Dilemmas

Like many American women, I have am imperfect relationship with food. My high school years were peppered with crash diets, despite always being slim. I've not dieted as an adult, but I am conscious of being not-thrilled to not weigh the same postpartum as I did prepartum. I do not always eat ice cream with the unadulterated joy it deserves. 

In this sense, I think too much about food. But in another sense, I think too little about food. I occasionally resolve to know more about where my food comes from, particularly produce and meat, but am incredibly lazy and rarely follow through. I am not terribly knowledgeable about what is in season when and I'm not entirely sure what additives I should try to avoid. We eat well at my house, but its nothing to write home about.

I'm thinking about my relationship to food because of one particular feature of my daily life: I dread dinner. I start thinking about what I am going to make for dinner around 3 everyday. What can I make that is healthful, that my kid will eat, that is easy enough for her to help with, fast enough to eat before bathtime, pliable enough to keep if Mr. Vane's commute takes 2 hrs (which it often does). Gah, I get tense just thinking about it. And then usually I make it, fighting with the kid half of the time, we sit down to eat and she declares herself done in 6 minutes. And I have a sort of rule about not power-struggling at the table, so I let her go and Mr Vane and I try to ignore her pleas to play for the next 15 minutes while we finish. Gah.

Obviously, I hate this all and am trying to think about changing the paradigm, which has as much to do with how I think about the possibilities with food as with table manners. Which brings me to The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I just read. (I know, you already read it; I am slow)

I liked this book. It was informative without being polemical, which is important to me. If there's one thing that makes me avoid conversations about food it's the sanctimony. When Alice Waters tells me that people should simply give up their ipods and cable to afford  local organic food, my chest tightens. Pollan, in this book anyway, is aware that food choices are complicated, food chains are staggeringly obscure, and economic constraints are real. He follows the food chain for 4 paradigms of meals: industrial (corn-based), big organic, local organic (grass-based), and hunted/foraged. Unsurprisingly, the latter 2 are more satisfying than the former 2, but there are lots of interesting details along the way (e.g. 20% of US fuel consumption is related to food transport). Also the prose is good.

There is some deck-stacking. One is hardly surprised to learn that a meal from the local sustainable farm, which Pollan takes hours to prepare and eats with old college friends while throwing back some nice wine, is more satisfying that the industrial representative: a McDonald's cheeseburger eaten in a moving car. No shit, Sherlock. There are, perhaps, more satisfying iterations of non-organic, non-local, processed foods. I have joyfully shared many a frozen pizza with friends. Mr. Vane and I really cherished our occasional trips to KFC in China. Bar food can be awesome. Families can bond over Chinese takeout. And so on. 

Similarly, Pollan's hero, Joel Salatin the sustainable farmer, asks, "Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing who grows their food"? No, I don't. And this kind of folksy faux common sense makes me crazy.

But I am persuaded of several things by this book. "Organic" means very little anymore. Organic via Whole Foods and the like certainly means nothing in terms of sustainability or treatment of creatures. Federal agriculture policy isn't helping anything; rather it provides subsidies that encourage farmers to produce more of over-produced crops (e.g. corn), thus dropping the price more and more. Meat should be eaten infrequently. One really must get past the notion that she can eat whatever food she wants whatever time of year. Food choices are undeniably political *if* one has the fortune to be aware of those politics. 

One thing the book didn't do was help me with dinner. And that is what I was looking for. It made me feel shittier about my dinner actually (organic but not pastured pork chops, roasted not-organic vegetables, organic salad, sugary salad dressing). And it made me feel miserable about the stress I felt when the kid ate 3 bits and started running around the house. Michael Pollan, and a lot of you probably, think if I take the time to know my food's history, to care about it's production, that my eating will be filled with more joy, more satisfaction. I am not persuaded of this, and truly I don't know where I would find that time. Eliminating the blogs might buy me a bit of it, actually.

I've more to say about the politics of food and class, but this post is ridiculously long, so I'll save that for part 2.