Eat his words - Unhappy Meals

The cover story in today's New York Times magazine is a landmark piece by Michael Pollan called Unhappy Meals. I think it's the best thing he's ever written, possibly because it speaks so eloquently to my own prejudices.

Here's the short version: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

But the meat of the article, so to speak, is an attack on what Pollan calls "nutritionism": the ideology that holds that the best way to a healthy diet is to ignore foods and concentrate on ingesting the proper amounts and ratios of nutrients lurking within them. This has led to many absurdities, like this one: