Good Stuff

Here are the first three paragraphs of the most useful and informative thing I’ve read in (quite literally) years:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

The article, “Unhappy Meals,” appeared in last weekend’s NYT Magazine, and by God, the NYT does get some things right once in a while. When Michael Pollan (the author) says he wants to keep things going for “a few thousand more words” he isn’t exaggerating. Not at all. But those “few thousand” words are well worth the time you’ll invest to read them, if you choose to do so. I hope you do.

The article is long, and as such, isn’t suitable for reading at work on your coffee break. I’m not a terribly fast reader and I tend to pause often to consider something, anything, that’s been said, or to chase a link, if I’m reading on-line. That said, I think I read the whole thing in about 45 minutes. And then I saved the web page for future reference. As I opened with: this is the best, most useful article I’ve read in years. I really mean that.

And another thing, apropos of this article: I owe The Second Mrs. Pennington an apology. She’s been going on for years about the virtues of healthy eating, and I tended to smile gratuitously and nod my head up and down, all the while thinking she’d gone over the edge. (That was back in Former Happy Days; we don't talk at all now.) And, in a small way, it was true…the bit about going over the edge. But that’s TSMP, in her very own, inimitable way. She’ll grab hold of something and ride it for all it’s worth, sometimes often to excess. But she was right about this one.

I apologize, Paula.

(Not that she’ll ever know, but hey...I’m on the record. Publicly, even.)