We spend only 9.7% of our income on food, a smaller share than any other nation. Americans are as addicted to cheap food as we are to cheap oil. It’s found only in the pantry of the food scientist, and that’s not who you want cooking your meals. Besides, what chef uses high-fructose corn syrup? Not one. Is HFCS any worse for you than sugar? Probably not, but by avoiding it you’ll avoid thousands of empty calories and perhaps even more important, cut out highly processed foods–the ones that contain the most sugar, fat and salt. Though HFCS was not part of the human diet until 1975, each of us now consumes more than 40 lbs.
It’s not just in cereals and soft drinks but also in ketchup and bologna, baked goods, soups and salad dressings. Eat food, not food products.Īvoid foods containing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). She was right: the trans-fatty margarine is killing us. My mother used to predict “they” would eventually discover that butter was better for you.
History suggests you might want to wait a few decades or so before adding such novelties to your diet, the substitution of margarine for butter being the classic case in point. Those aren’t foods, quite they’re food products. Imagine how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket: the epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt, the preternaturally fresh Twinkies, the vaguely pharmaceutical Vitamin Water. Along the way, I’ve collected a few rules of thumb that may be useful in navigating what I call the Omnivore’s Dilemma.ĭon’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. My aim was simply to figure out what–as a nutritional, ethical, political and environmental matter–I should eat. I’ve spent the past five years exploring this daunting food landscape, following the industrial food chain from the Happy Meal back to the not-so-happy feedlots in Kansas and cornfields in Iowa where it begins and tracing the organic food chain back to the farms. But Mom’s influence over the dinner menu has proved no match for the $36 billion in food-marketing dollars ($10 billion directed to kids alone) designed to get us to eat more, eat all manner of dubious neofoods, and create entire new eating occasions, such as in the car. Culture in this case is just a fancy way of saying “your mom.” She taught us what to eat, when to eat it, how much of it to eat, even the order in which to eat it. Once upon a time Americans had a culture of food to guide us through the increasingly treacherous landscape of food choices: fat vs. Six Rules For Eating Wisely By Michael Pollan
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