64 Weeks, 64 Food Rules

This month esteemed author, food activist and professor of journalism at UC Berkeley has released to the public a pleasant little tome entitled Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. Food Rules offers advice to eaters based on Pollan's three previous works, the extremely well read and somewhat controversial Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (James Beard award winner for best food writing, one of NYTimes 5 best non-fiction books of 2006), Botany of Desire (discussing the co-evolution of plant and animal species), and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (explores the Western diet, our cultural relationship to it and the resulting effect of the food industrial complex created around it).

Nearly everyone I know has read Pollan, his articles, Omnivore's Dilemma, commentary about Pollan's theories, and commentary about the commentary. Personally, I found Omnivore's Dilemma (which I listened to as an audio book and turn to as reference OG book style many times) overwhelming. What is the answer to the whole food movement? How do I adjust and easily access the right meat, steer clear of too much corn in my diet, and pre-plan my life to avoid the pitfalls of industrialized and fast food? The very idea of encompassing all that Pollan expounds upon is utterly confounding. However, we as good readers, followers of media and informed eaters understand his theories to be sound and ideas to be well thought. Pollan is folk hero, media darling, a whole food protagonist of Leopold Bloom-ian proportions.

Food Rules excites me. It answers the question above, how does the average Joe (or Josephine) live in response to the style of consumption Pollan calls for? Food Rules is the condensation of all that Pollan expounds upon in his previous works. A set of rules to adopt for eating. Factored down to its smallest prime is the suggestion, "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants". The pamphlet-esque Food Rules explains this advice in three sections; advising the reader what Pollan considers food, what kinds of food one should eat, and how much. Sixty-four rules altogether. Let me qualify that by saying that in the introduction Pollan suggests adopting one rule from each section permanently. Finding a rule approach method to eating nothing new (eating for athleticism in my teens, vegetarianism in my twenties, Atkins diet in my thirties and so on), and wanting a new way to approach both eating and food blogging, I plan to go the distance.

Sixty-four rules in sixty-four weeks. One rule a week. Two meals per week as exceptions to the rule planned in advance. A normal life, complicated, hectic, spontaneous, uncertain, celebrational, stressful, and any other adjective one could think of to describe the modern condition. And this blog. How does each rule, one by one, affect my eating and all the other activities that occur in one's life around eating; the planned and the unplanned, cooking, dining out, travel, time with colleagues and clients, husband and family.

A food journey in sixty-four weeks. Sixty-four food rules.