michael pollan

5 Books About Veganism
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So You Want to Go Vegan? Here Are 5 Books to Help

From full-blown meat eaters to even vegetarians, once you decide you want to adopt a vegan diet, there's a lot of learning that takes place.
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5 Books About Veganism

From full-blown meat eaters to even vegetarians, once you decide you want to adopt a vegan diet, there's a lot of learning that takes place. Being a vegan not only requires a shift in your food selections, but it also requires a lifestyle change. An extension of vegetarianism, a vegan refrains from consuming animal products and avoids products that contain any ingredients from animals. Whether you're going vegan for the betterment of your health, for the environment, or because of your love for animals, here are some books to help you in your quest.

The Kind Diet Becoming Vegan Food Rules The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions Veganist
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Low-Calorie Lunch Featuring Summer Produce, Jason Mraz No Longer Vegan, Michael Pollan Shopping Tips, & More
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Foodie Friday Link Time

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How to Build a Burrito Bar and Other Food News
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Yummy Links: From Burritos to Rhubarb Bread Pudding

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Yummy Links: From Gail Simmons to Michael Pollan
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Yummy Links: From Gail Simmons to Michael Pollan

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A Preview of Michael Pollan's Newest Book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual
healthy living

Michael Pollan Schools Us on Eating Well

A great way to start off the new year is to pick up Michael Pollan's latest book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual ($7).
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A Preview of Michael Pollan's Newest Book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

A great way to start off the new year is to pick up Michael Pollan's latest book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual ($7). Food Rules contains 64 rules to live by when it comes to eating, like rule number 19: If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

Each rule goes back to Pollan's basic tenet, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," and is humorous, simple, and memorable. Pollan is a must read if you're interested in changing your dietary habits, and Food Rules is a quick and accessible peek into the food guru's larger manifesto. Recently, he shared a few of his rules with The Huffington Post — give them a look before you sit down to your next meal.

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Rule #36: Don't Eat Breakfast Cereals That Change the Color of the Milk Rule #11: Avoid Foods You See Advertised on Television Rule #58: Do All Your Eating at a Table Rule #39: Eat All the Junk Food You Want as Long as You Cook It Yourself Rule #47: Eat When You Are Hungry, Not When You Are Bored
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Michael Pollan's Food Rules
Diet

Michael Pollan's Food Rules to Live By

I've had a crush on Michael Pollan for a while now, and though the specifics of his food manifesto may be hard for everyone to adopt, I think his basic rules are ones to live by: Eat food.
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I've had a crush on Michael Pollan for a while now, and though the specifics of his food manifesto may be hard for everyone to adopt, I think his basic rules are ones to live by: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (And processed food is not food.)

Whenever finishing a book or essay by Pollan, I always walk away with a new food rule myself. I was excited to see that in this year's annual New York Times Magazine food issue, Pollan turns the tables, asking what food rules we the readers live by.

There were thousands of submissions, and of those, Pollan picked the ones he felt made the most sense for a healthy life. What I found interesting was what he said about the ones he didn't use, "a banquet of food policies that even when they made little, if any, nutritional sense . . . nevertheless opened a window on our current thinking about food: the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play and the taboos we invoke to organize our eating lives."

I've been guilty of this myself — eating something "healthy" when it was nothing more than processed crap.

Learn a simple rule when you read more

Must See Movie: Food, Inc.
Food

Must See Movie: Food, Inc.

With the amount of food recalls seeming to grown annually, it is easy to feel that our food system in the US is broken, and after watching the 94 minute documentary Food, Inc., you learn that it truly is.
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With the amount of food recalls seeming to grown annually, it is easy to feel that our food system in the US is broken, and after watching the 94 minute documentary Food, Inc., you learn that it truly is.

From the opening shots of the supermarket, we begin to learn how corn and the fast food industry have changed the way Americans both grow and eat food. While the movie repeats many of the facts from Michael Pollan's informative book, In Defense of Food, the facts are just as interesting the second time around. Food, Inc. also delves deeper into the chemical giant Monsanto and its role in destroying the family farm from the seeds on up. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation shares the narrator role with Pollan, and these two tear down the food industrial food system starting with corn and moving quickly to the meat industry. The film is peppered with interviews with farmers — chicken, corn, and soy — whose lives have been dramatically altered by multinational corporations' interest in commanding the food chain. The film is disturbing to say the least, but it ends with tales from Polyface farm, a family operation that makes food seem wholesome again. I left the theater charged up to make changes not only in my daily diet, but to petition the government to give power back to their regulatory arms, the USDA and FDA, to help keep our food supply safe. The Food, Inc. website has a petition to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act. After watching this documentary, you may never look at food the same way again.

Check out the trailer after the break.

Food, Inc. Movie Trailer
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Food, Inc. Film Exposes Problems With US Food Consumption

In addition to being captured in photos by National Geographic, the sustainable food crisis is also the focus of a new documentary.
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In addition to being captured in photos by National Geographic, the sustainable food crisis is also the focus of a new documentary. Magnolia Pictures' Food, Inc. is a call to action to change the way America eats. It discusses food consumption today, its heavy dependence on corn, its ties to national policy, and its inevitable impact on our nation's health.

Based on the book Food, Inc. (and similar to The Omnivore's Dilemma), the premise of this film appears to be similar: the country's food system, with its focus on making food bigger, cheaper, and faster, is making America sick. The movie also addresses the contamination issues plaguing the nation and the enormous power wielded by US food corporations, with sustainable food poster boys Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser making appearances in the documentary.

If you haven't seen it yet, below is the trailer for the film, which debuts in select cities June 12. Do you think this documentary will prove to be as influential as proponents are hoping it to be? Will you go see it?

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Will Obama Change the Country's Food System?
Politics

Will Obama Change the Country's Food System?

With President-Elect Barack Obama taking office in two months, changes to our country's economy, national security, and foreign policy are imminent.
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With President-Elect Barack Obama taking office in two months, changes to our country's economy, national security, and foreign policy are imminent. But will America's agricultural system change with Obama in the White House as well? In an interview last month with Time magazine's Joe Klein, Obama commented on a recent article in the New York Times written by Michael Pollan, the country's preeminent critic of modern factory agriculture, saying:

Our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.

With Obama in the process of selecting new members for his administration, activists have begun circulating a petition for the new president to appoint Michael Pollan as the country's new Secretary of Agriculture. Do you agree with Obama's remarks that the country's food system is in need of reform? Do you believe this is the beginning of a new agricultural era for the United States?

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Must Read: In Defense of Food from Michael Pollan
weekend reading

Weekend Reading: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

I have a new food bible.
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I have a new food bible. It is not written by a chef, a nutritionist or a dietitian, but a journalist. The irony of dispensing nutritional advice as a journalist is not lost on the author of In Defense of Food ($21), Michael Pollan.
He actively wonders throughout this great little book on the circumstances that led food, the sustenance of life, to become so vulnerable that it needed to be defended from bad government policy and bad science. The complexities of government politics and macronutrients lead the US population down a slippery slope of very processed low fat foods.

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