Friday, March 14, 2008

The Ominvore's Dilemma

There is so much controversy about our national eating disorder that its almost impossible to choose the inevitable daily question,
"What's for dinner?"
How about meat or no meat, carbs or no carbs, milk or no milk, or questions like organic vs. non organic, local or imported?
Where are we supposed to look for answers to our endless questions?

It all seems a bit too much and one thing I highly recommend is reading a great book by Michael Pollen.

Below are a couple exerpts from the book:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollen

The organic apple or the
conventional? And if the organic, the local one or the imported? The wild
fish or the farmed? The transfats or the butter or the “not butter”? Shall I
be a carnivore or a vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegetarian or a
vegan? Like the hunter-gatherer picking a novel mushroom off the forest
floor and consulting his sense memory to determine its edibility,we
pick up the package in the supermarket and, no longer so confident of
our senses, scrutinize the label, scratching our heads over the meaning
of phrases like “heart healthy,”“no transfats,”“cage-free,” or “range-fed.”
What is “natural grill flavor” or TBHQ or xanthan gum? What is all this
stuff, anyway, and where in the world did it come from?

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is
also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been
done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a
great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of
it.To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound
like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.
By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is
to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly
content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a
thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are
things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book
about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened
by knowing.

_______________________________

Do yourself and your family a favor......read this book, you won't regret it!

here's a page of great links;
http://www.michaelpollan.com/eat_sustainably.pdf

1 comment:

Candice said...

just a note to add to this:

check out these great links;

http://www.michaelpollan.com/eat_sustainably.pdf

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