Michael Pollan takes on a journey to prepare food in which he collects the ingredients through hunting and gathering. By doing so, he looks if the methods he used in collecting ingredients are conceivable in the modern era while writing down his experience. This experimental work states that the omnivore’s dilemma is connected to having too many options while finding a lack of wise consumption guidance (Lewis 1). He is interested in knowing the source of ingredients used in cooking, enabling him to encounter nature directly. It can allow one to collect fresh ingredients rather than processed ones and obtain healthier nutrition.
McDonald’s and other fast food meals are at the far end of the expanse of human food consumption in comparison to natural food. In his book, Pollan states that “the pleasures of one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance” (254). It depicts that the cost of the first meal he prepared, gathered and hunted is steep, and the cost is acknowledged and thus paid for (Overend 54). In the second one, McDonald’s seems to be a bargain, but it bears the hidden cost to public health, nature, and the future. Both are unsustainable, for it is impossible for 6 billion people to gather and hunt, and food processing has health and natural negative consequences. In essence, the author informs of the incurring hidden cost brought by the modernization of the food industry; the cost brought by the complexity spirals out of imagination. The availability of numerous products and ingenuity coincide with difficulty in understanding the food source. Pollan explains the difference and the vast gap between healthy and widely available food and means the differences in impacts on human health and ecology.
Reading this marvelous work has made me cautious about what I eat. It encourages one to consume natural foods rich in nutrients and fresh. I just realized how much natural foods are healthier in comparison to processed foods with depleted nutrients. This book calls on the readers to be wary of processed foods, which are considered unhealthy and dangerous. It has enlightened me to consider reducing the consumption of processed food and eliminated my perception of food equality.
Works Cited
Lewis, Karyn Camille, A Meat Paradox: Media’s Role in Mitigating the Omnivore’s Dilemma. 2018. Master’s Theses. Aquila, University of Southern Mississippi. Web.
Overend, Alissa. Shifting Food Facts: Dietary Discourse in a Post-Truth Culture. Routledge, 2021.
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin Books, 2006.