How to Eat Food

Choosing what I eat every day has become a bit of a process, since my mom dropped In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan in my lap. Since letting the information in Pollan’s wonderful book (he is a genius, in my opinion) soak in I have made a conscious effort to take the time to eat meals, read what is in the “foods” I buy, and avoid being caught up in the food fads of late.


Step one: eat meals. At a table and everything, candle light optional. These once prevalent sit-down-with- the-family meals have been lost to the ever-fast, ever-easy snack food. Besides, who has the time to cook? Our lives are packed from sun up to sun down with friends, family, school, work, and kids. This may be why one-fifth of eating done by American adults now happens in their cars! Entrées that are pre-made and need only to be nuked are what more and more people are reaching for. A package that says “to-go” on the front sells a product. Try counting how many food products you see with “to-go” labels on them next time your doing some grocery shopping if you don’t believe me! You may be asking yourself, what can one do to stop all the snacking madness? The answer is simple. Cook. Get a cook book, or crack open the one your mom got you when you moved out. Make a point to try and make something at least once a day. Trust me, cooking meals is like Pringles (only far healthier), once you start, you can’t stop.


Healthier food is food that is comprised of a few identifiable ingredients. One’s that you can both pronounce and trace it’s roots. For instance, my once favorite breakfast food of all time, Malt-o-Meal, has something in it called ferric orthophosphate. I can pronounce this one, if I read it slowly, but where does it come from? What is it made out of? I think it’s safe to assume then that whatever it is, it was made in a laboratory, so is likely a chemical. And there are dozens of these unpronounceable, unidentifiable ingredients in the food products we eat. Bread, a once simple food, can be made with flour, yeast, water, and a pinch each of salt and sugar; five ingredients. While buying bread recently, the fewest ingredients I counted in one loaf of bread was 21. In 1938 there was an rule passed by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that made it so if a food product only resembled a standardized food, then that product must be labeled “imitation.” The rule was repealed by the FDA in 1973, but if it were still in effect today I think we would have very little food (and defiantly no bread) in our stores that would be without said label. Alas, even without those handy labels, we can choose our food using a simple rule: If your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, don’t buy it.


Another food guideline, if you will, is to avoid foods with health claims. These are food products that your great grandmother surely would not recognize. Fat-free, low-carb, high-fiber, low-cholestoral, sugar-free. The hyphens have taken over. As a general rule, when one thing is removed or added to a food, another thing is removed or added. For example, a food product that has been made fat-free is full of sugar, because removing the fat also removes the flavor, and so the sugar is used to give it a better taste. A second reason to avoid these health claims is that they are normally just a fad. Take margarine. A while back it was packed with trans-fats and said to be the healthier alternative to butter. Instead, it gave people heart attacks. Consider also the low-carb fad of today. Not many people know that the once popular “healthy” diet was low-fat, high-carb. Before that, sugar was the enemy. A man who lived through and followed those health fads said that after all his years of being stingy with the maple syrup on his pancakes, he was surprised to learn that he should have been worried about the butter. Now a days, however, he would be avoiding his carbohydrate loaded short-stack all together. It just goes to show that health claims do not make a food healthy.


At risk of sounding like one of those children from Reading Rainbow, if you want to know what is really going on with the “foods” in your grocery store, stop by your local library and check out Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food today.