Remember Michael Pollan? (b. 1955) He’s the one who cited a few basic rules about eating, delivered in his book In Defence of Food : An Eater’s Manifesto (2008)., repeated in Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (2009). They are simple and memorable:

Eat food.

Not too much.

Mostly plants.

The are nice, easy rules to eat and live (longer) by.

Here's another one: don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food. Hey. I'm old enough to be a great-grandmother but my grandchildren's generation is slower off the launching pad.

Pollan is very critical of the food industry and the sad fact that the cheapest food is the least healthy and the most fattening. These days it seems that only rich people can afford to be thin. But there’s a threatening corollary to this. Rich people can afford to be esoteric and who knows if what they are eating is healthy? I thought of this the other day when I was reading a restaurant review in the NYT and wondered at the items on the menu selected for description:

-lamb heart ashes scattered over sunchoke cream mixed with pickled sunchokes

-milk skin with sourdough and smoked hike

-pig’s blood on a traditional Swedish pancake under rose petals, cherries and a sweet-sour rose hip jelly

-birch ice cream under white slices of raw pine mushrooms and woodruff leaves

WOW

My online dictionary didn’t recognise sunchokes. I recognised pancake and sourdough - and cherries.

It all comes back to Pollan, though. He gives his orders in a simple, comforting way. He says eat what grows from a plant, not what is made in a plant. We should be aware of what we are eating and where it came from.

Put that fibre bar down, you don’t know where it’s been!

I was going to catch up with my blog last night but WNED ran 5 episodes back to back of The Forsyte Saga, so there went the evening.

So - another word that is being over-used as a connective or pause - I’m trying to cut it out.

So (ignore that) - I told you about CLSA, the Canadian Longitudinal Studies in Ageing, a survey that has been ongoing for at least four years now. I received my second interviews (by phone), in the past several days, three in all, covering physical health, mental and spiritual health, and emotional health - I guess. I fielded some shocking (to me) questions that made me realise how wide and far-reaching the survey must be. They were about physical and financial abuse, none of which I have ever experienced. These questions caused me to review all the questions and my answers. I always answered truthfully to direct, specific questions (“Have you ever been forced or cheated, yes or no"; my answer was always no, a factual, truthful no.) But my responses to more general queries as to my happiness and attitudes were always positive, cheerful and optimistic. I warned my interviewer (three of them, one per session) that I am a glass-half-full kind of person. And then, too, there was my father’s influence.

As you may remember, my father was a doctor. He spent every day listening to people’s complaints and hard-luck stories, and his job was to listen and to make them better, at least to help them as much as he could. When he came home at the end of the day he wanted to hear good news and up-beat stories from his family. It was incumbent upon us to report amusing events and personal achievements (exaggerated if necessary).To this day when I go to a doctor, always and only if I have a problem, and he asks me how I am, i always say, “Just fine!” as brightly as I can. Later, when the exam begins, I confess to an ache or a pain or a rash or whatever. My father actually sent me to school on two separate occasions, once when I had mumps, and once when I had chicken pox, because I said I felt fine when I didn’t. I was sent home at recess.

Thus, during the survey concerning my wellbeing, I answered in a positive way, glossing over any minor complaints as being common to everyone. I realised how fortunate I was when made aware of problems that other people on the list apparently had and I didn’t. But the day after my last interview I was feeling a bit down, depressed, in fact, and realised how much I make light of my (so-called) troubles. It depends, I guess, on what day it is. On the other hand, we see on the daily news what dire fates people in the world are suffering and we know how lucky we are. How can we complain?

How can we?