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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the idea should be better stated if it's so easily misunderstood.

I believe this is the origin of that phrase:

http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/six-rules-for-eati...

And, well, I don't really know what was meant by it. It decries Twinkies and Vitamin Water, but it also decries yogurt just because it's in a tube. Does shape matter for yogurt?

He exalts fresh produce as the pinnacle of health, yet my great-great-great grandmother would have had extremely limited access to it for most of the year, and probably would not recognize most of the stuff I'm able to buy in the store.

It's not a straw man when you legitimately don't understand what was intended.

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This is a great point. My great-great-great grandmother lived in Martin County, Kentucky, most likely ate mostly cornbread and string beans in fatback her whole life, and never saw quinoa or kale so long as she lived before dying in childbirth. I'm not exactly sold on this as a model lifestyle.

Kale was in heavy use in the 19th century (re Wikipedia and other sources). Kale and Chard are also heartier plants and can be grown late in the year, giving you those fresh leafy greens way after other stuff gives up. Given that Kale gets it's name from the Scott's Irish... and that That area was 57% english, 25% scott, 9% irish... yeah they very likely ate kale. Fatback too. Probbably whole parts of the hog. The corn for the cornbread, however, most likely went into whiskey depending on the age of your great^3 as up until prohibition, thanks to Andrew Jackson, it was one of the most efficient ways to move corn around (in barrels of distillate), as ~10 bushels -> 1Bbl of Whiskey.

Quinoa, however, was much later, coming not from europe, but peru.

(edited for tone)

Lol...I take it you've never been to that part of the USA.

Actually my wife is from that area but sure I quoted links instead of anecdote so I'm obviously making it up. What's your data from that time period?

My data is generations of my own family living in the same place, where I have also lived functionally my whole life, about which I think I'm allowed a little introspection in this casual discussion without having to cite some manner of study you'd approve of.

Whether I'm off the mark about kale or not is far beside the point. The fact is that my great-great-great grandmother and my great-great grandmother and on down to probably no more than a couple of generations ago...none of them would have had reliable or easy access to the kind of fresh food I do today, and they wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what I can find in practically any grocery store anywhere. It's not about whether or not there was kale growing in East Kentucky.

I don't believe you have much idea what your great-great-great-grandmother did or didn't have access to, or what she was or wasn't familiar with. I'm sure you never met her. Did you read her diary or something? Have you tried cooking from her recipe book? Or are you just assuming, based on no evidence, that East Kentucky in 1810 was basically the same as East Kentucky in 1920, or whenever your grandparents grew up?

It's plenty likely that you and your own parents wouldn't have been familiar with the bigger portion of what your great-great-great-grandmother ate, either. And some of that was fresh food. East Kentucky had a lot more fresh plants in it back then than it does now.

I'm not very interested in what you believe, actually. My point—which is that the way people subsisted on the Kentucky frontier 200 years ago would probably not have been congruent with Pollan's idyllic notion of the good food granny ate in the old country—doesn't seem to be of anyone else's interest. I won't belabor it.

epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt

Well, the important part of that statement is probably epoxy-like which is probably meant to describe the consistency of the Go-Gurt. What makes go-gurt more epoxy-like than yogurt and what that adjective means elude me though

It's probably not worth getting bogged down in the details when it comes to Pollan's polemics, but in my (admittedly limited) understanding the whole point of GoGurt is that it's less thick than ordinary yogurt, so you can suck it out of the tube...I'm having a hard time believing he's ever actually eaten a GoGurt.

Gogurt is actually really thin, more like thicker cream. It's not the good spackley (and tasty) stuff like greek yogurt or my favourite redwood farms goat yogurt (YUMM!!!).

> Does shape matter for yogurt?

In this case, yes? Gogurt is full of sugar. Of course the same can be true for yogurt in tubs as well. I feel the straw-manning of Pollan's writing is usually achieved by taking what is meant to be general guidance, pretending it's quite specific and stringent, and then poking logical holes in it.

Generally, the more packaging and marketing that went into something to get you to buy it, the more horseshit you'll find in it too. Generally.

Again, if the guidance is so easy to misunderstood then perhaps it is the guidance's fault, not the fault of the people misunderstanding it.

Apparently there's some underlying meaning to "Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food." that I'm not understanding. I'm not understanding it because my concept of what my great^3 grandmother would recognize as food, and the understanding of the person who wrote it, are extremely different. Yet the person who wrote it does not explain what he meant by it, and somehow this is my fault?

The past is not a region known for great nutrition. Taking food guidance from it doesn't seem very wise to me. I gather that this phrase is more along the lines of, "think of the idyllic, utopian, imaginary past that certain people believe is what it was actually like, and eat what they would have eaten," but that's not real helpful!

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