Omnivore's Dilemma
Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 21:01 Written by Barb Monday, 27 August 2007 00:00
I'm so swamped with reading these days. I haven't been writing as much. I think it's just the natural cycle of creativity. There can be no output without input and I'm just in an input stage right now. I don't feel badly about not writing as long as I'm taking things/information/ideas in. Consuming books and movies. Right now I'm ingesting a lot of books, some junk, some educational and interesting. And this one to the left here is by far the most interesting.
If you haven't picked up a copy yet, wowza! Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma will knock your socks off. I can't put it down. It's a fascinating journey about what we eat and why and you don't have to be a nutritionist or a farmer to be interested. We all eat. And eating, as the author makes us realize throughout the course of the book is a political act, a matter of life and death in so many direct and indirect ways.
I'm only about 1/3 of the way into the book now but here's a brief overview from what I've read so far. Starting with the title. What is the ominvore's dilemma he refers to? Well, the original omnivore's dilemma was how early humanoids decided what was edible and what was not. The red berries made you sick; the black ones didn't. And once you found that out, you'd better remember the discovery or you wouldn't live long enough to pass your genes on. This takes a lot more brain power than, say, the koala bear who doesn't have to worry: if it looks like a eucalyptus leaf and smells like a eucalyptus leaf than you eat it. If not, you don't. No dilemma. I hope the book will go into this a bit more because it seems fascinating. Was this one of the reasons humanoids developed higher thinking skills --because we are omnivores? That certainly seems to be the implication but so far I haven't come across the answer yet.
But regardless, Pollan says we still have an omnivore's dilemma. The new omnivore's dilemma is how a people with no single discernible food culture like ours in the US decide what to eat. In many other cultures, it's a non-question. Those of you in Italy, you eat pasta. In France, you eat bread. In Mexico, you eat beans and rice. That's over-simplifying, of course, and globalizations are changing those things so that now you in Mexico might eat sushi or eggplant parmesan but for the most part you get the idea. Traditional societies with a strong single food culture know pretty much what they're going to have for dinner on any given night.
Not so in the US and this is why Pollan says we're so susceptible to food fads. They decide what to eat based on culture, those of us in the US decide based on the latest fad diet book. The Atkins Diet and whatever diet trends are popular in a given decade. Told ya it was interesting!
Of course the author's going to argue that this following of diet trends isn't such a good way to decide what to eat. He thinks there are better ways. And to discover those better ways he suggests we look at three food chains: the industrial (what most of us here in the US are accustomed to), the organic-pastoral (what a lucky few of us are accustomed to and what more of us could be accustomed to if we made some huge changes in our agricultural policy) and the good-old hunter-gather (what we used to be accustomed to back in the day). The three exemplify different ways of eating and relating to the natural world. Either eating and producing and consuming food is a large-scale business model with profit, not nourishment, as the main goal; or it is an intimate communion with the natural world.
Deciding what to eat is not a simply a matter of knowing which products to buy in the supermarket of course. The question is symbolic of one of the most fundamental decisions of the human species: how are we to structure human society in order to sustain (nourish) ourselves? As my roommate pointed out, many civilizations have died out for not making the right decision there. Pollan does an excellent job of laying out the structure of this question in a new, insightful, original way and providing the reader with a wide-angle view of history in order to help us all make a more informed decision.