The Omnivore's Dilemma

[garote]

This book is incredibly interesting. I had no idea that the story it tells would be so full of surprising facts, impressive statistics, and totally bizarre situations. I think this is the most important book I've read in years, and it should be mandatory reading for anyone who has ever been even a little curious about where their food comes from. I've always wondered what the great industrial apparatus between our farmlands and our dinner table looks like on the inside. As this mystery is revealed to me, I want to laugh and cry at the same time.

When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes drive the family up to Oakland to visit my grandmother in her big, sprawling victorian house. One time we had chicken for dinner, around a parcel of the huge wooden table. This was a whole chicken, cooked in one piece and carved up on the dinner table. We each called for our favorite parts and gnawed industriously at them between mouthfuls of salad and mashed potatoes. The memory of those meals is ancient, barely a flicker in the back of my mind. I haven't thought about them for a long time.

But now I remember something my grandmother liked to do. She would eat every scrap of meat off every bone of her chicken piece, and then once the bones were totally barren, she would snap them in half with both hands, and suck the marrow from the center of each bone. The final waste from her meal, this scant heap of broken bones, was tiny compared to the sloppy piles remaining at the edge of everyone else's plate.

During a chapter stop in this book, the Omnivore's Dilemma, something startling occurred to me. The kids of the last ten years have probably been raised on chicken in the various forms of a "chicken nugget". They have probably never touched the bones of a chicken, and likely never will. Yet they will eat it, and in quantities much greater than I ever did when I was young. I'm vegan now so the memory of sucking the marrow from a chicken bone has died with my grandmother. But I just realized - it has also died for everyone else. That makes me feel sad for the people younger than I, in a way I don't think I've ever felt before.

No wonder people are so unconcerned with the difference between eating a plant, and eating an animal. They have no idea what that difference is. Hell, people mostly don't eat plants OR animals any more, they eat nuggets. The very idea that their sustenance comes from something as filthy as dirt is upsetting. Dirt is what you find under the lawn, and you wash it off when you come inside!

I'm "supposed" to be against the consumption of meat on any grounds in order to qualify for this heavy, pretentious term "vegan". But honestly, I think everyone at least once in their lives should carve a piece off a whole chicken, and nibble it down to the bone, so they can ruminate on what kind of exchange they are actually making. ...The novelty and gravity of eating other things that lived, in order to stay alive. Not as a lesson that it is repugnant in some way (I don't think it is), but that it is an activity with consequences, more than just throwing away the cardboard box and the ketchup packets when you're done, and waiting for the big machine to squirt more nuggets out.

Anyway, I'll get off my little soapbox here. But I really must emphasize that The Omnivore's Dilemma is a fantastic read, different and better than I anticipated. I'm going to have to read it twice just to soak it all in.

Comments

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

I think about that a lot, actually. And on a grander scale, how death in general is cleansed from our culture. I think we have wakes and viewings of the dead just so that we know that people really die and don't just disappear somewhere, yet it still feels like that to me because I've never attended a funeral. So the few close people in my life who have died have just disappeared, much like the chicken nuggets just appear.

We've been feeding our cats raw food diets, and I want to feed them rabbit (or even better would be mice or rats), but rabbit meat is pretty expensive. It occurs to me that raising rodents or rabbits would be really cheap. But the cats probably can't kill their own food reliably or humanely enough, so we would have to slaughter them, and in the case of rabbits, butcher them. The fact that I can't bring myself to do this makes me wonder whether I have the right to be an omnivore.

[garote]

Well, being an omnivore is not really a matter of "right" ... for example, your cats are carnivores by design, but unburdened by crises of conscience, they happily eat packaged food from a plate every day and go about their business. Since you have the opportunity to eat meat and eat it without much risk or effort, you naturally gravitate to it. We're all wired to consider it a boon. Debating whether or not you "deserve" to have that opportunity seems to me like an unnecessary side-journey into your self-image.

On the other hand, you could debate about whether it's a good idea to eat meat - and encourage the process that makes it available - without bringing the question of who "deserves" what up at all. I avoid dairy because I know it screws me up, especially as an adult. But my avoidance of meat is more sociological and environmental than nutritional. I never once asked myself whether I "deserved" to eat meat - just whether I wanted to.

[shinkagakusha.livejournal.com]

Eh, I think maybe you're overdoing the whole "kids-these-days" thing. I grew up eating meat from the bone (chicken, beef, pork, lamb) and I knew where it came from, and often the animals themselves. It's not like you can't buy meat on the bone at the butcher shop anymore, although I do agree that there is a disconnect sometimes about what process occurs to put that meat on your table.

[garote]

Yes ... but I certainly don't consider you a kid. :) I'm talkin' more like the 9- to 15-year-old set. And yes, you can still buy meat on the bone and whole animals from the butcher, but my point is, a smaller and smaller percentage of the population bothers to do this every year.

Kind of like how "hamburger night" for me used to mean shaping a raw patty with my bare hands and then having my Mom fry it up with everyone else's, but then it slowly and steadily became "name my preference at Burger King, then wait for the meal to arrive". ... It's actually a trivial difference when you consider the big picture, but it's part of a pretty clear trend I think...

[(Anonymous)]

an interesting memory....Many people eat the nuggets these days because they haven't the slightest idea of how to cook the chicken.

[garote]

Yeah, that's even more pathetic ... we're slowly forgetting what that little room in the house called 'the kitchen' is for. :)

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

This is what a 4th grade report on the kitchen will look in in the future:

The kitchen is home to quite a few magical principles. First, there's this box that keeps shit cold. How the fuck does it do that? Electricity is hot, how do they use it to make stuff cold? Then, there's this other, smaller box, that heats the cold shit up really fast. It doesn't heat up itself, just everything inside of it. How the fuck does it do *that*? When did the physics of Harry Potter jump out of the books and into real life?

[garote]

ROFL

Of course it'll be Harry Potter Book 53, The Order of The Jerk Chicken

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

That Americans now need to be informed where their food comes from -- that it used to be alive -- can only be a symptom of something deeply awry, perhaps unfixable.

But then, I'm a marrow-sucker myself.

BACON (http://http://www.baconskateboards.com/)

[garote]

THREE THREE THREE KINDS OF BACON

Yeah, the author rants about that for a while ... about how you need both a nutritionist AND an investigative reporter to figure out what you're eating these days.

[breakpoint.livejournal.com]

That was very well put, Garrett. Nicely done.

[garote]

Thanks - and I'm still waiting for you to weigh in on the whole "loose change" thing. ;)

[breakpoint.livejournal.com]

My head's full... "loose change"? Can I get a reminder?

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

Ok, a few hours after reading this and dropping my own quick commentary, an interesting debate was sparked in my mind. This is the summed up version:

On the one hand, preformed, preprocessed, precooked and prepackaged seems to be the wave of the future; a future that seems to be shaping up somewhat like Soylent Green. "Remember, Tuesday is Soylent Green day." No, I'm not suggesting that we're a few years away from cannibalism. What I am suggesting is that we're a few years away from not caring what we eat, as long as we know the nutritional content. (This was made abundantly clear to me in Fast Food Nation.) But then, the rational side of my brain kicked in and said this:

We're in the middle of another food revolution. The previous one happened around the time of the first TV dinners. Then Julia Child came on the scene and showed people that they didn't need to fear those big, hulking appliances in the kitchen. The same thing is happening now. Yes, the food available in the freezer section of the grocery store is way better than it was a while ago, but so is the availability of television programs, cookbooks, and websites dedicated to food preparation. Look at the food network. It's a whole friggin' channel dedicated to all different kinds and styles of food. Nuggets may become more prevalent, but as long as we have chefs that care about food, they won't take over entirely.

[garote]

I wouldn't call it a revolution ... more like a counter-movement. And also, I'm not any more comfortable deferring food preparation to chefs than I am with deferring food preparation to line cooks and engineers. The point I'm getting at is that food started as a thing that each person could personally observe and understand as it proceeded from the ground and the bushes all the way into his or her mouth. But in this country, the modern trend in eating is a lot like the modern trend in voting. We abdicate the polling booth and assume that someone else out there will take care of the details ... Then we mutter and grumble about how disenfranchised we feel when scandal erupts. With food and politics alike, it's either that we don't care outright, or we just don't have the time to care because we're too busy scraping by.

It's going to be very interesting when fossil fuels become scarce and expensive for the US. A lot of our industry will have to change. It will no longer be feasible to truck fresh vegetables 1500 miles to market. Maybe then, some of our farming economics will turn right-side-up again, and locally grown will become cheaper than remotely grown, and people will start to care because they feel like they have a chance to.

... Or maybe not. :/

[garote]

Whoah. Now that is some food for cynical thought...