The Right Way To Eat

The Right Way to Eat (1978)
Miriam Polunin | JM Dent
ISBN: 0460022768 | Condition: Good
Purveyor of wisdom and crumbs: Crappy Old Books

At last: a guide to eating properly from the glorious late 1970s, when everyone was discovering fibre, being suspicious of fats, and quietly pretending sugar was still fine as long as it came in a “wholesome” cereal box.

Miriam Polunin’s The Right Way to Eat is a wonderfully earnest attempt to answer the eternal human question: “Am I doing food wrong?”
Short answer: probably.
Longer answer: please see 150+ pages of charts, advice, and firmly worded suggestions.

What is “the right way,” exactly?

In these pages you’ll find:

• Balanced diets explained in that unruffled, school-teacherly tone that suggests you really should have known all this already.

• Food groups laid out as if they were diplomatic factions at the UN, with carbohydrates negotiating quietly in the corner while proteins muscle in.

• Advice on “good eating habits”, designed for a world where people still sat at tables and food did not yet come in quite so many exciting neon colours.

• Early warnings about overeating, under-eating and mis-eating, delivered with the calm authority of someone who absolutely believes you can be better than that third biscuit.

It’s nutrition before the influencers arrived. No juice cleanses. No miracle berries. Just calm, practical suggestions and a faint sense that if you don’t at least try, Miriam will be quietly disappointed in you.

Vintage nutrition, vintage charm

You get the full late-70s experience:

• Slightly stern diagrams and tables, the kind that look like they belong on a school wall under the heading “Healthy Eating.”

• A tone that says, “Of course you’re capable of planning sensible meals,” while knowing full well you will sometimes eat custard for dinner.

• Charming bits of advice that sit halfway between common sense and time-capsule: things like how to structure proper meals, sensibly sized portions, and what a “treat” should actually mean.

It’s like being gently coached by a kindly but no-nonsense home economics teacher who believes in regular mealtimes, real food, and the occasional firm talking-to.

About this particular copy

• Condition: Good – the kind of good that says, “someone read me properly, but didn’t use me as a coaster.”

• The pages have that soft, mellowed look that only 1970s paper can achieve, a sort of nutritional sepia.

• The spine has survived the decades without collapse, which is more than can be said for many modern diets.

This isn’t a pristine coffee-table object. It’s a working book – the sort you can actually leave on the kitchen counter while you debate whether a fourth slice of toast still counts as “breakfast” or has begun to drift into “lifestyle choice.”

Who is this for?

• Retro health nerds: People who like to see what nutrition looked like before the internet started shouting about it.

• Cooks and food historians: Anyone curious about everyday dietary advice in late-20th-century Britain, when “olive oil” still sounded faintly exotic.

• Diet-weary modern humans: If you’ve had it up to here with keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, and celestial moon-phase eating plans, this book’s calm, measured tone will feel like a cool flannel to the forehead.

The irony of “The Right Way”

Of course, the real joy lies in the title: The Right Way to Eat.

As if there were ever just one right way.

Reading it in 2025 is deliciously ironic. You already know that, in the decades since 1978:

• Fat was the enemy. Then sugar was the enemy. Then carbs. Then ultra-processed foods.

• Red wine was bad, then good, then bad again.

• Eggs were going to kill us. Then they weren’t. Then they sort of were, but only on alternate Tuesdays.

Miriam Polunin, meanwhile, calmly suggests that you eat sensibly, think about what goes into your body, and perhaps don’t base your entire nutritional framework around biscuits. It’s almost radical in its simplicity.

The Crappy Old Books treatment

At Crappy Old Books, we specialise in volumes that are:

• A bit out-of-date

• A bit too sincere

• And quietly, unintentionally hilarious when viewed through modern lenses.

This book is exactly that. It’s serious about food without being faddish, informative without being flashy, and inevitably wrong in some small ways (as all nutrition books eventually become) while still being basically... sensible.

Put it on your shelf and it broadcasts a very specific energy:

“I care about what I eat.
I also enjoy leafing through 1970s health advice while consuming something entirely contrary to it.”

So if you’d like a calm, old-school guide to sensible eating from a time before “superfoods” and “macro tracking” invaded the language, The Right Way to Eat is quietly waiting to lecture you – kindly, gently, and with the unshakable confidence of 1978.

Condition good. Advice mostly reasonable. Title gloriously over-ambitious. Classic Crappy Old Books material.

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