It's impossible to not notice the current obsession with food, diet and nutrition that exists around us. No matter where we get our news feeds from, there is a constant bombardment of information regarding what we should and should not eat to achieve a certain health goal or in general to be fit. I used to wonder how to make sense of all this information which sometimes used to contradict itself! And then one day I came across a talk by Michael Pollan on TED...I started reading a little more about his work and ended up reading two of his books titled "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food".
It is not possible to summarize in a few sentences what Michael Pollan wants to tell us -- but let me try nonetheless. The first book is a detailed overview of the inner workings of the American food industry, it's somewhat scary and heavy dependence on corn for creation of all food products, the collusion of the government, news media, agribusiness and pharma companies which has created a plethora of corn based (at a fundamental level) "food like substances" and the enormous cost that we pay for these food like substances in environmental and health terms. The second book is an eater's manifesto, meant to be a guide to practice good eating habits. Michael provides some simple (and funny sounding) rules for this -- "Don't eat anything that your great grandmother won't recognize as food", "Avoid eating products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable or are more than five in number", "Avoid food products that make health claims", "Shop at farmer's markets instead of grocery stores" etc. His advice can be summarized in own words as "Eat food (not food like substances). Not too much. Mostly plants". If you have some time to spare, you can listen to Michael's talk in the authors@Google series or read this article in the NY times or watch the eye opening, Oscar nominated, documentary "Food Inc.".
The bigger issue -- that sometimes we don't even realize -- is that we are unaware of how our eating choices as a society impacts our usage of environmental resources (land, water, air) in the production of food. As a society, we have been led to have a very myopic view of food -- where at an individual level we think that the cost of everything we buy as food accurately reflects it's "true" cost to us. We should view our choices with respect to what we eat everyday at breakfast, lunch and dinner as three votes that we cast each day. If we are callous and cast our votes injudiciously, we make choices that hurt us as well as future generations who will also rely on the same environment for food.
It is not possible to summarize in a few sentences what Michael Pollan wants to tell us -- but let me try nonetheless. The first book is a detailed overview of the inner workings of the American food industry, it's somewhat scary and heavy dependence on corn for creation of all food products, the collusion of the government, news media, agribusiness and pharma companies which has created a plethora of corn based (at a fundamental level) "food like substances" and the enormous cost that we pay for these food like substances in environmental and health terms. The second book is an eater's manifesto, meant to be a guide to practice good eating habits. Michael provides some simple (and funny sounding) rules for this -- "Don't eat anything that your great grandmother won't recognize as food", "Avoid eating products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable or are more than five in number", "Avoid food products that make health claims", "Shop at farmer's markets instead of grocery stores" etc. His advice can be summarized in own words as "Eat food (not food like substances). Not too much. Mostly plants". If you have some time to spare, you can listen to Michael's talk in the authors@Google series or read this article in the NY times or watch the eye opening, Oscar nominated, documentary "Food Inc.".
The bigger issue -- that sometimes we don't even realize -- is that we are unaware of how our eating choices as a society impacts our usage of environmental resources (land, water, air) in the production of food. As a society, we have been led to have a very myopic view of food -- where at an individual level we think that the cost of everything we buy as food accurately reflects it's "true" cost to us. We should view our choices with respect to what we eat everyday at breakfast, lunch and dinner as three votes that we cast each day. If we are callous and cast our votes injudiciously, we make choices that hurt us as well as future generations who will also rely on the same environment for food.
No comments:
Post a Comment