Comments on Fact Check

It is kind of a silly claim -- in addition to working full-time, I cook dinner for my family every night with old-fashioned ingredients (vegetables, bread, minimally processed-meats, etc). It's not that hard.

People are rather blind about previous times. I always look askance at people who claim blended families are a new phenomonon, after all in previous times women died in childbirth and men died in accidents and of disease at a higher rate than today. Surely many of them remarried and blended families.

Kudos to your Grandmother, raising six kids and being a breadwinner has never been easy.

Uh, yeah.

Let's ignore the fact that you completely missed the point of Pollan's statement. The primary inaccuracy involved your grandmother.

*sigh*

I like to catch songbirds, bread them, and fry them up for breakfast, and then have a nice meal of carrier pigeon for dinner.

Ah, just like great-grandfather used to eat!

(seriously, this is a really silly idea, although we as humans ate a much more fruit/vegetable/grains diet than we do now, and rarely had any sweetener)

I think a lot of people would be surprised to discover just how kick-ass their great-grandmother was.

Mine won prizes at the county fair for her fried chicken, watermelon and rhubarb pickle, and some baking items. Half the foods for which prizes were awarded there are unknown to most modern city residents -- watermelon pickle?

On the other hand, she, and most of her contemporaries in the Plains states, did most of their cooking out of cans, because you can't grow food in Eastern Montana most of the year. I'm not sure I want to go back to that.

Seriously one week of fresh tomatoes and then back to the canned stuff, oh yeah and the canning thats what we need now come on

@3: No, I completely get Pollan's statement, and I mostly agree with it. Eat whole foods, not too much, mostly plants--right on. But his writing (this time around: I still like The Omnivore's Dilemma) is sloppy, and I stick by my criticism. We can't restrict ourselves to dishes our great-grandmothers would recognize as food, and we shouldn't. However badass this great-grandmother was (and she is one of four, obviously), she didn't have a job like mine, and she wouldn't recognize the Bengali vegetable dishes I tend to cook when I have the time as straight-up "food."

In any case, my problems with his writing don't extend to his overall advice; I'm just saying you needn't bother reading this particular book to get it.

Don't we all have FOUR great-grandmothers?

Anyway, probably none of mine would have touched yoghurt or pasta or tofu or sushi with a bargepole, so not sure how useful a rule that is...

@7: Sorry, didn't see this before I posted!

Amy, he's not talking about the way that we prepare food, nor is he telling people that they have to cook the same way that your great-grandmother did in order to be healthy.

When he says that you should only eat things that your great-grandma would recognize as food, he means that you should probably pass up the cereal straws, and instead eat more oatmeal.

It's a plea for culinary simplicity, not a paean to a particular culture or style of cooking.

So, which is more objectionable, lemongrass foam or KFC? Because my great-granny would recognize the latter.

@10: I think you're mainly right, but the 'great-grandmother' test, strictly applied, would not only exclude the horrors of industrial food science, but plenty of healthy foodstuffs from other cultures that were unknown to my forebears, at least.

Sorry, Annie. Not Amy.

How about we just say _someone's_ great-grandparent should have recognized it as food, even if your own particular forebears might not have. *sheesh*

Assuming that general cooking knowledge is passed down from generation to generation, I'm not at all sure I would want to subsist on a diet made up primarily of mushy, overcooked vegetables, and literally everything else fried in bacon grease, which pretty much sums the culinary heritage imparted on both sides of my family.

Thank goodness my mother made me learn how to cook (mostly self-taught; Mom's a great baker, but a lousy cook, if you can comprehend the difference) at a fairly early age, otherwise I'd either be a 400 lb. diabetic, or, have died from arteriosclerosis a decade ago.

According to my father, I'm not sure I'd recognize anything my great-grandmother cooked as food.