Over two years ago, I posted the short version of my long pondered question:
why do people eat artichokes? As long as I've been alive, we've been going to the same spot at the beach, and as long as I've been alive, we've been driving through the same vast fields of artichokes where those pictures were taken. Artichokes do *not* look like anything resembling food, at least to the modern American eater, even a modern eater raised next door to the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley, with adventurous parents who more to cook and serve homemade Mexican black beans and Chinese-style stirfry than hamburgers for dinner. But artichokes always puzzled me. Who thought of eating them? How did they figure out to get the fruit? Who on earth figured out that the heart was edible, or that the leaves were good if you scraped them with your teeth? Just weird.
I don't usually read in themes, but if you've been following along as themacinator drifts from her normal topics (pit bulls, baseball, animal welfare, photography, and, well, Mac) to food books and food and food books again, you'll see that it started with
Novella Carpenter in August with "Farm City." The more distanced I am from this book, the less I like it, mostly because of Carpenter herself, and the NIMBY sensation I have. Did she have to do this in Oakland? The short answer is probably yes- like me it's awesome to be next door to the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley. And she lives (lived?) in Oakland, so yes, she had to have her backyard farm in Oakland. But the farm, especially once she added the pigs, disgusted me, both as a sentient person- GROSS to pig shit and rotten scraps- and as an animal person- her rabbit ethics especially disturbed me, and knowing this is going on in my town really put me off.
So I decided to bite the bullet and read "
Eating Animals." (see also
The Pain and
Hypocrisy.) This book troubled and moved me, and also demanded, ala Carpenter, that you know where your meat comes from. In a way, as a long time vegetarian, I felt vindicated. Only in a very, very small way. You can only opt out a little bit, as an American, as our culture is all about meat, and fast meat at that. I don't really opt out, either, not in any meaningful way, as I consume fast dairy and eggs, and Mac eats meat, meat that I don't pay particular attention to where it comes from- I wish I could say it does, and I wish that saying that I pick my battles was a good argument. It's not, but it's what I do, and what I can do at this point in my life. The book prompted me for the first time to consider being a vegan. I'm not, and won't be, but did make me consider more than the extremism that the word usually provokes in me.
So I decided to read Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma." Like Carpenter's book, this book was not particularly readable. It wasn't as morally difficult as Safran Foer's book, but more morally unpalatable (yuk yuk) than Carpenters. It takes Pollan 2/3 of his book to get to his title: The omnivore's dilemma is the dilemma of the artichoke. "The blessing of the omnivore," Pollan finally writes on page 287, "is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of these things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own." In the first part of Pollan's book, he talks about monoculture: America has turned a vast diversity of food options into one thing: Corn. Basically, we live on corn. Everything we eat- animal and vegetable, and all processed food can be traced back to corn, which is grown in giant monoculture. Farmers, the few of them that are left, grow corn. They ship corn. Corn is processed in a few different ways, fed to animals that have been redesigned to eat corn, which they didn't do a few decades ago, and they then are slaughtered, processed with more corn (which has been reprocessed into a variety of things) and then they are served up with corn in the form of soda and other beverages and side dishes. Delicious and not-very-nutritious. Yum.
The second part of Pollan's book- the conceit he uses to get to his main point is following three separate meals from the very beginning. The first is a meal at McDonalds, hence the super processed corn. The second meal is from a farm he finds that truly sounds sustainable and local. He has to kill chickens, but the chickens, he believes, live real-chicken-lives, which makes it OK. As OK as it can be. He eats everything right there, on the farm. The third meal, when he finally gets to the omnivore's dilemma, is a hunted/gathered meal- which involves mushrooms. They can be dangerous, fatal, even, which proves his point: if you don't know what to eat, you can die. If you know what to eat, you can have the best most awesome meal possible, available only to people, because they will eat anything. And the community that comes together to eat this meal enjoys a "perfect meal," because they were all involved in the making of it, including the ritual of cooking, another human thing. (Interestingly, Safran Foer starts his book discussing the ritual of meals, and how something is lost with the eating of meat, although he believes it is replaceable.)
Questioning and killing the eating of animals, Pollan stresses, is a new thing. Being a vegetarian, or even worrying about the animals we eat, is new, and kind of odd. In the same vein, the kind of mass production of animals, industrial farming, that Americans rely on, is also new. Both novelties are part of the same thing: distancing us from the fact that humans are also animals. Killing and eating animals is an animal thing. Being on the second farm, and having the "kill area" open to the air was a kind of transparency that Pollan found refreshing, and almost a defining part of a sustainable farm. Customers could and did come watch the process: if they didn't approve they could skip on the purchase. Pollan found himself immensely proud of shooting a pig, something he thought would repulse him. But both processes- the slaughter of a chicken who had lived a chicken life and the killing of a wild pig- reminded him that he, too, was an animal, doing an animal thing: preying on a prey animal, in a human way- with guns and knives. Primitive? Yes. More realistic than a vegetarian's idealism and an industrial farm? Also, yes.
I was sold by this, almost as much as I was sold by Safran Foer's arguments against eating animals. I've always argued that I don't eat meat because of the way we over-do it. If everyone ate meat in moderation, I've said, maybe I would, too. If people ate meat in the ways that Pollan ate meat in his second two meals- through local, transparent farms and in the once a year hunted meal, it would require moderation, and awareness. The animals would be real animals, not just meat for the table, which I think even Safran Foer might agree with. The humans involved would be treated as humans, not just assembly line workers. The environment, the earth, would be treated as a part of the process, not just a resource to be mined. Together, the pieces of both philosophies work. Separately, they're pedantic. In all likelihood, they're both improbable. If they're going to start anywhere, they're here in Oakland or Berkeley. I wish Carpenter, who had the most likelihood of doing it right, had done it right, rather than dabbling in every possible food animal. Maybe there's still a chance.
The last time I wrote a fiction review, I kind of said I wasn't going to do it anymore. Which is why I finished this book a week ago and haven't written this yet. Susan Choi has written an interesting book (yuk yuk) that I wouldn't have read if it weren't a Dad hand-me-down. I'm really not reading much fiction lately, and I rarely read psychological mysteries, which is what I think this is. Suspense or something. The book was actually quite good, and I had to put it down sometimes because it was too creepy. But I don't have anything to say about it. If you want the book, a weird mystery thingy set at a university, it's all yours.
