Friday, September 23, 2016

"August" family book report by Jason

Several years back, the resident friendly curmudgeon of our church made a book recommendation during sharing time.  I respect this fellow’s mind and sense his hesitancy to go out on a limb in public, so I heard the recommendation with interest.  However, I was never able to follow up on it before this August, when I selected Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals as my book to read for the month. Well, August being what it is at our homestead, I didn’t get it finished in August.  Also, it is hard to make much progress in a book when you feel the need to go back and underline twenty percent of it (ok, I exaggerate, but not much!).  The upper corner of the book is now substantially thicker than the rest from all the dog-earing I did to alert me to indispensable quotes for this report.

Indispensable though they may seem, I will now summarily dispense with nearly all of them, since re-writing much of the book will not be much help in distilling its essence for you, dear reader.  Also, I haven’t the time.  If you desire that experience, feel free to borrow my copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and skip the non-underlined portions.

I don’t know what I expected out of the book, but I think I just assumed he we would propose four different actual or hypothetical but believable meals and help us follow the supply chains to their source, thereby understanding more of the implications of our eating patterns.  That sounds eminently helpful, if a little dry for most readers.  I never expected it to be so lively.

Mr. Pollan doesn’t employ the desiccated style of many journalists.  His ambition seemed to be not only to document or summarize or even just to explain or interpret, he seemed to believe that his job here was to understand, and to help us understand, too.  He is not the reporter on the edge of the pool, he dives right in with the swimmers.

As such, he chose the strategy of direct involvement with each step or element of his journalism rather than relying exclusively on observation, archival research, or interviews, though he employed all of these techniques. For example, he didn’t just visit a beef brood herd, then a feedlot, etc.  He instead purchased a young steer being prepared for shipment, then a few months later went back and located his steer where it was spending its days in a pen with many of its fellows scarfing corn and wading around in their manure.  He didn’t just spend a day following Joel Salatin around on his farm with a notebook or recorder, he went and stayed there for a week, working on the farm, and then prepared a meal for some friends with some of Polyface Farm’s products.  He and his family, for the “processed food” example, scarfed a McDonald’s meal in the car.  It was no good sitting down and reading Animal Liberation, he thought he should start the book while sitting down to an exquisite steak at a nice restaurant.  And when it came time for the ultimate connected eater experience, he killed the wild pig himself, foraged the mushrooms, kneaded his own wild yeast bread, etc.  He even tried to make the salt himself…I won’t ruin that story for you, but I can tell you it is a tad sobering, if a bit comic, too.  I deeply appreciate this style of journalism.  People can get technical information the standard way, but the journalist who enters into their subject so fully ends up, it would seem, with so much more to say, and has an ability to connect it so much more clearly and with so much more presence to the reader than the conventional exposé.

Not that it wasn’t also an exposé.  He showed his investigative journalist chops off very well, exploding many popular myths along the way, and uncovering surprising connections.  But it was as much a matter of crafting his personal philosophy as an eater and cook as it was a matter of facts and fictions, but as a book of philosophy I must say it was of the most practical sort.  Yes, the issues are profound and overarching, but they are also intimate, every day issues.  Nothing could be more immediate and personal than food:  it is what I am putting into and through my very body now.
The title comes from a concept developed by a researcher who was working with rats, which are as omnivorous as humans (this is why they like our garbage piles and kitchens so much).  He was curious about how rats chose what to eat and not eat.  He developed the opinion that this was one of the rat’s chief challenges in life.  When you can eat almost anything, you then face the question that the Monarch butterfly caterpillar and the koala never face: what is the right thing to eat?  As Americans, Pollan argues, we are and have been for some time in the throes and the grip of trying to answer this question for ourselves; for our health and the health of the environment.  Food fads, food movements, and what he calls our “national eating disorder” owe much of their energy to a dilemma that is basic to our omnivorous nature.

As we try to resolve this ancient question and in so doing vacillate from one food fad to the next, food corporations see opportunity; each wave of change opens the door to getting us hooked on yet another processed or mediated food product.  They face their own dilemma, it would seem, in trying to craft a growth industry from food, the yearly increase in consumption of which is too thin a gruel to impress investors.

What makes us in the U.S. especially vulnerable to this dynamic, Pollan says, is that we lack a key cultural notion that humans all over the world have always used to buffer against this natural insecurity:  a cuisine.  We have never yet settled into a series of accepted foodways that we can rely on to relieve the burden of decision making that accompanies the omnivore’s dilemma.  What is right to eat?, the world asks, and the human usually answers:  What I grew up eating, of course!  What my religion tells me to eat, what my taste buds are tuned to enjoy, what is safe and available and familiar.  But here in the home of the brave we are emboldened by no such security.  We are an amalgam, for better or worse, of so many foodways from so many places, and that amalgamation has happened within the part of history that has been strongly influenced by capitalist economics.  It has long been recognized by food corporations that getting people to change their habits constitutes an opportunity; they have been deeply involved in official recommendations, legal schemes, and honest and dishonest research results for as long as such things have been done.  Nowhere in the world are the effects on our psyches and bodies so evident as here.

In the end, not too many solutions are proposed.  He sets up the dilemma nicely and details a few of the efforts to defend or continue or establish some alternatives.  I admire his honesty, though, in not holding out fictitious carrots to tempt us forward:  If we would only change this law, or buy from this place, or boycott this product hard and long enough, we could turn this thing around.  If there is to be a solution to this, it will be as varied and diverse as the landscapes and peoples that make up the places of this fine land.  The people of each place must respond in their own way, with the resources they have at hand.  And it won’t happen instantly.  Efforts to explore alternatives may seem symbolic, frivolous, or inadequate, but my view is that those are terrible reasons not to try them out, to exercise those long-atrophied cultural muscles.  I’ll end with one long quote from the end of the book, when Michael Pollan is reflecting on the meal he made from foraged foods:

“Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself?  Not necessarily; certainly this one wasn’t that.  Though I had spent the day in the kitchen (a good part of the week as well), and I had made most everything from scratch and paid scarcely a dime for all the ingredients, it had taken many hands to bring this meal to the table.  The fact that just about all of those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about the food on that table could be told in the first person…Perhaps the perfect meal is one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding.  This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal.  But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted.  The reason I didn’t open a can of stock was because stock doesn’t come from a can; it comes from the bones of animals.  And the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a pack but from the air we breathe.  The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as much as the meadows.  If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore’s Thanksgiving.”

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