How to shuck an oyster

Dunno about you, but I am a sucker for rules. Love ‘em.

Not so much the ones involving denial and effort and sacrifice (ew) but still, a book of rules nonetheless gives me lots of comfort. I used to love how-to-write rules when I first started out in fiction – it feels lovely and safe to be told what to do and when to do it – but now they seem rather limited and dull, and very often incorrect.

Now I’m sure it’s the same with food ‘rules’, but until I discover the flaws in them myself, I am pretty keen on the idea of my mate Michael Pollan’s new book,  Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. It sounds like a kind of precis of everything he’s done on food so far, prompted, he says, by doctors who say they wish they had a summary of his earlier books to hand to patients who eat garbage. Pollan writes:

Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say “you can’t imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food.” So rather than leaving his heart patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome meals out of it — a very different way of thinking about health.

Nice one, doc.

Anyhoo, I am keen on these rules, possibly partly because Pollan is such an engaging writer and his remarks on food are sensible and witty. We saw him speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival a while ago, where he invoked one of his very first rules: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.” To demonstrate this, he had an array of supermarket ‘food products’ on the table before him, and raised a long, pink, thick, phallus-shaped object up for the audience to view.

“Would your great-grandma,” he asked slyly, “know how to administer this to her body?”

Turns out it was some kind of ‘yoghurt drink’ encased in plastic.

Anyhoo, despite the Empress’s chiding (she thinks we already know all this stuff and don’t need books to tell us), I couldn’t resist and bought Food Rules. It’s a nice slender little mini-paperback, and the Empress is right – we already know this stuff. However, there are still some nice bits and bobs, like this one: “Be the kind of person who takes supplements – then skip the supplements”. Meaning:

..people who take supplements are generally healthier than the rest of us, and we also know that in controlled studies most of the supplements they take don’t appear to be effective. how can this be? Supplement takers are healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with the pills. They’re typically more health conscious, better educated, and more affluent. They’re also more likely to exercise and eat whole grains.

And so on. Lots of stuff like that. And for the gutsers and food-bolters among us (hmm, who could that be?), very good advice: “Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it” and “Serve a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds.” That last is the killer in our house …

Our only real rule in this house is that we don’t eat any processed food (I guess rice crackers are processed, but you know …) but that’s because we love to eat and cook; it’s for reasons of pleasure, not denial.

Anyway – check it out if you can be bothered, or check out the Sydney Morning Herald’s own version by Jill Dupleix apropos of the Pollan book. I like this and lots of the comments too. And if you have any eating rules you live by, do share, won’t you?