"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

by Adam & Holly Smith

(photo: Clay Olsen)

The new Cache Foodie group is a small bunch of food-lovers in and around Cache Valley. Our mission is to meet, eat, and share ideas and recipes that will help us abandon the "edible food-like substances" that plague our supermarkets, school cafeterias, and (all too often) our pantries.

We met this past week at our home. The food was amazing and the discussions were helpful and inspiring. We found an article online recently that summarizes many of Michael Pollan's (a nutrition author) suggestions regarding food. These are essentially the same ideas we discussed the other night and, in our opinion, are a fantastic set of rules to follow for those wanting to eat better, lose weight, or both.

7 Words & 7 Rules for Eating (taken from webmd)

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.
5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"
6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.
7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

The next post will contain recipes for the foods we gobbled at this week's Foodie-Fest.