Food Rules

I have written about Michael Pollan before and no doubt will do so again because food is a proper subject for a running blog and he is one of the best writers on the subject.

He is probably most famous for ‘In Defence of Food’ with its seven word piece of dietary advice: ‘eat food, mostly plants, not very much’. He also coined the phrase ‘edible foodlike substances’ for a lot of things that fill our supermarket shelves. So in 10 words he has said most of what you need to know about nutrition.

Of course there is more to it than that and sometimes you need a book to explain what those word mean but his rules for eating are basically very simple and self-explanatory:

· Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?"
· Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
· Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
· It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," . Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'
· Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love.

(The only amendment I would make would be to substitute ‘a great grandmother’ for my great grandmother, who I am sure would not have recognised all the exotic fruit and vegetables we now take for granted).

My excuse for bringing this up again is that he has just published another book with more pithy advice on eating. (Food Rules) uses maxims gathered from readers of the New York Times to guide us on our way and make us think about the way we live. The background to the project is explained here and some examples are here. None of them are as good as Pollan’s original seven words but many of them are successful in condensing a way of living into a simple rule of thumb, and that is always pleasing.

I am struck between the parallels of writing about food and writing about running. Essentially all you need to know can be distilled into very few words. Running and eating are both things the species has been doing very well since its inception (otherwise we wouldn’t be here), so we only need to be reminded of a few simple rules. But for both there are shelves full of literature (more for food, obviously, but the comparison still holds), ranging from science to anecdotes, encyclopaedias to top tips. In both cases the interested reader is happy to continue reading essentially the same information presented in different ways with new twists and find it fascinating and inspiring. In both cases there are lessons that can be directly applied,

In more than one way running and food are deeply entwined.