Eat FOOD

           I think Pollan gave the best advice he possibly could when he said “eat food.” So much of eating has been broken down into calorie, fat, vitamin, and sugar content that meal times are more of a science experiment than an enjoyable experience. If I eat a banana, am I eating a banana or a physical manifestation of a certain combination of chemical compounds? Personally, I’d like to think of it as just a banana. As a country, we have become too nutritionally focused.

                                           

In Dupuis’ article, he wrote how nutritionists focused on “the best diet for optimum public health and safety.” This endeavor became more of a propaganda front using race as a scientific variable. Robust white American men who drank milk and ate meat were the golden standard while other cultures like the Chinese who ate more plants were cast as weak and unhealthy. This was called nutrition. Pollan talks about nutrition in more recent history, where scientists have broken food down into its various fatty acids, vitamins, and antioxidants. While this seems more reasonable to me than the kind of ethnic profiling Dupuis mentioned, it is still kind of silly if you really think about it. Who decided we needed to know what was in our food? Who looked at a pineapple or a round of cheese one day and thought about the various compounds that make it up? I look at a pineapple and think “yellow” and “juicy” and then I eat it because it tastes good. Where did this abstract idea of nutrition come from? It really comments on the need of our society to exercise control. We have to be able to explain and manipulate all aspects of life in order to impose our dominance over it. We feel we have to conquer food. But why not just enjoy it? As Pollan suggests “worrying about diet cannot possible be good for you.” He also cites the French and other European cultures that take pleasure in their meals, making them small-portioned, communal events and how they tend to be healthier because of it.

Dupuis says throughout history we have asked the question “What to eat?” I’d like to ask the question “Why are you telling me what to eat?” Since when does what I eat need to be a group decision? Who decided that the FDA or whatever other governmental organization needs to impose these foods laws that “fats” are bad and “vitamins” are good? According to Pollan, they don’t even know if they’re getting it right anyway. Science is attempting to isolate things that can’t be isolated. All the foods we eat and their combinations are an overwhelmingly large group of interactions to study. Besides, before science was even thought of, when we just “came down from the trees” we seemed to do alright feeding ourselves.