Meatmachine.info

I’ve written about food and the choices we make regarding what we eat only a few times before, but it occured to me today how central food has become to who I am. As such, I ought to write more.

A big inspiration for a lot of my delicacy decisions is Michael Pollan.

For my 19th birthday I recieved a copy of Pollan’s treatise on taste, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. In dealing with the question of “what to eat”, Pollan explores four diametrically different dinners; McDonald’s on the road, followed by Whole Foods’ “Big Organic”, then a self-sustaining Virginia farm’s edibles, and finally a meal of ingredients he foraged for and hunted himself. Throughout his exploration of the range of options between fast-food and slow, Pollan’s dives deep into the paths ingredients take on their way to the plate. His research yields political, environmental, economic, and ethical implications.

Around this time last year I went to dinner at a friend’s house, they had started hosting a weekly dinner party to be prepared by a different guest/chef each week. That week we ate quiches made by Quinn. On a small chalkboard in the kitchen there was written a short phrase: “Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.” It wasn’t until a month or two later that I read the NYT article by Pollan, Unhappy Meals, in which he first dropped this awesome nugget of knowledge.

His latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, seems to be a healthy fleshing out of this concept. Where Omnivore’s Dilemma covered the environmental and ethical facets of feeding, In Defense of Food turns towards issues of health and the failings of ‘nutritionism’. BoingBoing posted today a link to an interview of Pollan talking with Ira Flatow from NPR’s Science Friday about his new book. Good listening, I bet it’ll be good reading too.