I recently finished reading
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I really enjoyed the book. A lot of what he said resonated with me. I had been thinking about how to eat healthier, but that seemingly simple idea becomes convoluted relatively quickly. What
is healthy eating? Is it low-fat, low-calorie? Does it mean avoiding sugar and complex carbohydrates? If you're trying to be heart healthy, you might try to cut back on sodium and cholesterol. Then there's organic food. Ultimately, I would love to be eating all organic food, but what does that really
mean anyways? What are the federal regulations that make a food able to be deemed organic? If I decide that eating healthier can't be achieved unless I also support concientious farming and care of the environment then I might want to consider eating locally, buying free-range or cage free, bringing my own reusable bags, shopping at the farmer's market, or even growing my own produce. As you can see, "healthy" isn't such a simple a term.
After reading this book, and doing some research, I have a new perspective, but there is still a lot of gray area. I think a lot of American's feel similarly frustrated. Food is obviously an integral part of our culture, but as Pollan says, "as a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us" (5). Without these traditions to guide our national eating habits, I believe we tend to swing on a giant pendulum, some of us depriving our bodies of perfectly normal foods like bread, meat, and sugar, while others binge, not knowing how to balance the pleasure of food with the restraint of overindulgence. We don't have customs that tell us to take time out of our days to leave work, go home, and prepare a meal, and then to actually sit down and enjoy it. Savior it! If we had these specific food customs, our impulsive and hectic meals would become nonexistent due to social traditions and taboos, not our unhealthy obsession with the online calorie counter. In another interesting observation, Pollan mentions the "French paradox" in which French women can seemingly live off of loaves of French bread, cheese, wine, and fois gras, and maintain more slender figures than us! Pollan says, "Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox - that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily."
While eating "local" is routine for a family in living in Italy or Mexico, who can (in some cases) walk to the market to purchase fresh produce from their local farmers, I could (an often do) plan my weekly meals like a glutton at Disney's Epcot Center. I might eat Chinese, Italian, Indian, Thai, and French food all in the span of just one week. Meanwhile, the Thai curry sauce has been shipped halfway across the world, and the hormone and antibiotic-filled chicken from my Moo Goo Gai Pan had lived its pitiful life in a filthy cage neurotically trying to peck at itself with its clipped beak.
In his book, Pollan mentions a farm in Virginia called
Polyface. In one funny anecdote, the author asks Joel Salitan, the owner of this progressive farm, to fed-ex a chicken to the West coast so he can see the difference real "free-range" farming makes. Salitan declines his request. His farm is completely local, and he intends to keep it that way. To him, flying a chicken across the country is an irresponsible waist of fossil fuel. His Virginia farm is a "beyond organic" local-market dedicated to "healing the land" that industrial farming has left behind. After reading about their humane and brilliant farming techniques, I checked them out online. As their quite family-run website suggests, they truly practice what they preach. Amazingly, they have a buyers club that covers about a dozen cities in Maryland and Virginia, the farthest reaching being Annapolis, Maryland!
As I tried to order some eggs and chicken of my very own for a May 14th drop off date at local person's home (yes, he puts his home address on the website and lets strangers come to pick up their purchases) I was immediately disappointed that they were sold out of many of the items I wanted. However, after scrolling down the webpage I saw a quote stating "remember, we are a farm, not a factory."
The problem is that at the grocery store, I can get anything I want. I don't have to wait for Spring to get fresh strawberries. I don't have to go to Central America to get a pineapple. The products I want are sitting right there for me whenever I want them. So why should I choose
not to eat them? It's because of what I
don't see when walking into the grocery store. I can't
see the barrels of petroleum wasted on shipping items across the world. They're not sitting on the shelf next to the the bananas from Honduras. I can't
see the squalor that the chicken lives in. I don't
see the unnatural and antibiotic-filled corn feed that the cows eat, while their bodies, grass-eating machines, have never seen a blade of grass in their short lives. I don't
see these things, so it doesn't make an impact. But that doesn't mean those things do not happen. They do, and on a massive scale. Does a plucked and cleaned chicken breast looks the same, no matter the source? Of course. So why should I choose to pay $2 more a pound?
My answer? Because it's only $2. If you were buying a car seat for your baby, would you buy the cheaper model, or the one that was slightly more expensive, but guaranteed safety? Then why will we fill our bodies with chemicals and anything that endured suffering, just to make chicken nuggets as cheap as possible? Don't we normally want to pay a little more for a higher quality product? Then why do we resist when it comes to food? I'm not saying that I don't have a budget at the grocery store. I definitely do, and I stick to it. I will also probably run to a McDonalds on a hectic day some time, and buy a pineapple too. I can't live up to the expectations of perfect eating. If so, I would spend each day obsessed with every morsel, which is just as unhealthy as every other binging or malnourished person. But I will try to strive for balance, a natural thought process to eating, and above all a conscientious and responsible attitude when purchasing the food I will nourish my body with. To me, if you are what you eat, I want to fill my body (and soul) with the most clean food that I reasonably can.
