"Food rules" for Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan -- author of the excellent In Defense of Food, which I'm in the middle of reading -- asked for people's "food rules."

New York Times readers gave over 2,500 of them in the comments of this blog post.

Do you think it's someone's job to read all of these? I just made it through the first page of comments, and here are a few I liked:

My main food rule is “cook your own food from scratch.” This was as much a food rule growing up in my family as it was a budget rule. Same for “eat your vegetables.” I threw out “clean your plate,” though.

— Heather

If I can pronounce all of the ingredients and can create a mental picture of the ingedients in a food, then I eat it. If I cannot, then I do not eat it.

— Jessica Neece

Our rule is simple: fresh food, varied meals, portion control. It’s a variant of Julia Child’s reaction to food fetishism, a French truth: pretty much anything is ok as long as it is real food and as long as we eat all kinds of foods routinely.

— hazbin

When the children were little, it was 7 vegetables at each dinner (garlic and herbs counted, for example, and two kinds of mushrooms = two vegetables). Now that we’re only grownups at home, we rely on local organic grocers and farmers’ markets for seasonal products and a little color on the dinner plate, but are no longer doctrinal about the 7-veg rule.

— Demington

Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

— DS

If man didn’t eat it 10,000 years ago you shouldn’t eat it now.

— Greg

If you love to eat but hate to cook, marry someone who enjoys cooking. It will provide a lifetime of happier, healthier eating. (And cleaning up the kitchen burns calories.)

— Jessica Rodocker

If you haven’t been to the farm where it’s from and seen how they treat their animals you shouldn’t been eating it.

— John Deserio

(Shallots photo by Don LaVange.)