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Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, Inc.
47 South Street, Rhinebeck, New York 12572 USA -
845-876-2626
Vegetarian - Vegan - Animal Rights - Health - Nutrition - Environment
The mission of the Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, Inc. is to promote the vegetarian ethic in the Mid-Hudson (New York) region, educate the community and aid anyone in the pursuit of a totally vegetarian (vegan) cruelty-free and healthful lifestyle.
Newsletters - Winter 2007 Issue
Unhappy Meals
Michael Pollan, author of the acclaimed book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and numerous articles in the New York Times that are passionately critical of agribusiness, has done it again. His January 28, 2007 essay in the New York Times magazine called, “Unhappy Meals -- Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” has a good overview of the fallacies of nutritional science, the press, and food producers -- who are largely in cahoots.
As in Jennifer Van Alstine’s piece describing her own vegan journey on page 4 of this newsletter, Pollan urges eating real food. Forget about Kellogg’s “Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars,” which, like other similar foods with superlatives on the label, are heavily processed. While Pollan is not a vegetarian, he does lay down some excellent principles in the article. In short, basic questions about what to eat have gotten too complicated and the “institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science -- and journalists.” His long essay boils down to a few simple rules:
Eat food. This is not easy, so he suggests: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” and…
“Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims because they are apt to be heavily processed and the claims dubious at best.” He points to margarine, which was “one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, and turned out to give people heart attacks.”
Go
on to Going from "Junk-Food" Vegan to Health
Food Vegan
Return to Winter 2007 Issue
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