The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 1 of 10: Introduction
November 17, 2009 by dr. lam
For my faithful blog followers, you will recall that I covered Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food that literally changed my life and perhaps prolonged it in both quality and quantity. Since then, I have backtracked to read his seminal work on exploring how food gets to our table entitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This prodigious work attempts to explore 3 pathways of how food arrives at our table: the industrial, the organic, and more directly from the forest itself. These pathways as Pollan explores are actually quite a bit more complicated than what we esteem to be our food sources when we append romantic terms like “organic” to what we eat. Is it truly organic? What does that mean anyway? It definitely means higher price. I truly enjoyed his exploring ideas like “beyond organic” that gets closer to the third pathway of food, which is beyond a falsified notion of organic that is mass produced through major chains like Whole Foods. Nothing wrong with Whole Foods but let’s not glorify anything too much simply because we can throw fancy words that we don’t even know what they mean like “organic”.
The omivore’s dilemma as the eponymous title reflects concerns the age old question, “What shall we have for dinner?” The term comes from University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin who coined the phrase and posed this existential question. Unlike a koala bear who simply eats eucalyptus leaves, we have a diversity in our menu selection that is bewildering and potentially fraught with risk. Pollan exposes the back end of what we are eating because what sits on our dinner table may be more than we bargained for. We should know how did what we got get there and what can we do differently in our lives to be more educated consumers of foodstuff. I think you will enjoy this intellectual and highly pragmatic journey into the world of food, yet again. Bon Appetit!
Comments
2 Responses to “The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 1 of 10: Introduction”
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Great, Dr. Lam!! I look forward to this blog series! Love the variety of blog topics!!!
this one is a great one, if i say so myself!