Poutine Rules

Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) has a new little book, Food Rules, offering sixty-four short dietary guidelines with a paragraph of explanation. (His October piece in the New York Times Magazine explains more about the project, and it has a neat visualization of reader-submitted rules, to boot.)

A piece he wrote for the Huffington Post yesterday excerpted a few of the rules:

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day. The french fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes -- and cleaning up the mess. If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them -- chances are good it won't be every day.

I like Michael Pollan but have to respectfully disagree with this one: Now that Jack has a mandoline (no, not a mandolin), he can get something like poutine on the table in twenty minutes.