Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

People complaining about the size of "Food Rules" certainly missed the point. In Twitterland, any message that can't be reduced from "bullet points" to 140 characters will not be heard. The Eloi don't read books. Food Rules compresses the message of Pollan's food advice into its second simplest form. Pollan mentions in the introduction his discovery, while researching In Defense of Food, that the answer to the question, "What should we eat to stay healthy?" turned out to be seven words: "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." As he points out wrily, that wasn't enough to satisfy his publisher, but fortunately explaining it was. Food Rules is the middle ground between The Three Commandments and the Food Bible. Clearly it is needed, if one hostile reviewer thinks his "Don't eat more calories than you burn each day, and eat a balanced diet" is comparable to Pollan's seven words. Food Rules consists of 64 aphorisms with a few paragraphs of explanation as needed (no rule runs much beyond a single page). Like the Tao Te Ching, Food Rules can be stuffed in a back pocket, thumbed through when you are bored, or purchased for a clueless friend you care about. The rules are common sense, unless you suffer from the literalism of some reviewers (No, gentle reader, Mr. Pollan did not MY grandmother, who was a rotten cook, but the proverbial grandmother, who is not). Common sense distilled to aphorisms rather than platitudes, Poor Richard's Culinary Advice. In other words they are crisp, memorable, and quotable. Who wouldn't wish they had thought up, "Don't eat any cereal that changes the color of the milk"? For the Twitterpated, this is the place to begin with Pollan. Some of them, at least, may discover that they would like to know more. If not, no harm done.

Food - from the growing to consumption to the entire system surrounding it - is a top 5 global issue. We're eating ourselves to death. This is Michael Pollan's excellent manifesto... that fits in your pocket and reads in 20 min.

I picked up Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, because I have been searching for just this type of book for many of my clients as a New Year's gift. I read the slim book quickly in a bookstore and it is the perfect present for my clients who are not eating healthy diets (but who have confessed they wish to.) I am an interior designer/organizer and see how my clients eat all the time when I redesign and organize their kitchens. Pollan's In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma are both excellent, but can be intimidating. Not Food Rules--it is short and easy to understand. The book is divided into three parts and has 64 chapters or rules. The following will give you an good idea of what the book is about: Part I, What should I eat? Includes such chapters as "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food", "avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients", and "avoid foods that contain high-fructose corn syrup". Part II, What kind of food should I eat? Includes "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves", "eat your colors", and "the whiter the bread, the sooner you will be dead." Part III, How should I eat? Includes "pay more, eat less," "eat less," and "limit your snacks to unprocessed plant food." For those of you who desire a healthier diet, Food Rules is a terrific guide that makes understanding what to put into your body simple to understand and implement. Finally, if healthy eating is a new concept for you, you will find the clever chapter titles easy to memorize, thus making the concept of healthy eating a simple one to learn. Highly recommend. By the author of the award winning book, HARMONIOUS ENVIRONMENT and SELL YOUR HOME FAST IN A BUYER'S MARKET

It is amazing how complicated we have allowed our diets, and our understanding of our diets, to become. Even Pollan's most recent book In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto - which seemed to be a pretty simple premise - ended up being a (wonderfully) complicated journey through our food system. So when I read that this book was coming out, I wondered if it was necessary given the wealth of information already covered. The answer is: yes, this book is necessary. While there are a million other guides to a healthy diet running around out there, few manage to boil down the essentials in such a usable way. Pollan takes the essential and fascinating information that he wrote about in his previous book and simmers it down into a succinct (the book is basically 70 half pages long) "manual" of rules for eating. While this book retains some of the bones of its predecessor, it is by no means a Cliff's Notes version. This manual is essential reading all on its own. Food Rules is broken down into 3 sections (and this will sound familiar to those that read In Defense of Food): 1- What should I eat? (Eat food) 2 - What kind of food should I eat? (Mostly plants) and 3 - How should I eat? (Not too much). Each section includes 20 or so rules that you can pick and choose from in order to eat a healthy diet. Some of the rules overlap (Avoid food products that contain ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce and Avoid ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry, for instance) and some seem like such common sense that it is almost laughable to include them, but that is why this manual is so important. It distills all of this complex information that we see and hear every day and turns it into something relatable. We know, somewhere in our minds, that certain grains and oils are better than others. Pollan gives us an easy rule to help know which ones are best. We know that most breakfast cereals are little more than desserts and Pollan gives us an easy rule to know which ones are safe. Some rules are humorous (it's not food if it arrived through the window of your car) and some are serious; some rules are easy and others require a bit more dedication. But what this manual has is a wide range of useful tips that can be applied to any life at any time. This is no complicated diet; this is a little pocket book of sensible, realistic rules to help you eat your best.