2.15.2008 9:55 AM

The Great-Granny Diet

One Writer Considers America's Unhealthy Obsession with Healthy Eating

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Photo: George Marks / Getty Images

By Annie Bell Muzaurieta

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is all the rage in many food-centric circles, and some are enjoying the paradoxes within the writer's advice.

In the Deseret Morning News, Ellen Goodman writes about America's unhealthy fixation on healthy eating (Pollan dubbed this "orthorexia"). She quotes Pollan: "'What other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?' he asks, recognizing the absurdity of the need for his own advice." And she wonders how eating has become a science rather than an art (her breakfast includes "a bowl of Anti-Oxidants Formerly Known As Blueberries.")

Pollan offers tips for orthorexics, and Goodman focuses on the suggestion that they avoid eating what their great-grandmothers wouldn't recognize as food.

While Goodman considers that her grandmother had never seen an avocado or kiwi, she says she supports the movement toward great-granny eating. She jokes that someone is probably penning the next bestseller, The Great-Granny Diet, right now. She's probably not that far off.

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