Depending on from where you are approaching Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, the author has either finely distilled his exhaustive research on the industrial food chain and North America’s often counter-intuitive eating habits into approachable, easily digestible rules to govern food choices—or he has severely dumbed down his message. If you’ve read Pollan’s previous works, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, the staunch rules and brief explanations in Food Rules strip Pollan’s key insights of their elegant urgency. If you are a Pollan neophyte, his “Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly plants” axiom outlined —again—here in a kind of point-form can’t be dismissed as hollow, even if it has been better served in previous publications.
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2010.