The Omnivore's Dilemma

Or: a natural history of four meals; by Michael Pollan. If you are interested in what you eat, why you eat it and what it will do to you AND the rest of the planet, this book is a must.

The title of the book refers to the idea that we, as omnivores, like all other species who have a choice in what we eat, are confronted with a dilemma:

“Is what we are going to eat good for us or will it kill us? And if it IS going to kill us, will it do so slowly or rather quick- and painlessly…?”

(…addition by me…)

Pollan illustrates the question above with the exact logical opposite: a Koala bear does not care about the omnivores dilemma. It doesn’t encounter it. If its prospected food looks like Eucalyptus leaves, tastes like Eucalyptus leaves and smells like Eucalyptus leaves, then it must be dinner.

For us, however, dinner is a complicated and culturally deeply embedded exercise. Since I am a reconstituted sociologist, this makes the book interesting for me already. But there is more. Why is it, that this book gives me a genuine, straight into the bulls eye Aha-Erlebnis? Well, firstly, because I, as a half-Italian, who grew up with a very ingredient-conscious father who had been youth-long spoilt with the immaculate food cooked by his Friulian mother (as is generally the case with directly imported Italians), happen to like good food too.

And real food as well for that, because that is what I was raised on. My third generation Dutch-Italian mother, who was maybe more than slightly irritated by the I-Eat-No-Crap attitude of my fathers, made sure that she made her meals of high quality ingredients. This was more of a blessing than I realised at the time. For me it was quite normal to have breakfast with a genuine San Daniele Ham, a piece of meat which costs an arm and a leg in the LowLands. That is to name just one very scrumptious foodstuff I thought of as “normal” while missing the exclusiveness of it entirely.

It was only later that I found out how privileged these circumstances I had lived in actually were. Good food or cooking, as became clear to me, is not a very Dutch thing at all. It had to be imported into this country of mashed potatoes, overcooked vegetables and meat soaked in grease.  I realised that I had been living in a small Schlaraffenland (food wise only!) whereas my schoolmates were brought up on boring chow and mediocre grub.

In spite of this good start however, after I left the parental house and started cooking for myself and my new house mates, it took almost 20 years before I was reintroduced to quality food again by my wife, who is possibly even more ingredient conscious than my father ever was. She has been cooking the family meals for almost a decade now, thus reducing my position in the kitchen to that of dishwasher… which I automated of course, as goes without saying.

My wife has done my family a big favour by bringing real cooking and real food back into the house. She has banned anything that looks like food but actually isn’t. This erases around 60 percent of the stuff one sees in the supermarket from our shopping list.  Besides that, anything my grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food is a no-no too, which takes care of another 35 percent. So the necessity to ever go to a supermarket is thoroughly reduced to an absolute minimum. The time and the money saved in this way, are put into real exclusive shopping for the connoisseur: the acquisition of food from the people who actually produce it, an exercise with many advantages, for us as well as the environment. We know what we eat, where it comes from, how it was made and who made it. The unavoidable side-effect is that we eat with the seasons and the food we eat is locally produced. We can even pick it up by bicycle, which reduces the energy footprint of the stuff considerably.

I never knew how “hip” we are as a family. But according to Micheal Pollan we are. In his book, Pollan traces the origins of four meals he eats: from industrially grown fast food to a meal made from ingredients foraged and hunted in the woods. And if one reads what sits in between those two, one can only come to the conclusion that we must go back to our basics when it comes to growing, harvesting, transporting, selling, buying, cooking and eating food. We must, to make a very long story short, turn back from a highly industrialised, reduced and technologised food system, that will only give us cancer and that will screw up our planet and our immune systems. We must return to a system that makes full use of the highly complex and holistic – and firmly rooted in healthy soil – mechanisms which nature provides us with, and with which we can live in symbiosis in a benign way.

And yes, we can! We must re-teach ourselves to become sentient eaters again, instead of mindless consumers, who will eat any garbage the Industrial-Military-Food Complex is cooking up for us, with the sole purpose of growing a bigger economy instead of better food.

Pollans book was an eye opener to me, and I would definitely grant this experience to anyone who takes food seriously. For the others, who think that nothing can or will ever change in the way we are feeding the people, this book is a waste of time. But then again, for them, ANYTHING is a waste of time.