Author Michael Pollan (Alia Malley).

via well.blogs.nytimes.com

I can't help liking Michael Pollan.

Following are a couple of excerpts from The New York Times' Well blog interview (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/michael-pollan-offers-64-ways-to-eat...) with him about his new book. Because I can't keep my big mouth shut, I've introduced each of quote with a couple of my own thoughts. 

When you eat a 68% bittersweet chocolate truffle, your chocolate craving is usually satisfied. Maybe you'll eat two as an indulgence. When you eat M&Ms, how many do you eat? Are you ever satisfied? (By the way, I do know how to get the cream into fluffy desserts--eclairs, anyone?! But, in keeping with Pollan's example about french fries, I only make them about once a year.)

"Q. Do you have any favorite rules besides the grandmother rule you mentioned earlier?

A.
“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” That gets at a lot of our issues. I love French fries, and I also know if I ate French fries every day it would not be a good thing. One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make. Wash the potatoes, fry potatoes, get rid of the oil, clean up the mess. If you made them yourself you’d have them about once a month, and that’s probably about right. The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them. Try to make your own Twinkie. I don’t even know if you can. I imagine it would be pretty difficult. How do you get the cream in there?"

***

I've always hated "diets," because, well, I love food. I have muddled through and found a way to cook and eat that suits me and my family. I also think the psychology of dieting is insane. And basically, dieting is a huge business that capitalizes on your failure. Gross.

"Q. Did you learn anything new yourself from the rules?

A.
What I learned the most about wasn’t so much about nutrition. I learned a lot from hearing from readers and other people who sent things in about the psychology of food. The games we play with ourselves about food, about how we confuse lots of food with lots of food experience. They’re not the same thing. You can have intense food experience with less food. Europeans have intense food experiences but eat less food. The biggest lesson I got from this is from people sharing their tricks, their psychological games and deepest feelings about food. The psychology of food is fascinating and barely understood."