Michael Pollan is carving out a place for himself as the nation's food guru. The author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan is an advocate of food — real food, simple food, fresh food, local food, pleasurable food. (He's not real big on factory farms.) There was a grassroots effort to have him nominated as President Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, but Pollan prefers to do his advocating from the outside.

His newest book is Food Rules (Penguin, $11), a pocket-sized guide full of easy-to-remember rules. There are 64 of them, based on Pollan's Big Three rules, which he came up with after researching the current state of nutritional science for his last book, In Defense of Food. Pollan distilled all the advice about eating for health and long life into seven words:

1. Eat food.

2. Not too much.

3. Mostly plants.

By "food," Pollan means things your great-grandmother would recognize as food. And many of the Food Rules read like advice your great-grandmother would have given you. A selection of our favorites:

7. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

19. If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant; don't.

20. It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

23. Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.

36. Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

37. "The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead."

39. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

51. Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.

54. "Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper."

57. Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.