Re: Ch. 7 - The meal: fast food
Welcome to the fold, Aubrey (or should we call you Alexis?). It's always nice to see a new moniker around here. If you don't mind my asking, did this discussion bring you to BookTalk, or did you find BookTalk and then decide to jump in on the discussion?
I believe Mr. P posted an article in the Science forum about the coming decline in seafood. Horrifying stuff, really.
One thing that struck me about this chapter, is Pollan's honesty about the emotional ties he feels with a fast food industry like McDonald's. It's a piece of Americana, in some ways, and I think one of the raw, maybe unappealing facts that we may have to face here is that we're breaking with what is essentially tradition. It's new tradition, in the grander scheme of things, but tradition none-the-less.
Everyone so far involved in the discussion has voiced some dismay at the state of the food industry in America, but we haven't really gotten around to recognizing all the things that we'd have to give up to divorce ourselves from it. And I don't mean the food itself, though I certainly feel an attachment to fast food french fries. For a lot of Americans, fast food dining has become the centerpiece of family life, their only edible connection to their family. And that's a pretty big deal, if you look at the role that food and dining plays in a lot of family and culture.
So if we're serious about reforming food in this nation, then I think we're also going to find that we need to be serious about cultural institutions related to food. Family is only one instance. Is it possible, for another, to have the sort of corporate structure we have, with 30 or 60 minute lunch breaks, without some sort of dependence on industrial food? How will a switch away from industrial food effect us economically? And so on.
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at: 10/1/06 11:57 pm
