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.