The idea for this book came from a doctor--a couple of them, as a matter of fact. They had read my last book, "In Defense of Food", which ended with a handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. "What I would love is a pamphlet I could hand to my patients with some rules for eating wisely," they would say. "I don't have time for the big nutrition lecture and, anyway, they really don't need to know what an antioxidant is in order to eat wisely." Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say "you can't imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food." So rather than leaving his heart patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome meals out of it -- a very different way of thinking about health.

Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the American diet -- roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet. And a healthy diet is a whole lot simpler than the food industry and many nutritional scientists -- what I call the Nutritional Industrial Complex -- would have us believe. After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refined grains and sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit.

So I decided to take the doctors up on the challenge. I set out to collect and formulate some straightforward, memorable, everyday rules for eating, a set of personal policies that would, taken together or even separately, nudge people onto a healthier and happier path. I solicited rules from doctors, scientist, chefs, and readers, and then wrote a bunch myself, trying to boil down into everyday language what we really know about healthy eating. And while most of the rules are backed by science, they are not framed in the vocabulary of science but rather culture -- a source of wisdom about eating that turns out to have as much, if not more, to teach us than nutritional science does.

What follows is a small sample of "Food Rules", a half dozen policies that will give you a taste of what you'll find in the book: sixty-four food rules, each with a paragraph of explanation. I think you'll see from this little appetizer that "Food Rules" is a most unconventional diet book. You can read it in an hour and it just might change your eating life. I hope you'll take away something you can put to good use, and maybe get a chuckle or two along the way. And do let me know if have any food rules I should know about. I'm still collecting them, at pollanfoodrules@gmail.com.

#11 Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

Food marketers are ingenious at turning criticisms of their products -- and rules like these -- into new ways to sell slightly different versions of the same processed foods: They simply reformulate (to be low-fat, have no HFCS or transfats, or to contain fewer ingredients) and then boast about their implied healthfulness, whether the boast is meaningful or not. The best way to escape these marketing ploys is to tune out the marketing itself, by refusing to buy heavily promoted foods. Only the biggest food manufacturers can afford to advertise their products on television: More than two thirds of food advertising is spent promoting processed foods (and alcohol), so if you avoid products with big ad budgets, you'll automatically be avoiding edible foodlike substances. As for the 5 percent of food ads that promote whole foods (the prune or walnut growers or the beef ranchers), common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush -- these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

From "Food Rules":

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

#36 Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

This should go without saying. Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day. The french fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes -- and cleaning up the mess. If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them -- chances are good it won't be every day.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry -- before you eat and then again along the way. (One old wive's test: If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.) Food is a costly antidepressant.

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

No, a desk is not a table. If we eat while we're working, or while watching TV or driving, we eat mindlessly -- and as a result eat a lot more than we would if we were eating at a table, paying attention to what we're doing. This phenomenon can be tested (and put to good use): Place a child in front of a television set and place a bowl of fresh vegetables in front of him or her. The child will eat everything in the bowl, often even vegetables that he or she doesn't ordinarily touch, without noticing what's going on. Which suggests an exception to the rule: When eating somewhere other than at a table, stick to fruits and vegetables.

 

Wonderful, joyous animated tale....local eating illustrated.

A year ago, I would have called Dumpster Diving a fringe lifestyle choice. But is this really about ecology, human rights and economic justice?

The Winter Locavore with Martha Stafford. $ 70
Sun Jan 10 at 10AM (duration 3½ to 4 hours).

In this class Martha will teach the importance of buying and eating local seasonal food. Martha is one of the pioneers in local cooking and has written many cookbook recipes pertaining to this subject. Menu may change slightly due to the availability of local vegetables at the market.
Mushroom Soup

Braised Winter Greens

Baked Rockfish with Onions and Virginia Wine

Winter Squash Bread Pudding

Apple Cake

Just came across the website for the Charlottesville Cooking School: what a wonderful selection of classes for the devoted foodie, culinary hobbyist or aspiring chef!

Urban food lovers learn how to hunt, butcher and cook venison in a class called "Deer Hunting for Locavores" taught in Charlottesville, Va. Here is the article: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/dining/25hunt.html

Check out Michael Davis (@yellowfish_md)!!

YAKIMA, Wa. — The apples look like Christmas tree ornaments, wearing a blush of dew at first light. The grapes could have been painted on, those clusters of sweet calories in their best October color. And here and there is the smell of hops, newly freed from their climbing nets, headed for breweries bottling a taste of fall.

I drove into the Yakima Valley, an edible landscape fed by water from the ice-covered volcanoes, on a day when yet another story appeared about how our food can kill you.

The piece by Michael Moss in the Sunday New York Times told of Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old dance instructor who is paralyzed from a food-borne illness caused by E. coli. Minnesota officials have traced her condition to a hamburger that her mother grilled for a Sunday dinner in the fall of 2007.

You look at Stephanie, and follow Moss’s trail of the burger from a splotch pattern of trimmings taken from slaughterhouses all over the hemisphere and then through the exit door of the food giant Cargill, and wonder how this diet of ours became so disconnected from simple sources.

Cargill has $116 billion in annual revenues. They deliver, in the case of frozen burgers, a product of nearly indecipherable components, from disparate origins, on a mass scale. They deliver it cheap.

A restorative of sorts is at hand this time of year. Barely 1 percent of all Americans work the land year-round as farmers, but still something in us needs a harvest. Every now and then, we have to see our food, if only to preserve the illusion that this good earth can keep us well.

The Yakima Valley is one of the nation’s most bountiful farm regions, producing cherries and peaches, apples and pears, plums and peppers, cider and good wine.

Red Delicious, which is to a fruit bowl what plastic surgery is to beauty, is still the most popular apple — a polished piece of fruit that can keep its buffed pose year-round in near-freezing warehouses, but is utterly tasteless.

Honeycrisp, which is sunshine in a marbled orb, and Gala and Fuji are all coming on, as are innumerable varieties that had nearly been lost in the joyless pursuit of the perfect apple.

In afternoon light, the vineyards are impressionistic. I tried little bunches of cabernet franc and some malbec, picked that morning, their sugars at their peak after a spell of warm days and cold nights. And the pears, just off the tree but soft enough to produce chin juice on first bite, are candy.

In the romance of an October day, all of it seems like Eden in an age of warehouse burger peril. All of it seems like it fits — sustainable and local, to use those drab words that people insist on attaching to good food from somebody you know.

But this image is somewhat illusory. The Yakima Valley is a miracle of manipulation. It would grow little but sage and scrub brush without its network of irrigation ditches and pipes, draining water off the Cascades.

And these fruit types: many of them were hatched in labs. In this valley, even a hobbyist can play Apple God with grafts of genetically superior species. That fresh-picked fruit may look as local as Mount Adams, but apples originated in Kazakhstan. The only one native to the United States is the crab apple.

Still, at harvest time, the roadsides of this valley are full of people trying to get closer to the consumer, with food that has a story behind it. Despite the travails of the Great Recession, organic fruit and vegetable sales were up 37 percent last year, showing the consumer has a similar desire to connect.

I’m not one who thinks that organic always means better. I wish the non-factory farm produce was cheaper. But as the Cargill E. coli episode proved once again, cheap food can come with a terrible price.

There are more than 70 million cases of food-borne illnesses a year in this country, resulting in 5,000 deaths. Leafy vegetables — that’s you, bundle of supermarket spinach, and you, pre-washed lettuce — are the leading culprits, outside of meats, according to a study released this week by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Just a few years ago, bagged baby spinach was said to cause the death of three people, and severe illness in 200 others.

Fruit is less troublesome, because it hangs above soil that can contain pathogens.

How much of the danger from leafy vegetables can be blamed on the industrial model that produces cheap calories I don’t know. But as consumers follow Michael Pollan’s advice to get to know our food producers, we will learn to see the processed burger and the industrial vegetables for what they are — cheap global commodities that carry some risk.

The best antidote for such a thing is to see, touch and experience food as it comes off the fields. As imperfect as this harvest picture is, it satisfies a need that has never bred out of us as people.

Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what has become a truly treacherous food landscape. I mean, what are we to make of a wonder of food science like the new Splenda with fiber? (“The great sweet taste you want and a little boost of fiber.”) Should we call this progress? Is it even food? And then, at the far other end of the nutritional spectrum, how are we to process (much less digest) the new, exuberantly caloric Double Down sandwich that KFC has introduced? This shameless exaltation of dietary fat actually redefines the very concept of a sandwich by replacing the obligatory bread with two slabs of fried chicken kept some distance apart by strips of bacon, two kinds of cheese and a dollop of sauce.

Food Rules: Your Dietary Dos and Don'ts

Deciding what to eat, indeed deciding what qualifies as food, is not easy in such an environment. When Froot Loops can earn a Smart Choices check mark, a new industrywide label that indicates a product’s supposed healthfulness, we know we can’t rely on the marketers, with their dubious health claims, or for that matter on the academic nutritionists who collaborate on such labeling schemes. (One of them defended the inclusion of Froot Loops on the grounds that they are better for you than doughnuts. So why doesn’t the label simply say that?) Making matters worse, official government pronouncements about eating aren’t necessarily much more reliable, not when the food industry influences federal nutrition guidelines. But even when the “best science” prevails, that science can turn out to be misguided — as when the official campaign against saturated fat got us to trade butter for stick margarine loaded with trans fats, a solution that turned out to be worse than the problem.

If we can’t rely on the marketers or the government or even the nutritionists to guide us through the supermarket woods, then who can we rely on? Well, ask yourself another question: How did humans manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promising to improve your child’s focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head? We relied on culture, which is another way of saying: on the accumulated wisdom of the tribe. (Which is itself another way of saying: on your mom and your friends.) All of us carry around rules of thumb about eating that have been passed down in our families or plucked from the cultural conversation. Think of this body of food knowledge as samizdat nutrition: an informal, unsanctioned way of negotiating our eating lives that becomes indispensable at a time when official modes of talking about food have suffered a serious loss of credibility.

Earlier this year I began gathering examples of these rules, or personal food policies, for a short book I’m publishing in January. My premise is that for all the authority we grant to science in matters of nutrition, culture still has a lot to teach us about how to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this popular wisdom is worth preserving — perhaps today more than ever, in this era of dazzling food science, supersize portions and widespread dietary confusion.

In March, I posted a request for readers’ rules about eating on Well, Tara Parker-Pope’s health blog on nytimes.com. Within days, I received more than 2,500 responses — more than any Well post had ever received. My aim was to collect genuinely useful, and nutritionally sound, examples of popular wisdom about eating. I found some for my book, but I also found something else — a banquet of food policies that even when they made little, if any, nutritional sense (and therefore didn’t belong in the book) nevertheless opened a window on our current thinking about food: the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play and the taboos we invoke to organize our eating lives. Some of the rules have stood the test of time and have been confirmed by science, but all of them have something to teach us about our continuing efforts to pick a healthful and happy path through the minefields of the modern-food marketplace or restaurant menu.

Post your own food rules here, and read my favorites here.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,” will be published in January.

« Natural Cures Blog Carnival on Seasonal Colds and Flu

David Gumpert’s New Book, The Raw Milk Revolution Coming Soon!

By Kimberly Hartke | Published: October 7, 2009

David E. Gumpert, Journalist

Joel Salatin, Famous Farmer

Author to do a Charlottesville Booksigning and Lecture with Famous Farmer, Joel Salatin

Come and celebrate David Gumpert’s newly published book, THE RAW MILK REVOLUTION!

The book takes readers behind the scenes of the government’s tough and occasionally brutal intimidation tactics, as seen through the eyes of milk producers, government regulators, scientists, prosecutors, and consumers. Following the presentations by David and Joel, there will be a book signing and reception, featuring Joel’s and David’s books. $10 per household donation suggested.

David E. Gumpert is a journalist who specializes in covering the intersection of health and business. His popular blog, www.thecompletepatient.com, has chronicled the increasingly unsettling battles over raw milk. He has authored or coauthored seven books on various aspects of entrepreneurship and business and previously been a reporter and editor with the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, and the Harvard Business Review.

Limited seating. Pre-registration requested. Register online at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/84370 Please indicate number in party via email.To register by phone or for more information contact us at info@VICFA.net, or call 434-760-5514.

Here is your invitation:

THE RAW MILK REVOLUTION

Behind America’s Emerging

Battle Over Food Rights

November 7, 6-9 pm

Piedmont Virginia Community College.

Charlottesville Virginia

BOOK SIGNING and RECEPTION

with David Gumpert and Joel Salatin.

Sponsored by:

Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association

Weston A. Price, Charlottesville Chapter

and Flavor Magazine

The book will be released on October 26, 2009. To pre-order the book visit Chelsea Green Publishing’s website.

These two men are Heroes of Sustainable Agriculture, don’t miss this chance to see and hear both of them speak.

I love that Joel Salatin is simply refered to here as "Famous Farmer".....we need a few Famous Farmers!