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An analysis of michael pollan's book 'the omnivore’s dilemma'. The author embarks on a quest to understand the concept of the omnivore's dilemma by preparing a meal using food he grew, foraged, or hunted himself. The challenges and learnings from his experience, the importance of consciousness in food consumption, and the moral and ethical implications of vegetarianism and meat-eating.
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Nov. 9, 2008 Word count: 1,
And this, I suppose, points to what I was really after in taking up hunting and gathering: to see what it’d be like to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved. I realized that this had been the ultimate destination of the journey I’d been on since traveling to an Iowa cornfield: to look as far into the food chains that support us as I could look, and recover the fundamental biological realities that the complexities of modern industrialized eating keep from our view (281).
My encounter with the chanterelle- or was it a false chanterelle?-put me in touch with one of the most elemental facts about human eating: It can be dangerous, and even when it isn’t dangerous, it is fraught. The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when
Nov. 9, 2008 Word count: 1,
it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own (287).
Disgust turns out to be another valuable tool for negotiating the omnivore’s dilemma. Through the emotion has long since attached itself to a great many objects having nothing to do with food, food is where and why it began, as the etymology of the word indicates. (It comes from the Middle French verb degrouster , to taste.) Rozen, who has written or coauthored several fascinating articles about disgust, defines it as the fear of incorporating offending substances into one’s body….”Disgust is intuitive microbiology” (292).
…we depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow is to cook cassava or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information. The same process of natural selection came up with both strategies: one just happens to rely on cognition, the other goes with the gut (294).
Nov. 9, 2008 Word count: 1,
Religion, and ritual, has played a crucial part in this process. Native Americans and other hunter-gatherers give thanks to the animal for giving up its life so the eater might live. The practice sounds a little like saying grace, a ceremony hardly anyone bothers with anymore. In biblical times the rules governing ritual slaughter stipulated a rotation, so that no individual would have to kill animals every day, lest he become dulled to the gravity of the act. Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves it was the god’s appetite that demanded the slaughter, and not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (Priests! Now we give the job to migrant workers paid the minimum wage) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal’s head. The beast would promptly shake its head , and this was taken as a necessary sign of assent (331).
There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life on earth for a million years made visible in a single frame, one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what is.
Nov. 9, 2008 Word count: 1,
But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in true accounting, it really cost. We could need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less that the body of the world (411).