Pollan + Dupuis = Thought

After reading articles by Pollan and Dupuis here’s the similarity I can see. One article is written by Pollan, the other mentions him in the first sentence. As for the contemporary food issue, well, Pollan sounds like pollen. Pollen is in flowers, and there are some flowers you can eat so that just about does it. Ok just kidding there was more than just that in common about these articles. The contemporary food issue that I'm going to elaborate on for the next two to four hundred words is that food isn’t just food anymore, it’s thought.

To set the stage a little we’re going to travel back in time a little, and by a little I mean to the Stone Age or around the time fire was first discovered. Before fire food was not that abundant (I'm just making this up so please roll with me), people ate what they could find without cooking it. Although they could’ve caught animals for food, they couldn’t cook them to eat without fire. The discovery of fire then allowed them to be able to cook the animals they caught and because there were so many other options for food it became abundant. There are ways to eat like that today, all you have to do is go camping you may not be living the same way they did because they didn’t have your Patagonia Gore-Tex boots, Marmot Jacket, and ten-person North Face tent, but you’re catching your food and eating it just like they did. Back then, and in this way of living, eating was simple. If you caught it, you sure as hell ate it because you don’t know when the next time you were going to catch something. You definitely don’t care if the fish you pull out of the stream has too much mercury in it you just want to eat.

That was back then (and in select situations now) though, nowadays if you don’t know exactly what you're eating you almost seem ignorant. Dupuis notes not the ignorance but the aspect that you have to now think about food rather than just eat it. She lists a few popular food authors and then says they “have turned our food choices into moral choices” (34). To me this stands out because it’s not even just a personal choice about food anymore, but now there are morals involved? You’ve got to be kidding me. In today’s day and age you can offend someone you’ve never met at the grocery store if they walked past and hear you order hamburgers from the counter and they’re a vegetarian. We’ve focused a lot on this issue in class already but more about where out food comes from, not what is in our food. I’d be curious to see if anyone in our class actually knows what a calorie is, and saying it’s the stuff in food doesn’t count.