My Michael Pollan Moments (s)

That Michael Pollan. The "Omnivore's Dilemma" and "Food Rules" guy had a way of ruining all the fun -- even though I know he didn't mean to do so.

Take yesterday for instance. We were out at the grocery store, and my daughter picked up a countainer of Peeps. The marshmallow sugar-crusted chicks were a bright blue, a color most certainly not found in the natural world. As we got into the car, and I eyeballed the candy, I said to her "Don't tempt me." Quickly she assured me that she hadn't bought the confection for me, but for herself.

 Until relatively recently (and I'm still not entirely rehabbed) I was a Peeps junkie. Yellow. Pink. Purple, even white. I could go through nine, or even 16 on the way home from the grocery store.  I'd seek out the sugary, spongy, sticky confections even when they were disguised as orange pumpkins or red hearts.

But Pollan, who has become the reluctant guru of the intelligentsia, has a way of making inconvenient statements. Sadly, the guy has also done a lot of research, and his conclusions make a lot of sense. "Don't eat food that your grandmother wouldn't recognize" is one of his "rules".  Now my grandma Sarah loved candy, but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't know how to identify a Peep; Eschew foods that have more than five ingredients is another one of his notions.  There are so many "food-like substances" (a Pollan term of art) in my pantry that it would take a chemist days to figure out what was in them.

I haven't quite given up Peeps yet, though I don't eat them in the enormous quantities of my younger days. Nor do I ban them from the house. But I'm trying to include more "fundamental" foods in our diets now -- which, in a household which is already meatless, becomes an dance of balancing vegetables with protein, dairy with grains. The originals, not the carbon copies. Pollan is also opposed to the "nutritionism" which has taken over our diets. Abstracting nutrients from their original contest, companies market to our obssesion with whatever particular nutrient is faddish at the time.

I'm having more and more Pollan moments, and trying to move us back to basics. One of his assertions: rather than being the object of a fetish, food is to be enjoyed. If that includes a Peep every once in a blue moon, hey, do you have a problem with that?

Pollan wouldn't. One of his rules? They are made to be broken -- now and then.

So we did.

Original Philly Moms Blog post.

When she's not hanging out waiting for her son to finish a chess game or her daughter to finish a rehearsal, Elizabeth serves as a part-time pastor at a country church and a columnist and free-lance writer for local and national publications. She blogs at Irreverent: Musings on Faith, Love, Life and Politics.

Picture of Michael Pollan courtersy of Wikimedia Commons.