Original Anti-Diet: Toggling Between Pollan and McCann

Joy!

The all-new Anti-Diet (ebook format) is now cuddled on my Kindle close to one of my food heroes, Michael Pollan.  I can toggle between Food Rules and my book to places where the man who coined “edible foodlike substances” (Pollan, loc 180) and I are on precisely the same page.  He’s referring to camera-ready products with a binge baked into them, the so-called foods that make your body long for the real thing and keep on eating even if you’re full.  I say that besides perpetuating cravings, they desensitize and render you numb to your needs (McCann, loc 216).

Pollan declares that he is “not antiscience.” He has “made good use of science,” and only wishes remind us how successfully humans have managed to nourish themselves “for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it” (Pollan, loc 164).    

I love Pollan for that!  Pop over to my Introduction, where I encourage readers to trust the “fantastic equipment” we are born with, a “complex biological, neurological and psychological system” that has kept most of us healthy “since we rose up on two feet” (McCann, loc 37).  And while I call my book, The Anti-Diet, I confess to an ingrained awareness of caloric intake.  I too read food labels for content and seek the most bang for my nutritional buck. 

Yes!  I prefer to “eat foods that will eventually rot” (Pollan, loc 313).

Yes!  I “avoid food products with the wordoid ‘lite’ or the terms ‘low-fat’ or ‘non-fat’ in their names” (Pollan, loc 202).  Indeed, I stand in the aisle and laugh out loud at the fat free labels on strawberry jam that has never harbored so much as a nano-gram of any oil or butter in all its days. 

Pollan’s Food Rules is a pleasure to read and his simple admonition to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” (Pollan, loc 155) is a model to live by – exactly what I hope my book will grow up to be. 

My “rules” take a few more words, but are just as flexible: “Eat everything you want. Eat nothing you don’t want. Eat only when you are hungry. Eat only what you really want. Stop when you are full” (McCann, loc 952).

  

OMG, this is fun!