Oh, for....

[oursin]

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 foodWhy 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

Comments

[sam_t]

Er, has anyone else been listening to the recent Radio 4 series on food adulteration? Because I can pronounce 'white lead' and 'pepper dust', and my great-grandmother may well have eaten them, but that doesn't mean I have to.

[sam_t]

Should have been an 'or previous generations', there.

[green_knight]

I'm fairly certain my great-grandmother would have recognised tinned food...

And from what I know about one of them, she strikes me as having been adventurous enough to try new spices and vegetables. (Anyone who was born in the old world, settled in Maine and travelled to Yosemite on a holiday ought not to be afraid of strange food)

[coughingbear]

It's bizarre, isn't it? So I'd only be able to eat garlic if, say, I'd had a French great-grandmother, because like you I doubt my English great-grandparents would have had much time for it. One set kept a fish and chip shop for a while; I'm not sure if he would consider that food under his rules. Nor, perhaps, the parsnip wine another great-grandmother used to make.

[richenda]

Oh I knew that you were a good person to have around (when I first joined LJ) but had no idea that you were so splendid as to have a fish and chip shop in the family!
I didn't eat chips for ten years of my life, because I couldn't find anyone who cooked them to the dtandard I require - so I'd love to have a chip shop in the family

[hafren]

I have no idea what any of my great-grandmothers ate - I never met any of them.

He said something in his last article along the lines of "fats good carbs bad" which sounded ominously like Atkins. That was a rubbish diet that restricted fruit while one binged on animal fats and developed appalling bad breath. And I do believe Atkins died obese, so either he found it as joyless and impossible as most would, or the bloody thing didn't even work...

I also find "eat plants" irritatingly unspecific - if that includes fruit I might be ok, but not if he means veg, since I hate almost anything with green leaves.

[nineveh_uk]

Yum, deadly nightshade.

[oursin]

Lovely, lovely fly agaric!

[nineveh_uk]

Though it's tricky to keep a reindeer in a back-to-back.

[clanwilliam]

So that's soda bread, bacon, potatoes, salt and tea.

Gosh, yes, I can see he's right. That's the healthiest diet ever!

[parthenia14]

You're lucky, I'm down to mince, cabbage, potatoes, white bread and sweeties; still, it's all washed down with Bell's whisky so I'm all right.

Perhaps he's thinking of some Universal Mediterranean great-grandmother.

[clanwilliam]

Well, great-granny would have had access to vegetables too - especially winter ones.

Oh, and that diet is the healthy one. I dread to think what the other one was eating in the East End of London...