Food Rules by Michael Pollan

My sister recommended this book to me and I loved it! I enjoyed it so much that I have since added The Omnivore's Dilemma to my To Be Read list.

This book is very short and easy to read. The rules inside it are simple enough to follow, but at the same time, brilliant in their simplicity. These are in most cases rules that we intrinsically all know, but in our rush for speed and convenience in our daily lives, we conveniently forget.

Some of these are rules that I have heard before. One of my favorites is to shop the peripheries at the grocery store. If you are doing that, you are buying fresh fruits, vegetables and meat instead of processed food that is unhealthy for you.

Other rules were new to me, but seem like simple common sense in retrospect - for example, eat only those foods that your great-grandmother would recognize as food. I used to buy my children gogurt to eat. They loved it and it was what I thought of as a healthy snack for the beach. After all, how can you go wrong with frozen yogurt? The answer is easily when you consider the packaging, the possibility for leaching dangerous chemicals into the yogurt after it has been frozen. Never again will we buy that particular kind of frozen yogurt.

Finally, I guess my favorite rule was "Real food doesn't come through the window of your car." We all know that fast food isn't healthy for us, but for the sake of convenience, we still eat it. Now, after further investigation, I know that not only is fast food not a healthy choice for my family, it is also an inhumane choice for the animals who share our planet. I'm McHating It, and I hope you are too. Do your family a favor - read this book. It isn't any time commitment at all, and like me, you will be glad you did.

I cook more, the foods I choose are healthier, and I have stopped engaging in practices that are bad for me, bad for the animals and bad for my planet. I thank my sister for recommending this book!