Tag: Michael Pollan

Heart-smart food rules: your dietary dos and don’ts

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Author and foodie Michael Pollan asked and answered this question of his New York Times readers last year:

“How did humans manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promising to improve your child’s focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head?

“We relied on culture, which is another way of saying: on the accumulated wisdom of the tribe.”

Curious about the wisdom of other people’s tribes, Pollan asked his NYT readers to send him their own favourite rules for eating well. Within days, he received over 2,500 responses, including gems like:

“If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.”

Here are just 20 of the food rules he liked best.

What’s your best food rule for eating well?  Share it with us!

 

The fall of home cooking and the rise of heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 5 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas 

Chef and food activist Dan Barber, writing in The Nation recently, had a goofy, radical, off-the-wall idea:  we need to learn how to cook.  “A lack of technique behind the stove is as complicit in harming human health and the environment as the confinement pig or the corn-fed steer,” he boldly claimed. And author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food), writing in the New York Times, notes the irony of our fascination with wildly popular celebrity chefs and TV cooking shows (even an entire food cable network!):

“How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking. 

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