BestDailyRecipe

This is part one of a three post series summarizing Michael Pollan’s advice from his excellent book, In Defense of Food. The conclusions he reaches are: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. These are Pollan’s overarching guidelines for buying and eating food. But, since that’s not much to go on, our posts will deal with each in more detail. Here is “Eat Food,” a description of how to shop for food…

Eat food mostly means to eat whole food rather than processed food. If you are going to eat something processed, try to stick with those products that have minimal processing. The following will help you weed out the minimally processed from the heavily processed.

1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
2. Don’t eat anything that is incapable of spoiling - If it can’t go bad in your cupboard, it probably shouldn’t be introduced into your body!
3. Avoid food products that contain ingredients that are either unrecognizable, unpronounceable, or are greater than five in number - The number of ingredients says something about the degree of processing the product has undergone. And, if you don’t know what it is, maybe you should eat it.
4. Avoid anything that contains high fructose corn syrup
5. Avoid food products that say they are “healthy” - If a product makes a health claim, it’s probably been engineered. If it’s been engineered, it’s probably been processed extensively.
6. Focus your shopping to the edges of the supermarket and avoid the center - In most grocery stores, the whole food (fruits, vegetables, grains, meat) are on the periphery, while the center aisles are packed with processed products.
7. Try getting food from places other than the grocery store - Farmers’ markets and CSAs (community supported agriculture) provide the consumer with almost exclusively whole foods. The other advantage is that in most instances, these foods are in season and local, which means their production had a lower environmental impact than the pineapple that was shipped from out of the country.

Tags: featured, food, Nutrition, pollan