Unhappy Meals

I am sure I will not be the only person linking to this great article from the NY Times by Michael Pollan. The article is called "Unhappy Meals" and the headline is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants."

I hope Mr. Pollan will forgive me for my very brief precis:

Eat food: what your great-grandmother would recognise as food (and nothing with a health claim or more than about five ingredients on the box)

Not too much: most of the US national eating disorder is about eating too much - don't

Mostly plants: plants come to us as whole food, with a balance of goodness we evolved around - most of the other stuff is either bad for us in and of itself, or is bad for us the way we process and eat it

Reward: health and long life.

There is a motif in there about maintaining a traditional, community approach to food as a means to healthful eating. I wonder if the Jewish and Kosher approaches have such benefits ... somehow I am doubtful!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

In answer to your question, Judaism is definitely about living healthy. The Talmud is full of guidance what to eat, how to eat it and how to live your daily life. The rabbis even go into details that they acknowledge are not comfortable to discuss but are important for your health.

Maimonides writes at length on healthy living not only in his medical writings, but particularly in his codex of Jewish Law. This emphasize is based on the belief that G-d gave us our body and life and it is our responsibility to it.

That being said - in real life we have developed a cuisine of cholent, kuggel and sweet cake, not exactly healthy :-)

As the late Rabbi Kook wrote "natural repentance" to a healthy lifestyle is before "spirtual repentance" of ones soul.