

but even if you leave all that aside, cows aren't meant to eat corn. their digestive systems aren't equipped to handle it, so for them to survive on that kind of diet and not get sick and die, they have to be pumped full of drugs. antibiotic use on factory farm feedlots is a huge contributer to the development of drug-resistant strains of germs, and if it doesn't stop, someday soon we're going to learn what it was like to live in a world before antibiotics because ours just won't work anymore.

long story short: it might taste better, but it's terrible in virtually every way and is also full of drugs and nastiness. unless you're saying grass-fed is somehow inedible, it has to be the way to go.

(most of this was drawn from Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," by the way, which i can't recommend highly enough.)