Michael Pollan's 20 Rules for Eating

Michael Pollan is at it again — gracing the world with his pearls of foody wisdom. He has oh so many pearls. And so, it turns out, do his readers.

He asked them in March, via a post on Well, Tara Parker-Pope’s health blog on nytimes.com, to suggest rules — or, more accurately, guidance — on how to eat in a world where Splenda now comes with fiber and KFC is selling sandwiches in which the bread is replaced with fried chicken.

He was trying to answer the question, as he reveals in an essay in this week's New York Times Magazine food issue: “How did humans manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promising to improve your child’s focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head?”

The responses he got — an overwhelming 2,500 (and counting), more comments than any other Well post ever — are by turns thoughtful, funny, stern and irreverent. Respondents drew from their common sense, their family heritage and the cultural traditions that guide their lives. He chose 20 of his favorites to share with us all. See all of them at the NYT Magazine, presented as illustrated placards, or stay here and check out a few choice tidbits:

• "Don’t eat egg salad from a vending machine" (David A. Wilson).
• "Don’t yuck someone’s yum" (Rachael Narins).
• "It's better to pay the grocer than the doctor" (John Forti).
• "If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, you are not hungry" (Emma Fogt).
• "Don't eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow" (Carrie Cizauskas).

And my personal favorite: "Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it" (Kirk Westphal).

Photo courtesy of roland, via Flickr