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FOOD RULES

Name: FOOD RULES
Author: Michael Pollan
ISBN: 978-1-59420-308-4

AN EATER'S MANUAL

by Michael Pollan & illustrated by Maira Kalman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

A pleasure for foodies and a fine gift for anyone who prizes a good meal—but maybe not if that person works for General...

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What should you eat? How should you eat it? Pollan, doyen of all things food-related, serves up the answers in this jauntily illustrated version of his 2009 book.

Whether Kalman’s innocent, pleasantly goofy sketches (similar to those of Roz Chast) add much to the proceedings will be a matter for the beholder’s eye. Much more serious, even with a few playful moments, is Pollan’s text, which opens with a stinging denunciation of the state of nutrition science (it’s “today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650”). And what should we eat? The author’s answer is simple on its face: food. The answer takes on complexity as his rules elaborate on it: Food, by his reckoning, has fewer than three ingredients of which sugar is not the first, is mostly vegetable and would be recognizable to your great-grandmother as, well, food. Much of the overprocessing, oversweetening and generally over-everything of our current diet, writes the author, is a fairly recent development. Pollan finds good guidance in the grandmotherly saw, “Better to pay the grocer than the doctor,” and he advises paying more for better food and getting away from the problematic Western diet that yields so much obesity, heart disease, diabetes and kindred maladies. He recommends the wisdom in the French Je n’ai plus faim, “I’m not hungry anymore,” as opposed to the English “I’m full.” (You want healthy? Then eat to 80 percent of capacity. Don’t get full.) But Pollan usually avoids preachiness, and he closes with the most welcome admonition of all—to let down your guard every now and again and have some fun with a piece of pizza or greasy fistful of cheeseburger.

A pleasure for foodies and a fine gift for anyone who prizes a good meal—but maybe not if that person works for General Mills or in the advertising biz.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-59420-308-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011

Categories:

HEALTH & FITNESS

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by Michael Pollan

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by Michael Pollan

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GETTING OVER GETTING OLDER

AN INTIMATE JOURNEY

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1996

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Yet another feminist offers an up-close and personal examination of trekking into middle age. Pogrebin's (Deborah, Golda, and Me, 1991, etc.) friends groaned when they heard she was writing about aging; how depressing, they thought. Readers may groan as well at the prospect of another paean to growing older. But Pogrebin, now 56, brings some fresh insights to the process, particularly in a discussion of what time means once you're over the hill. Pogrebin places herself in that small cohort born between 1932, when FDR was elected president, and 1945, the end of WW II. She labels this group ``the Roosevelt babies,'' calling them (and herself) ``unself-conscious trailblazers,'' mapping the territory of longevity for the Boomers. ``Time is all there is,'' she says, so don't hoard it or waste it trying to recapture youth. ``Use it or lose it'' is but one piece of T-shirt advice that she passes along, in company with poetry and observations from May Sarton, Simone de Beauvoir, and feminist peers from her early years at Ms. magazine. Often setting herself apart from what she views as the unrelentingly positive feminist party line on aging, she hails the value of nostalgia in a section on memory and praises diet, exercise, and hormone replacement therapy in chapters on the aging body. She also speculates on whether the public discouse on menopause will stigmatize older women as the mysteries of menstruation and PMS once kept young women in their place. In the end, Pogrebin is reconciled to the idea of dying, if not to the fact of death. While there is undeniably much that is thoughtful and useful in this volume, it's often buried in anecdotes about family and friends less interesting to general readers than to the author.