Ryan McClure

I originally caught this at Lifehacker, which posted from the NYT. I’ve paraphrased the list and condensed it, with explanations below.

1. Don’t eat egg salad from a vending machine.
• Or eggs from a carton.
2. You can’t leave the table until you finish your fruit.
3. Meals prepared at home, served at the table, are more appreciated and more healthful than food eaten on the run.
4. Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.
• I don’t understand this rule.
5. Don’t eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow.
• The emphasis here is to buy local, organic foods rather than imported food. It’s usually fresher and has required less chemical processing.
6. Never eat something that is pretending to be something else.
7. Don’t yuck someone’s yum.
8. Make and take your own lunch to work.
9. If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.
10. Eat until your are seven-tenths full and save the other three-tenths for hunger.
• The point is to enjoy what you eat without eating too much.
11. Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.
• Key example: corn byproducts (i.e. high-fructose corn syrup).
12. Go ho, go shiki, go mi (Japanese for five cooking methods, five colors, five flavors) for each meal.
• Go ho: Five cooking methods (i.e. steaming, simmering, grilling, sautéing, raw)
• Go shiki: Five colors
• Go mi: five flavors (i.e. sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy)
13. Avoid snack foods with the “oh” sound in their names
• Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Hostess Ho Hos
14. The law of diminishing marginal utility from economics: each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite
• 3 bites from 5 plates/dishes is more satisfying than 15 bites from 1 dish
15. Don’t eat anything you aren’t willing to kill yourself.
• I suspect this is aimed at we carnivores from vegetarians.
16. No second helpings, no matter how scrumptious.
17. When drinking tea, just drink tea.
• Tea is not a tea bag, water, milk, and sugar. Tea is a tea bag and water.
18. When eating, don’t talk about other past meals, whether better or worse.
19. Don’t create arbitrary rules for eating if their only purpose is to help you feel in control
• If you have to choose between eating ice cream and spending all day obsessing about eating ice cream, eat the damn ice cream.
20. It’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

Emphasis added to the rules I consider most important.