PASSIONATE RATIONS

Two weeks now and I am still suffering the malady I mentioned two posts ago.  Neither my taste buds, nor my sense of smell, has fully returned.  Thus, neither has my appetite. This has forced me to look to other avenues to sate my food-driven interests. 

Luckily, I recently was given Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as a gift.  The book documents Pollan’s investigation into just how our food gets to our table-tops, from industrial farming to organic to grow-your-own.  It is enlightening and informative, in the best tradition of investigative journalism, raising complex ethical and practical questions about sustainability and the place of capitalism when it comes to something as essential as our, and the natural world’s, health.  Take this excerpt, from his description of the history of fertilizer and how agriculture was set on its current industrial path when a scientist discovered the three chemical elements essential to plant growth:  nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium:

“The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.  When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.” (pp. 147-148)

I have been astounded to learn how petroleum-driven it has all become.

I’m not usually able to read non-fiction straight through, since my everyday job has me reading it for a living and, thus, I typically seek escapist fiction to relax.  But Pollan is a terrific writer and the the account is so interesting I simply cannot put it down, and, so, I recommend it to you.  Part of my New Year’s resolution to become a vegetarian grew out of a desire to become more accountable for my food choices.  The book makes clear there are no easy answers.  But, then, there rarely are.