Authors@Google: Michael Pollan

The main point of this video is is that corporations make lousy cooks. I liked it and I hope you watch the whole thing including the Q&A at the end. The presentation starts out with a rebuttal of the food science industry, which I think is a little oversimplified, but becomes an argument against corporate food and a commentary on social values and the economy.

My notes:

• Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants
• Don't anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food
• Shop the perimeter of the grocery store, it's the food that is least fiddled with.
• Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
• Don't food with more than 5 ingredients.
• Don't eat food with ingredients you can't pronounce.
• Don't eat food with high fructose corn syrup because it's a marker of highly processed food.
• Get out of the supermarket and go to farmer's market.
• Eat slower.
• Eat until you're 80% full.
• Don't eat alone.
• Don't get your food where your car does.
• Eat for pleasure and community and health will follow.
• This costs money and time. At least 20% more expensive. Related to that, the real cost of a 99 cent hamburger has been externalized to the environment and health system.
• The government has fixed the system in favor of processed food through things like corn & soy crop subsidies.
• It's hard to make money selling simple things.
• Those of us who can afford to vote with our forks should. Spend more eat less.
• Social values are important. "I'm a good guest, I eat what's put in front of me." Don't eliminate special occasion food.

...normalizing obesity and diabetes, making the seats in the airplanes bigger, putting dialysis centers on the street corners in our inner cities next to the check cashing shops, becoming the Lipitor nation, I mean that's where we're going [...] or we can just change the way we eat.

I think this compliments John Berardi's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Nutritional Programs, which is the basis for my current eating goals. Fundamentally Pollan, Berardi, and my personal trainer all agree that less processed is better and plants are good.