Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder
I just bought out two new book selections today, and just having read the intro to Pollen's book, I'm already stoked for the rest of the book. His style is candid but eloquent, and he's chosen an interesting way to structure the book. In some ways, his approach reminds me of one of my favorite modern journalists, John McPhee, but the differences are enough to make reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" a distinct experience altogether.
A few notes I made on the introduction:
For those who are on the fence about whether or not to read "The Omnivore's Dilemma", let me skip ahead to the end of the introduction. Pollen names two themes that are central to the book, and I think they're worth noting, both so we can revisit them as we discuss the book, and as an early indication as to its worth. They are:
1. "that there exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry"; and
2. "that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world".
I'd add a third to those two explicit themes. Later in the intro, Pollen writes, "To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction." But despite these three themes, Pollen doesn't come across as an ecological polemicists, nor as a rootsy back-to-nature sort. He's a journalist, one who has decided to consider a particular topic from the ecologists point of view, and it looks early on as though he's struck a perfect balance between sophistication and accessibility.
Going back some...
I found it somehow reassuring that Pollen could connect the complexities of our modern relationship with food to a more perinneal evolutionary omnivore's dilemma. It isn't so much that I'm comforted by the fact that our problem has been faced before, and therefore shouldn't necessarily give us a kind of apocalyptic anxiety. Maybe it's simply the idea that the botched job we've made of things has roots that go back much earlier than our generation or the handful of generations that preceded us. It's an ongoing struggle, and that makes it seem less trite, I suppose. At times, it seems somewhat pathetic that one of our major concerns should be the evils of food solicted in cardboard boxes by a red-haired clown, but placing it in the larger context of our development as a species makes it easier to the modern industrial food change as just one aspect of a complex relationship to the natural world.
On the other hand, if Pollen sees fit to situate our food anxieties in the larger context of human development, he also notes a radical change in the nature of that relationship, signalled by the post-WWII shift away from solar food sources to those derived from fossil fuels. And this is something fairly new (under the sun, ahem), a hitch that is particular to our generation and a few generations before us. It also makes it part of a larger phenomenon, our growing relationship to fossil fuel power sources. There are differences, of course, but that we depend on fossil fuels not only for our mechanical energy but also our very fundamental biological energy contributes to an argument (which it doesn't look like Pollen himself will make) that fossil fuels have become for modern Americans (and others) a kind of monoculture, analagous in the broader scheme to the monoculture provided by corn.
And lastly, Pollen lays out in the introduction the methodology he opted for in his exploration of food chains. He presents it as a kind of journalistic wager: he decided ahead of time how he'd tackle the problem, fully aware that the resulting book would succeed or fail in proportion with how well he chose that method. So one question we can revisit later on is, did he pick a good method? Further, what methods might have proven more sound or more enlightening? What are the drawbacks of the way Pollen handled the central question of the book, what should we have for dinner? I'll be interested to find out.
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