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Michael Pollan: Food rules (2009, Penguin Books) 4 stars

A pocket compendium of food wisdom from the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In …

Review of 'Food rules' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

A very slim book that tells you all the things you need to do to eat a healthy diet. He distills it down to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And everything following talks more about that. There's a some interesting bits -- one rule is "Break the rules" and another one talks about making a window garden or plot so you can eat out of your own personal garden.

But the biggest thing has to be "Don't eat sugary preprocessed crap." Which I don't do already, so I'm good there. I think he had some things to say about "unidentifiable food" -- basically if you're eating a bacon explosion don't be surprised that it's not healthy for you -- but what really stands out is that the US diet is so amazingly unhealthy that it manages to make people sick when just about nothing else does. There are Inuits living off seals and African tribes living almost entirely off of calves blood... even the French diet of cheese, bread and wine is healthier than Freetos and Hostess pies. (Sadly, he doesn't go into detail on pizza, but I bet Italian pizza is a very different beast than a Domino's Supreme Meat.)

Good read, hand it to kids and get them young.