Michael Pollan's Favorite Dietary Dos and Don'ts

Earlier this year, Michael Pollan posted a request for reader’s rules about eating. Within days, he had received more than 2,500 responses. Here are some of Pollan’s 20 favorites:

1. Don’t eat egg salad from a vending machine.

2. Don’t eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow.

3. If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you’re not hungry.

4. Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.

5. Avoid snack foods with the “oh” sound in their names: Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Ho Hos, etc.

6. No second helpings, no matter how scrumptious.

7. It’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

8. You may not leave the table until you finish your fruit.

9. You don’t get fat on food you pray over. (Meals prepared at home, served at the table and given thanks for are more appreciated and more healthful than food eaten on the run.)

10. Breakfast you should eat alone. Lunch you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.

11. Never eat something that is pretending to be something else (artificial sweeteners, margarine, etc.)

12. Don’t yuck someone’s yum. There is someone out there who likes deep-fried sheep eyeballs and, well, more power to them.

13. Make and take your own lunch to work.

14. Eat until you are seven-tenths full and save the other three-tenths for hunger.

15. I am living in Japan and following these simple rules in preparing each meal: GO HO – incorporate five different cooking methods, GO SHIKI – incorporate five colors, GO MI – incorporate five flavors.

16. One of my top rules for eating comes from economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility reminds me that each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite. This helps me slow down, savor the first bites, stop eating sooner.

17. Don’t eat anything you aren’t willing to kill yourself.

18. When drinking tea, just drink tea. I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information absorption in the morning, when I’m also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day.

19. When you’re eating, don’t talk about other past meals, whether better or worse. Focus on what’s in front of you.

20. After spending some time working with people with eating disorders, I came up with this rule: Don’t create arbitrary rules for eating if their only purpose is to help you feel in control.

Sources:

New York Times October 11, 2009

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Michael Pollan has a knack for taking the complex, big-picture problems facing the entire food system and explaining them in simple, relatable bite-sized pieces.

This is likely why Pollan’s books In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma are quickly becoming true classics of the food world.

Though the tidbits above are not written by Pollan, but rather selected by him from a pool of more than 2,500, they represent a smattering of small ways that you can improve your relationship with food and the way you view agriculture, eating and the American food system.
This is a favorite topic of Pollan’s, and one that is well worth revisiting here.

The Food Industry Challenges That Most of Us Need to be Address

There are far more challenges than I can address here, but one of the most prominent revolves around agricultural subsidies.
The food crops currently subsidized by the U.S. government are corn, wheat, soy and rice. Growing little else but corn and soy means we end up with a fast food diet. In essence, these commodity programs are subsidies for the creation of junk and fast food, not REAL food that could have a positive impact on public health.

The average American is now 10 pounds overweight, which translates into $250 billion in added yearly health care costs, not to mention a shorter lifespan.

But in addition to producing little else but fast food, this type of monoculture is also very dependent on fossil fuels. You see, when you grow one type of crop almost exclusively, you deplete the soil, which means you have to use more fertilizer, which is made from fossil fuel. Monocultures also invite more pests, which need to be treated with ever increasing amounts of pesticides -- also made from fossil fuel.

Cheap food is actually incredibly expensive once everything is added up, including stratospheric health care costs, continued dependence on fossil fuels, and the destruction of the earth as a whole.

One of the many astounding facts that Pollan has revealed is that it now takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food. And for certain foods, like the feedlot beef used at most fast food restaurants, it can take 55 fossil fuel calories to produce 1 calorie of food!

This clearly is unsustainable.

What About Food Safety?

This is another hot topic and one that’s been making headlines a lot recently.

It’s a double-sided issue, the first side being a clear lack of regulation, inspection and oversight for the massive factory farms where much of your food is grown. For instance, there is no federal requirement for meat grinders to test their ingredients for E.coli prior to selling them. And most retailers do not test either.

However, this is on the surface level. At a much deeper level is the fact that this policing was never necessary until huge food corporations started to interfere with the natural order of agriculture.

The food system began its dramatic decline the second the world turned away from the farming practices of our ancestors, and began to attempt to outdo nature with technology.

Now, producing food on a massive scale at the lowest price possible has taken precedence over obeying the laws of nature. The system is pushing natural systems and organisms to their limit, forcing living creatures to function as machines.

Of course, “whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience,” Michael Pollan pointed out in

Our Decrepit Food Factories.

Soon, the animals, and consequently your food supply, become unhealthy. The honeybees begin to get sick and die off. The bacteria prove that they can outwit man-made antibiotics, and create super-versions of themselves.

And as nature has shown us many times before, when you take away one part of this integrated, living system, things begin to crumble.

So what you can do, like the readers who wrote in to Pollan have likely done, is make small changes in your own life in regard to how you eat, and what type of agriculture you choose to support.

Even though the problems with our food system are vast, you can do your small part to help. If you have the space, a backyard garden is a great starting point. You can also steer clear of foods that come from factory farms, and instead support sustainable agriculture movements in your area.

And, why don’t we pick up where Michael Pollan left off? You can share some of your favorite dietary “dos and don’ts” in the Community Comments section below …

Posted: True Health Is True Wealth

Farmer In Chief

 

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.  Continued:  

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Permalink:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

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Michael Pollan Answers Readers’ Questions

Please go to http://change.gov and urge President Elect Obama to select Michael Pollan for the Secretary of Agriculture... Farmer in Chief.

Michael says he doesn't want the job, but could probably be convinced.  And this would be a real and positive Change!

Michael Pollan On Food, Gardening, and Helping America

November 28, 2008

"My path was through the garden." Michael Pollan

Few people reflect and report more astutely on the state of American food production and consumption than Michael Pollan. Beginning with his fascination in plant cultivation, THE BOTANY OF DESIRE, Pollan has become a mixture of reporter and prophet, documenting the state of American food and warning of the consequences if we don't change our ways.

An Open Letter to the Farmer in Chief

In October 2008, Pollan wrote to the prospective presidents about just how far food policy reaches into our world — from national security to the rise of diabetes. In his ""An Open Letter to the Farmer in Chief,"Pollan gave the next occupant a "heads up" about an issue that hadn't made any noise on the very noisy campaign trail:

[Y]ou will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention...[Y]ou will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.

Biography

Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: AN EATER'S MANIFESTO. His previous book, THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS (2006), was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the NEW YORK TIMES and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of THE BOTANY OF DESIRE: A PLANT'S-EYE VIEW OF THE WORLD (2001); A PLACE OF MY OWN (1997); and SECOND NATURE (1991). A contributing writer to the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism.

Pollan served for many years as executive editor of HARPER'S Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING (2004); BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS (1990 and 2003) and the NORTON BOOK OF NATURE WRITING. Published November 28, 2008.

Guest photo by Robin Holland

Go To http://Change.Gov  and urge President-Elect Obama to choose Michael Pollan for Secretary of Agriculture... now that would be Change!!