34. Food Rules | Michael Pollan
You can buy this beaut of a book here.
Friends,
I’m not a fan of diets; rigid eating plans; intermittent fasting; extremism such as veganism or anything else that feels dramatic about food. I LOVE FOOD. Sharing food with people I love is one of my favourite things to do. In fact, this brings me on to one of my favourite Spanish words - ‘sobremesa’ - which means ‘over the table’ as a direct translation. She refers to the Spanish tradition of lingering long after the plates are empty and I could not love a word more.
From the cover:
“Food Rules, Pollan’s wise and witty critique of the western industrialised diet, distils the wisdom of history and traditional cultures to three simple rules:
Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.”
Some special parts I’ve highlighted:
“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
"If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.”
“...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.”
“Be the kind of person who takes supplements -- then skip the supplements.”
and my absolute fave:
“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”