Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder

MadArchitect

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.

SolinaJoki

There are two topics that Pollan touches upon in the introduction that are of particular interest to me.

1) I have been conscious for a long time of the predicament we are placing ourselves in by depending on fossil fuels for transportation and heating/cooling (especially as I live in Canada, the greatest per capita consumers of energy in the world). This is the aspect most noticeable in the media. I constantly wonder how it is that so many people have forgotten the "energy crisis" of the 1970s when they buy their sport utes and big houses. I had never before thought of the North American food supply being dependent on fossil fuels, other than for transporting to market. After all, food grows from sunlight doesn't it? Well, apparently I've been rather shortsighted about that. I'll be very interested and more than a little scared to learn how industrial agriculture depends on fossil fuels to produce the food I eat.

2) Looking at humans as just another species out there who happen to be omnivores, how is it we have become so squeamish about our carnivorous side. When I watch a hawk kill and eat one of "my" backyard birds, I am angry and sickened and I have to look away. However, I do the same thing every day when I eat my beef. How is it we have been able to become so disconnected from the source of our food. I really look forward to his exploration of this side of our omnivorousness. I feel the need to come to terms with the fact that I live on animals, rather than stop eating them (which for me is not an option) or continue to look away. The other day we were out walking in the woods and I came across the skeleton of some small animal, who had presumably been eaten y a larger one. I did not turn away, as I always would have in the past, but stopped to look at the parts of the skeleton. Given my background in human anatomy, it was actually quite fascinating). Perhaps this is a first step on the way to accepting that I am the killer of animals myself, as are all of us who eat meat.

In presenting this book from a personal perspective of the four meals he intends to explore from source to plate, I think that he may be very effective in getting the reader to place themselves in the food chain, to help us remove the blinders we wear about where our food comes from and that we are animals in a food chain after all. I find this rather scary as I am a meat eater and animal lover (well, really a bird lover, animal liker). A more theoretical, clinical view of the subject would probably allow me to remain removed and more comfortable, but miss getting the point across in a more personal way.

Another topic that might be intesting for us to consider in future reading would be the controversy over the state of the world's fossil fuel supply.

Dissident Heart

I'm still waiting for my library copy to arrive.....

Here's an article The Politics on Our Plates by Amy Bentley that reviews Pollan's book alongside Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006) The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (Rodale Press, 2006) and What to Eat, by Marion Nestle (North Point Press, 2006).

Quote:
Weberian musings aside, what this spate of food-studies books represents is a new maturity in thinking, a genuine attempt to integrate complex issues linking aesthetics and ethics with health, the environment, family life, and social- and labor-justice issues, previously seen to have little in common. Further, the authors explicitly link issues of production with those of consumption, something not done as well since Sidney W. Mintz's superb 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. The books also demonstrate the convergence of the environmental movement and the "delicious revolution" — the two are on the same page, after all. Aldo Leopold meets Alice Waters, Rachel Carson meets M.F.K. Fisher. If these books fall short in any area, it is in addressing the difficult but crucial issue of getting all this healthy, sustainable (more expensive, less widely distributed) food to people of little means. Finally, these authors see little difference between science and poetry, between applying rational thought and romantic sentiment, to food problems and issues. For them, all knowledge, all emotion leads to the same point: a refashioned food system incorporating sustainable practices, cultural sensitivity, good nutrition, and taste. Such a system in the long run is the most practical and economically viable.

Loricat

I'm with you in looking forward to this one. I've read the intro so far, and I think I'm going to have to own this one (my local library only has the one copy).

Just to add my perspective & context to this discussion -- I'm the manager of our local Farmers' Market, and because of that connection (and my skill set), I have been hired to produce a Food Security Forum. My biggest bugbear on food security is the transportation issue that SolinaJoki brought up -- my husband was a trucker and I am very that at any time, there is only about 3 days worth of food in any community. Countries like India and China are net exporters of food -- people in their countries are starving to fuel our need for over-consumption.

Needless to say, Im interested in this book, and his discoveries.

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Loricat's Book Nook
Celebrating the Absurd


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