I don't get the point of this. What's his problem with having healthy snacks (yogurt, nuts, etc.) between meals??

Well, he writes for the average American, who does not snack on healthy snacks.

--Try not to eat alone

These are just guidelines to help explain/follow the main rules of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants."

If you don't have a problem with eating too much, you could ignore those. When you eat in company, you have a tendency to eat more slowly and less.

In theory I like his ideas but in practice about half of those bug me in various ways.

Brenda is me. I support his philosophies in a general kind of way, but when he gets specific, Michael Pollan annoys the living shit out of me. I can't read more than a few sentences into any of his columns before I want to roll up the magazine and start beating him with it. He's like the Michael Moore of foodie-ism.

I'd say the Big Mac (especially the bread) probably violates the following rules:
--Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
--The "bread" probably containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than 5 in number, and may include high-fructose corn syrup
--Eat mostly plants, especially leaves (not seeds)
--Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
--If you eat meat, try to eat less than 1 serving per day; beef should be 100% grass fed (not grass finished)
--Eat more like people with traditional food cultures (the French, Italians, the Japanese, Indians, Greeks) and regard non-traditional foods with skepticism

When you eat in company, you have a tendency to eat more slowly and less.

hahahaha...clearly he's never dined with me and my friends or, laws, my family. Maybe we eat more slowly but certainly not less! Also, we drink more!

(Although I do get this "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants" and try to follow it as much as I can. And I do try to avoid processed foods as much as possible.)

Oooh, lightning and thunder! After getting three inches of snow last night!

Many of the "back to basics" food movements have a certain worthwhile logic, while also being riddled with rules that make no sense and are not scalable. Why is that?

(I don't know what my great-grandmothers would have recognized as food, but I'm pretty sure that tomatoes, bok choi, tofu, and avocadoes would not have been on the list. Fish heads, yes; but, good fricken luck convincing me to eat those.)

Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads....

There are things my great- grandmothes recognized as food that I simply will not. Never. Lutefisk, people.

Fish heads, yes; but, good fricken luck convincing me to eat those.

Fish heads are delicious! You just need to put them through a food mill to get rid of all the sharp and icky bits. And also try not to look at them too much while they're cooking, because eyes are creepy.

Nutty, your great-grandmothers wouldn't have recognized tomatoes as food?