Vegetarian Star

“School cafeterias serve chicken “McNuggets” and give kids 10 minutes to eat, educating them to be the next generation of fast-food eaters. We need to give kids good food and enough time to eat it, teach them where food comes from, and provide them with opportunities to grow the food in school gardens and cook it in school kitchens. Knowing how to cook is an essential skill. Parents can also get their kids involved in cooking. They need to take back control of their kids’ diets, which has been ceded to food marketers. [Parents] need to be the gatekeepers.”

—-Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnnivore’s Dilemma, in an interview with Vegetarian Times.

Although Pollan isn’t vegetarian, he has recommended we eat less meat and begins In Defense of Food with the following statement: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

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Last March, Michael Pollan asked readers of the New York Times Well blog to submit rules for healthy eating habits.

After over 2,600 responses were taken, Pollan picked his favorites.

We’re liking some of the responses, like not leaving the table until you’ve finished your fruit.

However, we’d have to disagree with reader submitted rule #6:

“Never eat something that is pretending to be something else; eg., no “texturized vegetable protein” or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no “low fat” sour cream, no turkey bacon, no “chocolate flavored sauce” that doesn’t contain chocolate, no Quorn. If I want something that doesn’t taste like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be healthy.”

We beg to differ on some of those items.

Take a Boca Burger versus a McDonald’s Happy Meal burger, for example.

The Happy Meal burger contains these stats:
275 calories
106 fat calories with 11.8 grams of total fat
35 mgs of cholesterol
387 mgs of sodium
30.5 grams of total carbohydrates
12.3 grams of protein
6% of daily calcium
13% of daily iron.

In contrast, the Boca Burger’s numbers are the following:
90 calories
25 fat calories and only 3 grams of total fat.
5 mgs of cholesterol
280 mgs of sodium
320 mgs of potassium
4 grams of total carbohydrates
3 grams of dietary fiber
14 grams of protein
15% of daily calcium
10% of daily iron

Looks like this “faker” Boca Burger pretending to be real is clearly the better option.

For the entire list of Pollan’s favorite reader submitted rules, visit nytimes.com.

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