To Eat Animals, Or Not To Eat Animals

          "The Forest" section of this book is the first time I actually could picture the narrator, Michael Pollan; his personal experience is what dominates this section, and along with that he brings much more of his voice into the book as he navigates forests and reflects on what he himself values. I could almost envision him reading it out loud, which wasn't the case in everything prior to this forest section. As I myself am an avid meat eater, I found this part refreshing -- I expected to, once again, be guilt-tripped and disgusted into being a reluctant vegetarian for a few days like I always do after I read or watch a critical piece on eating meat. But I loved how Pollan delved into the issue of how we consume meat today, and then actually went through the process of finding out that eating meat in a more conscious way is in fact more wise than just disregarding it altogether. This section really made me think more than any other part of the book, especially in terms of what I personally value and what I want my lifestyle to be like. Granted, there were a few sentences that did give me a twinges of guilt: our choice, according to Singer, was between "a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being" (312). And the whole "force-molting" process? Alright, then I felt terrible. But overall, this section didn't make me feel overly guilty for consuming meat, and instead changed the way I think about consuming it. In today's world, it's true that we "remain only semiconscious about what it is [we're] really doing" (281); when we consume food, we may have our eyes open but we aren't actually seeing. I had never thought so in depth about the action of consuming meat, and this was especially evident during the part when Pollan was examining the question of whether or not speciesism and racism are comparable...I don't exactly know what to make of that, but I did appreciate the point he made about how natural the consumption of meat in the world is; we'd be denying the entire system of nature itself to cut off meat consumption entirely. What we do have to change is how conscious we are of what we eat, how it was raised, and how this affects the environment now. What's wrong is the "practice, not the principle" (328).
         
          I was so intrigued when I read the paragraph about the fact that we combine certain foods with certain spices for a reason other than taste -- I thought that wasabi was eaten with raw fish only for the unique combo of flavors, not that the antimicrobial functions of the spicy paste minimized the danger of the uncooked fish! I never really stop to think about the origins of food combination, whether mixing different foods serves as a nice twist on the dish, or whether or not it serves a completely different purpose. I liked Rozin's summary of this, that cuisines are the embodiment of the wisdom of a certain culture; evidently, I had little to no wisdom before reading this book.
        
          It really surprised me to read that part of the mere 47% of Americans who have sit down family meals, some of them don't actually consist of sitting down together and eating at the same time. I thought that the concept of "sitting down to a family meal" was pretty basic; I'm probably biased because most of the meals from when I was an infant to when I graduated from high school were sit down family meals. This was one of the things that my mom and dad always insisted on, especially during the school week. Setting the table for everyone was a nightly routine, as was waiting to eat until everyone was at the table. In the earlier years, we were forced to stay sitting at the table even after we were finished eating to wait for everyone else to be done. I know that in reality, this routine isn't easy for many families. But I at least thought that the families who did have sit down family meals actually sat down together.
        
          I love the idea of obtaining meals by hunting and gathering; realistically, I probably wouldn't ever be motivated enough to do all of it, but what I appreciated from Joel's farm and from Pollan's hunting/gathering was the complete openness of it all; they weren't trying to hide anything from the people consuming the food, but those people were in complete awareness of exactly what they were buying or eating. There's also so much more meaning to the food you consume when you hunt and gather; I find myself mindlessly wandering through the caf day after day, just trying to find semi-decent food to satisfy my hunger. This food is meaningless, and I rarely think hard about it. My parents actually get meat, eggs and milk from a farm in northern Wisconsin that's not unlike Joel Salatin's; the chickens and cows roam around on beautiful green hills, and they actually get to meet the cows that end up being their next cut of meat. The milk comes straight from the udder and is put into glass jars which they take home -- my parents call it "raw" milk, and I never could get used to the weird taste. This is so sad to me -- I'm so used to watered-down, to pasteurized, to industrial, that I can't even bring myself to enjoy the natural, straight-from-the-source gold.