The Omnivore's Delight

The final section of the Omnivore’s Dilemma was very interesting to me because it was so different than all of the other sections of the book.  While the other two sections dealt with realistic and possibly food options for the average American, myself included, the third part described a lifestyle that was altogether strange to me.

Evan and I have joked before that we want to life in the woods and forage for food together, but never have I actually considered it as an actual possibility.  For me to consider growing, hunting, and gathering all of my own food is almost a joke.  I don’t know the first thing about hunting or gathering, and I’m not sure how much wild sustenance is roaming and growing near my home anyway, a suburb of Detroit.  My family used to grow chives and tomatoes in our backyard when I was young, but that has long since become a way of the past.  Nowadays, I would have no idea how to go about growing anything without some extensive research.

Reading this section was an interesting experience, because I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to emulate his actions or not.  On the one hand, the thought of being completely responsible for my own food was tempting.  He described the meal he ate as the perfect meal because he was completely aware of everything that had to go into making it.  Especially after taking this class, that idea was a very appealing one.

The more I thought about it, though, the more pessimistic I became.  I began to realize that, even if I could in theory eat a “perfect meal” of foraged food the way Pollan did, it wouldn’t exactly be the lifestyle change I was imagining it to be.  Pollan wrote that it took a very long time to get to the point where he could finally complete his meal (the hunting license alone took a couple of months) and I began to wonder what he was eating during this time.  No doubt, the answer to this question was corn, in varying quantities and forms.  And so I found myself once again trapped in the first section, surrounded by all of this inescapable corn.

I began to realize, as he had written from the start, that this was not a viable solution to the food problem for the majority of people in the United States.  It’s tempting to want to take yourself out of the food industry completely, whether as an independent farmer like Joel Stalin or as a forager like Angelo Garro, but the truth of the matter is that this isn’t really helping anyone but yourself.

To me, the most important thing still is food industry reform.  Earthbound farms, for example, has industrialized their organic farming, which has resulted in a world of good; they’ve converted thousands of acres of land to organic farmland, cutting down on incomprehensible amounts of pesticides that otherwise would have been used to keep that land ready for growing.  Industrialization may be a problem, but it my mind, the only realistic solutions are those that recognize the prevalence of the industrialization and aim to fix it, rather than those that cut it out altogether.  Because, realistically, no one in the 21st century is going to agree to go back to the days of hunting and gathering.  Getting people to buy organic, though, that’s something that still has hope.