Last week I joined the legions who’ve read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I’m not sure I’ll ever look at a slab of beef or an ear of corn the same again. I suggest that anyone who’s at all interested in food, the environment, or the economy read this book, thereby sparing me the task of distilling its complexities in this small space.The upshot for me was that I want to endeavor to eat more foods whose ingredients I recognize and whose origins I know. (I say this while I’m snacking on an apple from 3,000 miles away.) This idea of eating more locally and simply is of course all the rage now. The New Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” the word of the year for 2007. And while I agree with the ideals of this movement, I do find it disconcerting that we needed to coin a newfangled term to describe what is essentially the way civilization grew and ate its own food for thousands of years.
How far we’ve come when the basic becomes the exotic.
2 comments:
I'm both sympathetic the current food movements and skeptical of their true impact. I understand the dual desires to know where one's food comes from and to assure that its production is environmentally sustainable and humane. What I wonder, however, is whether any real change can come from altering individual diets. From what I can tell, this bottom-up approach has had very little effect on the way food is produced. At the same time, I see no real movement in support of better regulation of factory farming practices.
All that aside, what I really find interesting about the food movements (from veganism to eating locally) is their parallels with religion.
I've never read The Omnivore's Dilemma, or much literature on veganism, etc., so I am probably just rehashing the standard arguments, but the way I see it, civilization grew and ate its own food this way for thousands of years, but for thousands of years a lot of people barely had enough food to eat. While the current obesity trend has swung us too far in the other direction, modern food farming/production techniques is a major reason for the increased "quality of life" compared to yesteryear. This isn't really a defense because our ethical choices should always be made by what the present allows, but I can never shake the feeling that veganism/vegetarianism/rawfoodism/etc. is the elitest concern of the privileged. The same way existentialists were decried in their time for not having to work and therefore having too much time to think about how their life makes them nauseous.
I feel this strange compulsion to defend my omnivorousness because everyone in Seattle is and I started writing an essay on it, but I think my ultimate conclusion was that I enjoy eating meat too much to give it up and that I'd rather pick my ethical battles elsewhere. Because frankly, most vegans are hypocrites and for every vegan, there's someone who's more vegan who can criticize and frown on him the same way that person does to me. But I am an extremist.
And anyway, most vegans I know are insane. Like one of my roommates. Seriously, she is fucking crazy. Chemically, nutritionally, psychotically, pathologically imbalanced. There's soon going to be a huge increase of kids brought up on vegan diets (most adult vegans today grew up on meat), and they are all going to be crazy. The future is doomed.
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