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The US food writer and campaigner has come up with some guidelines for ordering food, including the advice to always order the special. Is he right?
The American food writer Michael Pollan likes coming up with rules for eating sustainably. He once published a whole book of them. He is the EU bureaucrat of gastronomy, the headmaster of the table. Most famously there's his haiku-esque: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Others, such as his warning about frequenting drive-thrus – "It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car" – have a certain redundancy, given they're never likely to be read by those who might actually benefit.
Now Britain's Sustainable Restaurant Association has asked Pollan to come up with a whole bunch of "restaurant rules" to help us all be really, really good at eating out. If you have brows, prepare to furrow them. There is, "If there are daily specials, order them. They often mean fresh ingredients and thoughtful presentation." Really? Many restaurants use specials as a way to flog the ingredients they over-ordered yesterday. Even when they don't, the word "special" is no guarantee. I know from experience; I once described a special at a Marco Pierre White steak house as "only being special in the way Benny from Crossroads was special". Then there's the instruction to study provenance by looking "on the menu for the names of specific farms". Hmmm. Does Willow Farm count? Because that's Tesco's brand name for mass-produced chicken.
More controversially there's, "Don't eat at restaurants that serve asparagus all year round (or strawberries, peaches or apricots). The chef's not paying attention to the seasons, and it's unlikely the food will be special." If the seasonality argument is about sustainability it's not vastly convincing. A Defra report last year stated that "there is not one consistent definition of seasonal food that, if applied, would consistently select foodstuffs of various kinds with lower environmental impact across the board". And if it's simply about choosing nice things to eat, that would make visiting Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants a terrible sin for most of the year. This is how silly a rule it is: a few years ago Gordon Ramsay said using unseasonal ingredients should be against the law. Oh, how we laughed.
No one really likes rules, apart from the people who write them. But a bit of advice might help from time to time, so here's mine. Avoid places which have the words "dishes may contain nuts" on the menu. It suggests they didn't make the stuff themselves and they have no idea what's in it. Steer clear of restaurants on boats, which revolve or have a view. The food will never be the most important thing. Stay away from places that proudly boast that the soup is "home made". If they're shouting about that, who the hell made all the other stuff?
And never, ever, order the special. Unless you like the sound of it. In which case, do.
Jay Rayner's new book A Greedy Man In a Hungry World: How (almost) everything you thought you knew about food is wrong is out now.
