The most basic, guiding question that Pollan takes for the book is 'What should we have for dinner?' It seems, as he points out, such a simple question. Indeed, eating food is perhaps the most basic thing that we humans have control over in order to continue to live. We don't have to worry about breathing but we do have to worry about what to put into our bodies in order to allow them to continue to function.
Pollan then tries to figure out what happened to make this such a difficult question to answer and he pins down the omnivore's dilemma, something that has plagued (or benefited, depending on how you look at it) our species since we became a species. When you can eat virtually anything, deciding what to eat can be a bit of a problem.
Yet, Pollan points out, for millennia, this never really was a problem. We relied on culture, on availability, on local climate to help dictate what we ought to eat and when. You want asparagus in January? Tough. Eat some beans. The modern industrialised food chain has warped availability and trumped locality so that we can, indeed, eat asparagus in January if we so choose. But at what cost? Are those dozen or so spears of asparagus really worth the jet fuel that flew them from South America to your grocery store?
Americans spend less on food than any other nation on the planet. Some might see this as the triumph of the American promise of equality and equal access. But remembering how basic food is to our existence, why, logically, should it be a good thing for food prices to fall continuously? 99¢ for a dozen eggs? What does that tell us about the quality of those eggs? Does the average person even have any idea where eggs come from or how they're produced anymore?
As I settled in at a bar one night with the book and a pint, I was chatting with the bartender who is always interested to find out what I'm reading (this is the same bar at which I did a lot of reading of the Divine Comedy this past Spring). She sort of recoiled when she saw what I was reading and said that I shouldn't read it, because it would turn me into a vegetarian. I told her that I was already essentially a vegetarian and she looked puzzled since I'd just ordered a steak quesidilla. Oddly enough, Pollan's section on vegetarianism and the ethics of eating animals has made me feel okay about when I do choose to eat meat and has given me some philosophical cud to chew (sticking with the food theme) about the topic.
If you click the link at the end of this post, it will take you to Pollan's website where you can read the introduction and the first chapter of the book. If that doesn't hook you then perhaps you're one of those people that Pollan suggests maybe shouldn't read the book. To quote the introduction,
'Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.
To know from whence our food came used to be such a benign question as not even to merit thinking about it. Do you know where your morning pop-tart came from? It started as some kind of organic substance somewhere along the line. Or, to take a subject closer to my heart and my everyday, do you know where your morning cup of coffee came from?
As I sit here typing this, my cat is hunting. The cold weather has brought a few mice indoors to join us. Every now and then, she'll catch sign of one and be occupied for hours. It's not as if we starve her, but it's fascinating to see her instincts kick in like this. What happened to our instincts about food? Shouldn't we want to know where our food came from? The supermarket, though convenient, is not a farm. The vast majority of our food does not come from farms as we conceive them. Neither I nor Pollan quite argue that this is necessarily a good or bad thing. Still, it is a thing. And a thing worth noting at that.
Ultimately, I think that a book like this should remind us all that we're still animals. Despite our civilisation, we are actively connected to the rest of life on earth and everything we do, everything we eat—even Twinkies—affect the rest of the planet somehow.
Run, don't walk, to your local library, bookstore, or favourite online book seller and read this book.
You'd be stupid to remain ignorant of where your food comes from.
And, after you've read it, if everything begins to taste suspiciously of corn, don't say I didn't warn you.
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