Review of Food Rules by Michael Pollan

I don’t know any woman who hasn’t had some sort of weird food rules at one time or another. When I was a teenager, my food rules were of this variety.

They revolved around calorie counts and fat grams. Diet Coke was my drink of choice. I weighed myself religiously, forever hoping to lose those 5 pounds, and beating myself up mentally when I failed to do so.

I had no food rules in college, and it showed.

I didn’t care what I ate or how it made me feel, and so I felt terrible a lot of the time. I lived on coffee made in my dorm room. I loved the curly fries in the student center. Free food was always a bonus, and my friends and I would often go to events just for the food. In fact, that’s how the college lured us to most of the events.

These days, my food rules are quite different. They’re a lot more aligned with the ones that Michael Pollan outlines in new book. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is an elaboration on the main themes that come out of one of his last books, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
- which were:

Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

In Food Rules, Pollan goes into more detail on what to eat – i.e., real food, not things made in a factory or with names that are the same in any language. He talks about where to eat – at a table, mindfully, away from the computer and TV. And when to eat – when you’re hungry, not when you’re bored or sad or lonely.

And if you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, that’s what I recommend, too.

It seems like common sense, but so many of us are confused on what to eat – and this is no accident.

It’s a concise book that does not go into great detail and that you can flip through in about 30 minutes. But it can serve as a pocket reminder for how we should think about food most of the time but seem to forget a lot of the time.

You can pick up a copy of Food Rules on Amazon.

What are your food rules? Share them with me here.