I really liked what Pollen did in this last section. It made me think about whether or not I would have the ability to kill my own food. It made me crave mushrooms and I learned that stock comes from bones. I thought that the last part was also the most interesting of all the sections because we get so many human perspectives and characters.
Pollen's experience as a hunter was immensely intriguing. He begins to see the world in terms of food like he had never done before. I think in this section Pollen gives his reader a little break to stop feeling guilty and realize why we're at such a disadvantage. Being an omnivore is inherently stressful! And we're supposed to have older wiser generations to teach us food culture so we don't have to be so anxious. But in America we don't have a nationally way of eating that isn't bad for us. We have never had a stable national cuisine writes Pollen. So I can give myself a break but then I also have to start being smarter than latest food fad. I definitely remember "Fletcherizing" in middle school! What a terrible idea!
"Failing to appreciate that how we eat, and even how we feel about eating may in the end be just as important as what we eat"--Page 100
To me this dilemma keeps coming back to our mind-set which is often the hardest to change. It's hard for me to imagine America without snacking but in France, according to Pollen, they just don't do it. And the worst is the blurring of the line between nutritional supplements and food. Sitting down to eat isn't even important to us anymore. I remember growing up that every dinner was a sit down at the dining room table dinner. My mom worked around our sports schedules and youth group meetings and even if we only sat down long enough to scarf our food and give the family a brief update on our lives we still sat down for family dinner. But over the years this ritual died out and dinners were reduced to eating together but separate connected only by the television set. We got busy. It was fun at first but I quickly began missing those family dinners.
Again, it's a bigger problem than it seems at face value, isn't it? Even if we could dismantle the industrial food complex and focus on eating fresh, whole, local foods whenever possible, we still need to consider HOW we're eating. And that would require a whole different revolution in the way we live.
ReplyDeleteI'm game. How about you?