For this assignment please respond briefly to Michael Pollan's argument, in the first few pages of Omnivore's Dilemma, that we as a culture lack a stable food culture like the Italians or French, are obsessed with health, are confused and anxious about food, and therefore easily succumb to various expert-directed food fads.
What food experts do you and your family pay attention to - scientists, journalists, chefs, commercials on tv, doctors, nutritionists, health officials, book authors?
I find Michael Pollan's argument that much of the US lacks a stable food culture to be overstated. Certainly it is true that there are fads (Atkins diets), "trendy foods" (acai), and a superficiality of everday eating. But, on the one hand, isn't this precisely a sort of food culture with an emphasis on the "new"? And on the other hand isn't much of US food culture pretty stable - burger joints, french fries, pizzas, sodas? And on the 3rd paw doesn't Pollan's argument mainly apply to a selective-college-educated segment of the population who actually cares what the scientists are currently recommending while most of the continent continues crunching Cheez-Doodles?
It does, however (final paw), apply to me. I read books about food (including a lot before and a few after Pollan's) and think about different ways of eating (I've read manifestos and had conversations with friends who advocated vegan, vegetarian, paleolithic, sustainable, freegan, and raw diets). I switched to grapeseed and olive and flax and coconut oils at different times on being told by "experts" that one or the other were healthier (now a mix of all them). I was vegan for 16 years - largely based on the arguments and insights of anti-cruelty and anti-exploitation food philosophers - and recently added pasture raised eggs and pasture raised goat yogurt on the arguments of the sustainability philosophers (Gene Logsdon, Michael Pollan, a few others) and my experience seeing animals raised humanely at a commune in Virginia. I've been eating a lot of flax seed and DHA on reading that it might be a particular health issue for vegans and think I even see a benefit from it.
So I would have to say that I lack a stable food culture - that the corporate food culture I grew up in is insane and that abandoning it was crucial to my health - and that I don't miss it at all. When Catherine DeLaura tried to hold faculty dinners at places like "The Olive Garden" and "Outback Steakhouse" I never went.
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Would you say that not attending these faculty dinners was less about the food and more about the social nature of the meeting? You could always eat before you go.
As for not having a food culture, i would say that you still have one, it is just an ever-renewing system. You could argue that all the foods you eat have something or another in common, be it that they are naturally occurring or the result of humane animal treatment.
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