Food Rules

I recently read Michael Pollan's pocket sized novelette, Food Rules, which is a collection of mostly common sense rules about healthy eating. We have all heard about smaller portions, the importance of fruits and vegetables and the gospel of local, organic foods as better for the environment and for our health. It never hurts to read these rules if only to reinforce what you already know. It never makes the “right” decisions about eating any easier in tempting situations though!

The funny thing from my perspective is that he opens the book with two mentions of “gluten-free,” but then never mentions gluten-free again in any of his food rules. I was really hoping he would set everyone straight in one of his rules that a gluten-free diet is a fabulous diet for people with celiac disease or a gluten intolerance, and that includes a lot of people in the US, but that folks should look to other rules to lose weight…like portion control and decreasing sugary and fatty foods.

There was one little tip that I thought was particularly brilliant, which I will share. The tip was to save the water from steaming vegetables to re-use in sauces or soups because flavor and nutrients are in that water!

I have visions of putting spinach water into pasta sauce or steaming carrots in chicken broth and then using the broth later for a soup. Imagine the color if you put steamed beet water into a muffin mix?

Since the farmer’s markets are bursting with end of summer produce, now is the time to steam vegetables and then freeze the water for winter stews!

Maybe I didn’t glean any gluten-free wisdom from Food Rules, but I am definitely going to make flamboyantly pink gluten-free blueberry muffins after my next batch of steamed beets!

Kendall Egan