Oh, for....
Another annoying recommendation from Michael Pollan in second lengthy extract from his book in today's Guardian G2:
Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food
Why your great-grandmother? Because at this point your mother, and possibly even your grandmother, are as confused as the rest of us; to be safe we need to go back at least a couple generations, to a time before the advent of most modern foods. Some nutritionists recommend going back even further. John Yudkin, a British nutritionist whose early alarms about the dangers of refined carbohydrates were overlooked in the 60s and 70s, once advised: "Just don't eat anything your Neolithic ancestors wouldn't have recognised and you'll be OK."
Well, that's extra-virgin olive oil out (in ggma's day probably only used for external application and bought in wee bottles of the purified variety from a local chemist), avocados, aubergines, courgettes, mangetout and sugar snap peas (she'd probably have recognised, but recoiled in horror from, garlic), a wide range of condiments that are (or can be) perfectly organic and okay, just for starters.
It also overlooks pretty much the whole of food history, which has been fairly massively about either introducing or importing Stuff That Wasn't Native.
It does feel a bit as though his next recommendation will be to junk one's washing machine and go back to the washboard and dolly-peg, if not bashing one's washing on the rocks by the local river and laying it out on bleaching greens to dry.