I picked up Michael Pollan’s book, Food Rules, in an airport about a month ago when I was desperate for something to read on the plane.
What a wonderful little gem of a book!
Pollan lists 64 short and sweet “rules” about what to eat if you want to be healthy. My favorite Pollan food rules are:
1. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
1. It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (think Big Mac, Cheetos, Pringles.)
2. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.
All of his rules make sense to me. Now, if only I would follow them!
The ingredients in my morning chai break a bunch of the rules. This chai is a powder that I mix into hot water. Unfortunately it contains non-dairy creamer. Can non-dairy creamer even be considered a food?
Chai Ingredients:
sugar,
nonfat milk,
nondairy creamer (coconut oil, corn syrup solids, sodium caseinate, sodium citrate, mono- and diglycerides (a soy derivative), salt, sodium aluminosilicate),
black tea powder,
honey granules (sucrose, honey),
cinnamon,
natural and artificial flavors,
silicon dioxide (as an anti-caking agent),
vegetable gums (carrageenan, guar gum).
Yuck! That’s totally gross.
But my inner infant throws a fit whenever I consider weaning myself off of this junk. In my baby book (the pink covered version of Our Baby’s First Seven Years), my mom was organized enough to list in detail what she fed baby Nancy; Carnation instant milk mixed with water and sugar. That’s Chai for babies!
I think there might be a connection here. I was destined from birth to drink Chai. Why fight it??
Well at least I’m consistently following Pollan’s last rule:
64. Break the rules once in a while
Leave a Reply