Kelly Rossiter
DCL
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. There it is, the elegant, pared down premise of Michael Pollan's brilliantly written book In Defense of Food. So why, I ask myself, couldn't he leave it well enough alone? Mr. Pollan has just published a very slim book entitled Food Rules: An Eater's Manual and I am scratching my head and cynically wondering what he and his publishers had in mind, other than raking in a bit more money from rehashing this hot topic and cashing in on Mr. Pollan's (well earned) reputation. It seems to be working, because it took me 3 days and visits to four bookstores before I could find a place where it wasn't sold out.
I took this book with me to my piano lesson, because I like to arrive a bit early and read and be calm and collected at the beginning of my lesson. I managed to get to rule number 54 out of 64 before the student ahead of me got up from the piano, which took about 20 minutes. This is material for a magazine article, not a book and close to half of the 139 pages are almost blank. Not only that, there is a certain amount of cutting and pasting straight out of In Defense of Food, such as Rule #2 - Don't Eat Anything Your Grandmother Wouldn't Recognize as Food, which I loved the first time around. Some new entries include # 18 - Don't Ingest Foods Made in Places Where Everyone is Required to Wear a Surgical Cap and # 20 It Isn't Food If It Arrived Through the Window of Your Car. But these ideas are covered in the previous book, and this just seems like so much stretching of material.
I suppose, working for an environmental website as I do, that I should be happy that Mr. Pollan is reusing and recycling so much in this book, but I just felt, well, used. There is still an important message here, to be sure. Mr. Pollan makes some cogent arguments about what we eat, and why we eat it. I am in complete agreement with his ideas about shopping, about the kind of food we eat, and about treating our food as more than fuel. This book is the bare bones of his premise, with the science and nutrition information removed, and that may be exactly what you are looking for. If you have read in Defense of Food, don't bother with this one, there isn't anything substantive that is new. If you haven't read In Defense of Food, my suggestion is to go out and buy it and get the whole thing.
