Christmas is three days past, and perhaps this is a moment to reflect on the impact of all our holiday excess. Too much spent on too much “stuff”, too much waste, too little sleep, too much alcohol and, perhaps most punishing of all, too much food of questionable value.
This is exactly the moment to curl up quietly and re-read one of my favourite – and most useful – “how-to” books: Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. Written in 2009, it is an indispensable guide on how to bring life back into equilibrium after the past week’s festive excess. It also provides a sharp blade to cut through the jumble of techno-medical babble from doctors, diet books, bloggers, influencers, government advisories and health claims that sit in tiny print on the side of food packages on every supermarket shelf.
It is an unashamedly “retro” reminder that the more we seem to have learned about our food, the less clearly we understand what is good for us and what is not. The conventional modern diet has become so dominated by edible food-like substances rather than real food that we have become less healthy the more we claim to know about nutrition.
Unsurprisingly, Pollan has over the years become the nemesis of global agribusiness and the science behind much of what is sold in supermarkets today. Between 2006 and 2013 he wrote four separate books on food – impressive for someone without any professional training in food science – before moving on to write about the science of psychedelics and the sociocultural impact of food, in particular opium, caffeine and mescaline.
Pollan complains that we have developed a food culture that reliably makes people sick, scouring over “the highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists, consisting mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no normal person keeps in the pantry.” The book is brilliant not only for its brevity but its simplicity. His 64 rules for healthy eating boil down to just seven words of plain English: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
That reminds me of the precocious simplicity of my own five-word rule for restoring control over global warming and the climate crisis: decarbonise electricity, then electrify everything. There is comfort in discovering a simple core at the heart of such monstrously complex issues, even when I acknowledge that simplicity is easier said than achieved.