Jeremy and I picked up the latest Michael Pollan book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual this weekend which we intend to pass onto his mom who showed an interest in it after watching Oprah.  We took a quick peak at it the night we bought it, and by quick peak I mean we read the whole book out loud in about an hour while making dinner.  If you haven’t heard already, it expands on the list of rules he originally published in In Defense of Food – eat food, mostly plants, not too much.  There is a brief paragraph or two explanation of each rule following, and a total of 64 rules.

Our favorite rule was rule 57, “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”  And our favorite quote came from rule 8, “Avoid food products that make health claims,”  with the quote, “Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”  We are doing pretty well overall on the rules, the one we are going to try to do more of is rule 43,  “Have a glass of wine with dinner”  (the sacrifices we are willing to make for our health).  Jeremy was particularly smug about the rules relating to eating slowly, because he is probably the world’s slowest eater, and has been teased a lot because of it.  Rule 3 is “Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry,” as one example he lists xantham gum which we currently have an entire bag of in our pantry… I guess we are no ordinary humans.  (We have xantham gum because it is used in gluten free baking often).

If you have read In Defense of Food, there isn’t any new information here, but if you are looking for a concise list of rules he thinks you should follow you’ll find it here.   It is a pretty entertaining read, with some funny old sayings to help you remember what to do, and is also in paperback for $5.00 brand new.

My book club decided to read Harvest for Hope by Jane Goodall recently and I was somewhat afraid it wouldn’t have too much new information for me that I didn’t already read about in Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, or Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  But I was surprised that there is still a lot about our current food environment that I don’t know.  The book is actually only partially written by Jane Goodall, if you aren’t familiar with her, she is the woman famous for living with and studying chimpanzees in Africa.  The book has two other contributing writers and  at times it does read like it has multiple authors.  The tone of the work is inconsistent and it doesn’t always flow together in a natural way, there are also things repeated in the book multiple times as if it is the first time they are mentioned.

The book has brief overviews on a lot of different interesting topics.  I was actually glad I’d already read some of the other books on this subject because I felt at times like Harvest for Hope assumed you had a good understanding of things and brushed over the details on several of the topics. On the other hand, this book did introduce me to several topics I had not thought much about previously, one of which being the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food today.  While the book gave a pretty good overview of GMOs, it definitely left me wanting to find out more for myself.

Overall, I would start with other books if you haven’t read much on this subject, but if you have already read Omnviore’s Dilemma and others like it and want a brief overview on GMO’s, water quality, the impact of fishing on the environment or some of the other subjects she discusses, it might be worth picking up.  The book also has a pretty extensive list of resources in the back that I found helpful to find out more information.

P. S. Sorry for the lack of posts this week, I was out of town all weekend and got back Sunday night.  And now our baby has a cold and an ear infection!