TOD Part 3

            I was really interested to see how Pollan decided to go about this last meal. Like him, when I was little my parents had my brother and sister and I do a little foraging. Before we started growing them on purpose, my dad would take us out to hunt shiitake mushrooms in the spring and fall, and my mom made it a competition when we went camping to see if we could find things like wild blueberries or blackberries. So I feel a little bit of kinship with what he’s trying to accomplish. However, he’s right when he says “it’s not as though the forager food chain represents a viable way for us to eat at this point in history; it doesn’t. For one thing, there is not enough game left to feed us all, and probably not enough wild plants and mushrooms either” (Pollan 279). So eating wild food has a different draw. I like to think of it as an adventure. And—at least for me—when I eat something I make, it’s a way of connecting to my family even though they’re not here. Pollan says “all winter long [his mother’s] beach plum jelly summoned memories of summer vacation: August on toast” (Pollan 278). As well as being reminiscent of a certain garlic episode on the back deck at my house, this is another reason for food: it’s a comfort. Smell is one of the strongest triggers of memory, and I think that’s because we have evolved as humans to remember what’s good and what isn’t.

            I had to laugh when he talked about Thoreau’s quote about the gun and how “That pitiable, uneducated boy [that Thoreau talks about] was me” (Pollan 281). I’ve fired guns before, my dad (the son of a cop) thought it a necessary thing to teach all three of his children, and according to him I’m good at it. However, I’ve never shot anything with a still-beating heart (my dad holds all three of his children to the you-shoot-it-you-eat-it policy). One of the other best parts of this section was when Pollan found “his forager Virgil” (282). Not only is that a hilarious way of thinking of a person who knows how to live off the land, but it’s the fact that he made a point of actually going out and finding one. Angelo Garro—the aforementioned “Virgil”—actually reminded me a lot of an Italian Chef Gousteau, a big, jolly guy who really, really enjoys cooking and what goes into cooking. Seriously, can I go be apprenticed to him? This guy sounds Excellent with a capital E.

            The discussion about animal rights was very interesting, mostly because I don’t have a problem with killing things so long as they’ve been well-treated while alive. I’ve always been taught that an animal is an animal, not a human. They don’t think like humans, they don’t feel feelings like humans. Sure, certain animals can form attachments to humans—dogs, horses, cats, and so on—but they don’t recognize that they feel those things. They just exist. They do not think about the fact that they exist. Their minds are busy considering things like: “That is food. That is not food. That is a threat. That is not a threat.” Pollan talks about the writers that are anathema to animal rights activists, saying that “the offending argument, which does not seem unreasonable to me, is that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not” (316). I think Pollan is absolutely right. Animals are different from humans in the fact that “The concept of nonexistence is thankfully absent” (316). Death is a fact of life and they accept it. Humans though, oh man, we have to make a whole big to-do over it. I wanted to applaud when I read the line “As humans contemplating the suffering or pain of animals we do need to guard against projecting onto them what the same experience would feel like to us” (316). I admit I could never eat small furry things (with the exception of squirrels, I could probably manage squirrels)—mice, rabbits, that sort of thing—but bigger animals and birds? Not a problem. I’ve mentioned before how my mom and I cut up chickens last summer. It was disgusting while it lasted, but afterwards we had tasty-looking chicken meat that could easily become dinner. I also admit that I probably wouldn’t have the guts to just walk up to an animal and kill it, but I’d be fine with using a gun. Pollan would probably say that shooting it would distance me from the kill, but in my mind a gun is a weapon, made to kill things quickly and efficiently. If I’m going to kill something humanely with a minimum amount of pain—because animals do feel pain, and actively causing pain to someone or something without their express consent is wrong—I’m going to shoot it. (Another reason I don’t like using industrial meats—the animals are uncomfortable, even sometimes in pain. The fact that this is a normal part of feedlot life really pisses me off.)

            After the subject of the animal rights activists—in which Pollan made a great deal of sense, which was comforting after the ideals of the animal rights activists, which to me made very little sense—the discussion of why farms like Polyface are better for the animals and how animal rightists ignore the fact that domesticated animals evolved to be domestic because they had a higher survival rate in a symbiosis with humans was excellent. On a farm like Polyface the animals are leading the kind of lives they are biologically supposed to live, which is better for everyone and everything involved. This is the same with animals in the wild, and Pollan makes this very clear when discussing Matthew Scully and his writings on the “moral degradation” of “predators (like cats)” (321). Pollan responds with “moral degradation?” (321). I agree with what he didn’t say here: animals in the wild don’t really have a capacity for morals…they’re too busy worrying about staying alive. (I could sing a song by the BeeGees here, but I won’t.)

When Pollan started describing the morning of the day on which he was going to kill his first pig, I nearly fell over laughing. I thought, “What, what is this? This flowery prose from the man whose irony and sarcasm I have come to admire so much?” But then he acknowledged that he actually felt this way about what he was doing, and it gave me a new respect for him because he has the ability to write factually but still make it beautiful. When he finally took the shot and killed the pig, however, it was really easy to imagine being there. My dad taught me to take a breath and hold it before firing—the gun stays steadier that way because you move less—so the “crystal stillness of the scene and the moment in time” (352) is a very apt description of the milliseconds between when your finger moves the trigger and when the bullet fires. My dad also taught me that you pull the trigger in a slow, controlled motion (less chance of accidentally moving the gun while it’s firing and ruining your shot), just like Pollan uses when shooting his pig, so I knew exactly what he felt, or as close as target shooting gets to shooting an actual animal. I know whenever I shoot, the extremely small amount of time between when the trigger starts moving and when gun fires always seems like longer than it is, because my anticipation of how I’m going to react to what the gun might do as it fires reaches its high point just before the firing pin strikes the bullet and sends it shooting out the end of the barrel.  

            On the whole, I think what Pollan is trying to get at with all of this is that humans have lost the responsibility that comes with killing things. My dad’s rule of You Shoot It You Eat It made this very clear. If I’m going to shoot something, I become responsible for it, and I have to deal with it. Pollan talks about something he calls “respect for what is,” saying that “it doesn’t tell you what to do or even what to think. Yet respect for what is does point us in a direction. That direction just happens to be the direction from which we came—to that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence, and never ate them except with gratitude” (362). Indirectly, humans are responsible for the deaths of every single animal raised for its meat, but we forget that because we are no longer confronted with the direct reality of a dead thing as a result of our actions, because mostly our meat comes already dead, prepackaged and shrink-wrapped with a barcode and a price.

TOD: RR Part 2

 Apologies for the late post—the internet ate my original and I didn’t realize it until now.

            I enjoyed reading the second part of The Omnivore’s Dilemma far more than the first section. Reading about how the “organic” things in grocery stores were made was disconcerting to say the least, but it was an interesting and I think much-needed look into how the food system works. I’ve said before, I don’t like not knowing where things come from and what’s in them. Now I know.

My favorite part was undoubtedly Joel Salatin’s farm. Oh my dear god. I just want to go and stay there for forever. I am in no way a “‘Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer’” (Pollan 125) as Mr. Salatin describes himself, so okay maybe I wouldn’t want to live there, but I do tend to prefer it when the place my food comes from makes sense with the kind of food it is. Pollan says that “feeding ruminants corn came to make a certain economic sense—I say “certain” because that statement depends on the particular method of accounting our economy applies to such questions, one that tends to hide the high cost of cheap food produced from corn” (Pollan 200). Mr. Salatin’s farm, however, makes different but much simpler biological and ecological sense. Not only was it interesting to learn about how a farm like this works, now I understand more about why Grassfields—which is actually based on Polyface Farm and how Mr. Salatin does things—works the way it does. It just plain makes sense. And I think Pollan is right again when he says that the reason this sense isn’t implemented in large farming operations is because “our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale. Everything about corn meshes smoothly with the gears of this great machine; grass doesn’t” (Pollan 201). Bravo, Mr. Pollan.

The other fantastic part was when Pollan actually took the food back to his friends’ house and cooked it. It took me back to so many summer meals I’ve had at my own house, with my family and friends. He talks about how the people there made it a completely different experience than if he’d simply been eating by himself. The food would still have been good, I’m assuming, but the people present give meals a certain quality in and of themselves. The meal becomes about something other than the food, almost a celebration of the ties between the people eating it, and I think that how the presence of people changes meals is fascinating. Generally people want to eat with those they love—friends, family, etc.—but they don’t want to eat with people who intimidate them or people they don’t like. It literally ruins the meal, because they’re so busy focusing on not making complete fools of themselves that the food pretty much loses its taste, no matter how high-end it is.

Or at least, that’s how it is for me.  Someone else’s experience could be completely different, which is another one of the interesting complexities of food. The events in a person’s life can change how they experience the world around them, including food. I bet I experience food a whole lot differently than a starving child in Africa or a chef that makes French haute-cuisine for a bunch of wealthy socialites. So food is different in so many cases, yet is the same on the whole because every single human being has to eat in order to survive. How weirdly cool is that?

 

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: RR 1 (Or: My Giant Rant On Why I Don't Like The Corporate Food Industry)

            By the end of part one of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I was really, really sick and tired of reading the word CORN. A lot of what Pollan writes in this chapter I already knew. Corn and soybeans make up pretty much everything in the industrial food chain; most corn is genetically modified; farmers can’t actually support themselves on what they grow; I knew all that already. For as long as I can remember, my mom has been on my case to “eat healthy,” and I’ve been taught about where food comes from. So while the history lessons in the chapter are interesting, they are only interesting because I happen to like history and he tells it like a story instead of a textbook.

However, I do like a lot of the things Pollan says in the introduction of his book. I wish I could just make a list of quotes that remind me of the lessons my parents taught me, but I won’t, because that would be boring and I hate being boring. Pollan says “like the hunter-gatherer picking a novel mushroom off the forest floor and consulting his sense memory to determine its edibility, we pick up the package in the supermarket and, no longer so confident of our senses, scrutinize the label, scratching our heads over the meaning of phrases like “heart healthy,” “no trans fats,” “cage-free,” or “range-fed.” What is “natural grill flavor” or TBHQ or xanthan gum? What is all this stuff, anyway, and where in the world did it come from?” (Pollan 5). These are exactly the same kinds of questions my mom taught me to ask. Being lactose intolerant for a portion of my life made me very careful about reading ingredient lists, a habit which I've kept despite the fact that I am no longer allergic to lactose. For example, what the hell is potassium sorbate and why is it in my food?  Why is the monetary success of companies more important than the health of the people who depend on those companies for food? It makes no sense, and I don’t like it when things don’t make sense.

Another quote I like from Pollan's introduction is: “Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead” (Pollan 9). The whole point of nature is to keep everything in balance. It reminds me of that line in “The Matrix” when Mr. Smith is talking to Morpheus about what the human race actually is. I believe he calls it a virus, always growing and obliterating as it grows, forcing itself to move elsewhere in order to find new things to feed off of. I wouldn’t call humans a virus, necessarily, but I do think that humans have become really, really bad at this whole balance thing.

On the same subject, Pollan says “By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented” (Pollan 10). I’m hoping he means “novel” in the sense that our bodies don’t know what to do with all these foreign compounds we keep pumping into them. If so, then he hit the nail on the head, because in my opinion that is what is contributing to the national food crisis. Obesity, heart disease, any number of other fatal medical conditions can be contributed at least in part to the food we eat, and there is almost nothing the individual consumer can do to change that because they have no power over how the food is made. It’s scary, I admit it. Thinking about how many people there are out there who don’t know about the things that go into their food and what it’s doing to them is terrifying. But I know at the same time there’s only so much I can do.

Which is why, as I’m going to say in my CYOA presentation today, I am proud of the way I eat. I say “I want to go see the happy cows,” but I don’t actually want to see the cows. I want to go to the farm because it gives me comfort to know that the food I get there is actually food, grown the way food was meant to be grown, whether it’s animal or plant matter. This leads me to my favorite quote from Pollan’s introduction: “in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing” (Pollan 11). Bam. Thank you, Michael Pollan. Watch me do a dance. This is why I take so much pleasure in eating the way I do at home: I KNOW WHAT’S IN THE FOOD. I know the beef is just exactly that, beef. It hasn’t been injected with saltwater to make it heavier to so I have to pay extra per pound. The cows it came from haven’t been treated with antibiotics or hormones or anything else. It’s just COW. Or pig, or chicken, or turkey, or eggs, or milk, or whatever, it’s JUST. FOOD. Nothing else. And it’s also nice knowing that the money my mom pays for the privilege of getting food and nothing but food is helping support a wonderful family of people who care about what they do and how they do it. Seeing exactly what your money is going toward is a really unique experience, one I wish everyone could have. It makes me think about the fact that the farmers depend on us just as much if not more than we depend on them, but I honestly don’t think we’re holding up our end of the bargain on a national scale. In my opinion, that needs to change, but I don’t see it doing so until so much damage has been done both to humans and the environment that some of it is irreversible.

Restaurant Review: Thai Cuisine (Final)

            Tucked away into the corner of a strip mall off Drake Ave. in Kalamazoo, MI; Thai Cuisine is a medium-size restaurant that has similar characteristics to the Isla de Muerta from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl,” because going there is a bit of an adventure, and “it cannot be found but by those who already know where it is” (or people who have a computer or a Maps app on their smartphones). 

The restaurant has large windows, warm lighting, and an interesting mix of decorations. Waist-high golden statues of Chinese-style spirits and dragons stand guard on either side of the door, next to the fireplace in the center of the room, and at various other places around the restaurant. They share their decorative purpose with several potted plants, which give relief to the mostly red, gold, white, and black color scheme. 

Red silk-like wallpaper with a gold pattern on it that could either be an Indian goddess or Buddha covers the walls, and poster-size pictures of the same model in different traditional Thai costumes look down from nearly every single wall. Upon entering there is that unmistakable smoky but spicy smell that restaurants offering food from East Asian cultures usually have. The tables are covered in white tablecloths with paper over them, presumably to make it easier to keep the cloth underneath clean. The chairs are comfortable and look well cared for; all in all this looks like a place that would cater to all types of diners; families with children, couples on casual dates, groups of friends together for a night out. 

But, keeping with the Isla de Muerta theme, the place is as eerily empty as a cave in an island of the dead containing a stone chest full of cursed Aztec gold. There is enough seating for probably forty or fifty people, but only two tables are occupied at around six on one particular Friday evening; an older couple speaking quietly enough to each other that their conversation just sounds like vague mumbles sits on the opposite side of the room from a group of four girls. The girls are easily the largest source of noise, yet it is still quiet enough in the restaurant to hear the traditional flute music coming from the speakers in the ceiling with the volume turned down low. Of course restaurants are allowed to have off nights, but it seems a bit odd that one of this size doesn’t have more people eating there.

The hostess is polite but not overly-friendly, and is apparently the only member of the staff present besides the chef in the kitchen, as she also acts as the waitress. While prompt, she disappears for the most part after she brings diners their food, returning only once to briefly check on them and refill their drinks before disappearing back down whatever rabbit hole she came out of. She also reappears for customers who come into the restaurant to order take-out, so it’s possible that this restaurant makes some of its money that way. What is slightly confusing is that as soon as the waitress notices that one diner at a table is done eating even though the others are not, the check soon follows, along with an offer of boxes for leftovers. 

Now, either the chef at Thai Cuisine has some magical power that can speed up cooking times, or the food is made prior and simply kept warm until someone orders it. Here’s hoping it’s the former, not the latter. The waitress returns with food for the customers in what seems like too little time, even for the beginning of the dinner period when some things are made in advance in preparation for the dinner rush. Perhaps East-Asian cuisine like Thai, Chinese, or Vietnamese cooks more quickly than American food, but less than ten minutes between when the food is ordered and when it arrives is not even enough time for diners to get a conversation going. 

            The food itself, though each dish looks and smells slightly different, all has the same undertones. The peanut curry with chicken, which has a nice sneaky-spicy hot flavor that warms the mouth but doesn’t burn, has little to taste besides the spice, salt, onion, and whatever oil they used to cook it in. The chicken has no flavor whatsoever. A different peanut curry dish with tofu is slightly better than the first. Same warm-hot flavor, salt, onion, and oil, but the spice was nicely complemented by the tofu and vegetables in the dish: green and orange bell peppers, zucchini, broccoli, and pea pods. Surprisingly, this dish came with rice instead of the noodles that appear in several other dishes. 

Curry Pad Thai, an odd mix of Indian spices with Thai ingredients, is in all honesty the best of the bunch. The chicken doesn’t have the consistency of a dry sponge, the sauce is creamy and complemented by a bit of egg, the amount of spice is good and the noodles behave like noodles instead of sticking together in the chewy, slightly dry clumps that they turn into when left to sit out for too long. It had the same elements of oil, onion, and spice, but was less salty than the others, which let the other flavors come through better. 

The drunken noodles, however, a traditionally Thai dish, are if not the worst of all the different dishes, somewhere near the bottom.  They taste mostly of salt, spice, and oil; the noodles were chewy and dry in some places, and the whole thing was overloaded by onion. There are other vegetables as well—undercooked carrots and pea pods—but there is double the amount of onion than the rest of the vegetables put together. The “special basil” mentioned on the menu as an integral part of the drunken noodles is either absent or drowned out. As for dessert, diners need not worry about having to choose between something low-calorie and something delicious. There are no desserts on the menu. 

            The food at Thai Cuisine is filling and on the whole fairly good, if a bit salty and not quite as flavorful as some might like. For the price—around $12 per person, not counting the tip—it’s decent food. The restaurant has been open for several years, so they do not appear to be lacking for customers, however the slightly unnerving feel of eating in a mostly empty restaurant might lead diners to simply order take-out. And perhaps this is best, because the quality of the food is more along the lines of what one would expect to arrive in a white cardboard take-out box than on a white ceramic plate.