Food Rules
by Michael Pollan


This was an interesting little book. I was surprised to find that I'd heard a lot of these common-sense food rules, and many of them are actually guidelines that my family tries to live by. My little brother, Brian, is autistic, and as such he is especially sensitive to certain kinds of foods. We've noticed that, without a more organic, holistic type of diet, Brian tends to regress in certain areas developmentally. My mom has said for years that we shouldn't be eating things with ingredients that we cannot pronounce, and she's made sure to try to buy from the farmer's market and whole foods stores rather than supermarkets, much to my chagrin at times. The book itself is well written and though I cannot pretend that I still remember each and every one of all of those little rules, the larger trends made evident in the book are remarkably easy to recall. It basically boils down to eat less in general, eat more plants and less meat, and avoid foods that are produced by corporations. And there's a lot of wisdom in that I think. I found especially interesting the comparisons being made to the diets of other countries. It's a sobering fact to think that a country as blessed and wealthy as ours is slowly killing itself with a knife and a fork. We're on the cutting edge in nearly every other facet of modern existence; why not with our diet?