Daniel Lubetzky

These are my favorite responses to Michael Pollan’s NYTimes blog request for readers’ rules about eating:

• From my Romanian grandmother: “Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.”
  - Irina A. Dumitrescu
• “Never eat something that’s pretending to be something else…no textured vegetable protein or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no ‘low fat’ sour cream, no turkey bacon, no ‘chocolate flavor sauce’ tat doesn’t contain chocolate…If I want something that tastes like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be more healthful.” - Sonya Legg
• “Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.” – Kirk Westphal
• “One of my top rules for eating comes from economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility reminds me that each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite. This helps me slow down, savor the first bites,stop eating sooner. It also helps get plenty of variety in my diet because this rule also makes a meal of small plates more enticing: 3 bites of 5 plates versus 15 bites of 1 will maximize satisfaction and nutritional variety.” – Laura Kelley
• “When drinking tea, just drink tea.”  I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information absorption in the morning, when I’m also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day.  I believe that it’s so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food.  Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning.  (Of course, some time ago, I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him this aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper.  When confronted, the teacher said, “When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!”) – Michelle Poirot