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How to Eat
WHEN MY YOUNGEST SON and collaborator on this book, Tom, was thirteen
years old, our family was in the final stages of a slow shift to becoming
vegetarian. One Sunday morning, Tom came home from a sleepover at a
close friend's house and told us a story I still remember.
The night before, Tom was being grilled, in a friendly way, on his
eating habits. The sister of Tom's friend had asked him, rather incredu-
lously, "You don't eat meat?" My son had never justified his eating hab-
its; he had just gotten used to eating what was on the dinner table. As a
consequence, Tom was not practiced at answering such a question. So
he simply answered, "No, I don't," without offering any explanations.
The girl probed a bit more, "So what do you eat?" My son answered,
with a few shrugs, "I guess just... plants." She said, "Oh," and that was
the end of that.
The reason I enjoy this story is because my son's response, "plants,"
was so simple. It was a truthful answer, but couched in an entirely un-
traditional manner. When someone asks for the glazed ham across the
table, she doesn't say, "Pass the flesh of the pig's butt, please," and when
someone tells his children to finish their peas and carrots, he doesn't
say, "Finish your plants." But since my family and I changed our eating
habits, I've come to enjoy thinking of food as either plants or animals.
It fits well into my philosophy of keeping the information on food and
health as simple as possible.
Food and health are anything but simple in our country. I often mar-
vel at the complexity of various weight-loss plans. Although the writers
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