DON'T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GRANDMOTHER WOULD'T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD

Eating in our time has gotten complicated - needlessly so, in my opinion. I will get to the "needlessly" part in a moment, but consider first the complexity that now attends this most basic of creaturely activities. Most of us have come to rely on experts of one kind or another to tell us how to eat - doctors and diet books, media accounts of the latest findings in nutritional science, government advisories and food pyramids, the proliferating health claims on food packages. We may not always heed these experts' advice, but their voices are in our heads every time we order from a menu or wheel down the aisle in the supermarket. Also in our heads today resides an astonishing amount of biochemistry. How odd is it that everybody now has at least a passing acquaintance with words like "antioxidant," "saturated fat," "omega-3 fatty acids," "carbohydrates," "polyphenols," "folic acid," "gluten," and "probiotics"?

It's gotten to the point where we don't see foods anymore but instead look right through them to the nutrients (good and bad) they contain, and of course to the calories - all these invisible qualities in our food that, properly understood, supposedly hold the secret to eating well.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. 

Imagine your great-grandmother (or grandmother, depending on your age) at your side as you roll down the aisles of the supermarket. You're standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-GURT Portable Yogurt tubes - and hasn't a clue what this plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel could possibly be. Is it a food or is it toothpaste? There are now thousands of foodish products in the supermarket that our ancestors simply wouldn't recognize as food. The reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products are many, and go beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain, or the plastics in which they are typically packaged, some of which are probably toxic. Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed to get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons - our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt.

These tastes are difficult to find in nature but cheap and easy for the food scientist to deploy, with the result that food processing induces us to consume much more of these rarities than is good for us. The great-grandma rule will help keep most of these items out of your cart.

Note: If your great-grandmother was a terrible cook or eater, you can substitute someone else's grandmother - a Sicilian or French one works particularly well. The next several rules refine this strategy by helping you navigate the treacherous landscape of the ingredients label.


By Michael Pollan in the book "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual", Penguin Books U.S.A, 2009, excerpts from pages  6-17-18. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.