Unhappy Meals · Thursday February 1, 2007
I posted this link over in the sidebar, but it’s one of the most well-written and deeply meaningful essays I’ve read in a while, so I thought it deserved a bit more emphasis. The piece is Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Thanks to Inside Owl for directing me toward this.
Academia generally lacks this type of popular yet powerful writing. So get in:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
← Previous entry: 2007 Arrives
→ Next entry: Clean Lungs
