Nutritionists

My midwife group sends all its patients to their nutritionist early in their pregnancies. In principle I approve of this; it's part of their whole-person approach to babymaking (which, by the way, I PLAN NEVER TO HAVE DO AGAIN IN MY LIFE!). In practice, I find it ridiculous. Their nutritionist was nice enough, but I think the whole activity of telling a nutritionist what I eat is bogus, even setting aside the rubber sample portion sizes she waves in the air during the questioning. And then the whole activity of the nutritionist telling me what I SHOULD eat is equally bogus. The whole thing makes you think about food in hideously wrong ways, and if you try to organize your eating patterns according to nutritionists' rules, you will soon go insane.

Anyway, so I've been meaning to write a post about food for oh, six months now, and I haven't gotten around to it. In the post I planned to write, I would explain how the rules that I use for deciding what to eat are simpler than the nutritionists' rules, but, I think, give me perfectly good health results while directing my focus to what's really important about food: the ecological, ethical, social, and gastronomic aspects, rather than the poorly-understood nutritional aspects.

But of course I was sick, and then sick some more, and then I had a baby, so I never got around to writing the post. Luckily, Michael Pollan has now done it for me. [paywall, sorry!] (The virtues of procrastination!) He's made the rules even simpler than mine would have been: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If we do that, he says, we'll be generally healthy, and can stop worrying about properly balancing each meal and making sure we get enough protein, calcium, iron, and folic acid every day.

The whole thing is worth reading, but if you can't get behind the paywall, the summary will do.