The Omnivore's Dilemma - Part 2: Grass

This week's reading of "The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 2: Grass" was especially troubling. The following are just a few quotes from this section that really stood out to me, in which I will elaborate.

[1]"Everything eventually morphs into the way the world is." (168)

[2]"But in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential." (178)

[3]"I'm just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time." (212)

[4]"This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale." (213)

[5]"It was all of a biological piece, the trees and the grasses and the animals, the wild and the domestic, all part of a single ecological system." (224)

[6]"The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked - nature into culture." (264)

The first quote was especially bothering because, like I've expressed in a previous blog post, the human race makes things adapt to us. We make the world and all things in it revolve around us. This is dumb. Rather than referring directly toward nature, this time it was directed toward industrialization of farming and selling food. Quote [2] also sparks some conflict, we've made everything adapt to us to the point that all we care about is having a lot. Quantity is now more valued than quality. In order to make our industrialization of food "equal" to the natural way of growing truly "organic" (if I can still use that word as it's intended), we've began telling our country that all foods are created equal.

I appreciated [3][4][5] because they express how the growth of food is a natural process, one that we (humans) aren't the divine force in; we are merely "the orchestra conductor." Our ecosystems know what to do to optimally create nutritious life as it were intended; they really are their own machine. This machine is the same machine that we think we are better/smarter than (referring back to previous rants about humanity).

[6] is just food for thought. Raw : Cooked :: Nature : Culture

The Omnivore's Dilemma - Part 1: Corn

This week's reading consisted of Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma." The first section focuses on the impact of corn in our diets and lives. The following sentence really stood out to me...

"In the third age of food processing, which begins with the end of World War II, merely preserving the fruits of nature was deemed too modest: The goal now was to improve on nature." (91)

I can understand wanting our food to last a little longer - for storing and shipping reasons, even for marketing reasons. However, what I cannot understand is why we think we're smarter than nature! For our entire existence (or any species existence for that matter), we adapt and evolve based on our environment. Then we begin thinking we're smarter and better than the world in which we live and rather than adapting to it, we decide we're going to make it adapt to us. Maybe I don't understand evolution, but this doesn't seem correct to me. Granted, we are still going to be evolving, because now our bodies have to adapt to our new food-like substances. This just seems like an unnecessary process to me.

Just a thought.

TED Talk

Check out the following TED Talk. "Andras Forgacs: Leather and meat without killing animals" Runtime: 9:03. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gXq1ml6B1E

Cooked - Fire

Michael Pollan's "Cook" begins by discussing the element 'Fire' and how it interacts with our relationship with food. He focuses his discussion on barbecue; arguably the best food around. I really appreciated the part which talked about the sacrifice of the pig and the gods' love for the smoke. Barbecue is definitely God's gift to humanity! Many times, he mentions how fire has tended to be a man's toy. Whenever food was to be cooked with fire, men would do it; some because it was outdoors, but mainly because they wanted to hangout, eat, and drink their alcohol. So to begin, cooking with fire was a man's job.

An interesting quote made by Sy Erskine was "[Barbecue is] the mystic communion among fire, smoke, and meat in the total absence of water." Pollan admits he doesn't quite know why this pit master mentioned water, but speculates that it may be because it is the enemy of fire or because it's a feminine principle and barbecue is a man's. Either way, this quotation brings the idea that food has not only a relationship to us (humans), but also to other ingredients and even the elements. 

Also, I feel that the following quotation goes along very well with everything Michael Pollan has been stressing to us so far...

"'You see, this cooking is really all about interdependence and community, and that extends to the farmers who grow the food and the little slaughterhouses they depend on. That sense of interdependence is what we've lost.'"

Through reading these books and having discussions about reconnecting with our food, I'm seeing relationships that should be present that aren't. I don't mean just the relationship between us and our food, but the relationships we hold with each other through food, as well as the relationships various "foods" have with each other.

In Defense of Food

After reading "In Defense of Food. An Eater's Manifesto" by Michael Pollan, I realized that as his ideas progressed, what I took from them changed. It wasn't until the last paragraph of the entire book, pages 200 and 201, that things completely clicked. After reading and reflecting on everything Pollan wrote up to that point, the line 

"food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on the other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight"

I feel that this climatic point expresses everything he was trying to get across throughout this work. Food isn't about eating; it's not about disecting the whole to see what exactly we're putting into our bodies and trying to determine optimal health. Food is about much more than that! The emphasis Pollan puts on relationships is really how our lives should be as well. More than when it just comes to food, our society is growing away from intimate relationships with one another. We don't grow together, cook together, or even eat together. In addition to food providing nourishment and sustenance, food provides an environment where we can spend time with others; we can develop a relationship via food. In other words, food takes on many forms of relationships that we miss out on due to our industrialized, instant gratification, fast-paced culture. 

An example Pollan provided was that mom cooks and eats, while dad and kids fix themselves (microwave) food that's more appealing to them. So while everyone might eat at approximately the same time, there's no communion being shared. To exaggerate, that's like, four related people living in the same house - not a family of four. Pollan offers the following.

"If a food is more than the sum of its nutrients and a diet is more than the sum of its foods, it follows that a food culture is more than the sum of its menus - it embraces as well the set of manners, eating habits, and unspoken rules that together govern a people's relationship to food and eating." (182)

Foods are not just a congregation of many things; they're a communal fellowship of nutrients and ingredients that complement and improve each other. Take, for example the Greek city-states called poleis. A polis was a political entity ruled by its citizens. The community within a polis mutually work together for the betterment of the entire city/town/village. Food, though not human, does not greatly differ in this concept.

Granted, no relationship is perfect, but relationships can be nurtured and grown and even rebuilt. Our relationship with food is no exception.

Thirteenth Rule Challenge

The 13th rule in "Food Rules" by Michael Pollan is "Shop the Peripheries of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle." Throughout he book, he emphasizes to eat Food, not food-like substances. Myself and a few others were challenged to go to the grocery store and find three foods from within the isles of the store. Pictured below, are the items and their ingredients list that I found. 

(Whole Almonds, Natural Raisins, and Oats)