Essay #1 FINAL

Matthew Grubisich

ENG 414 - SU’11

K.Leslie

Bringing It Back to the Roots

                   When it came to food, growing up with a first generation Vietnamese mom meant that I ate everything and anything whenever it came my way. I have come to realize now that she was encouraging me to embrace cultural foods, and for this I couldn’t be more grateful. On top of this enriched appreciation for diverse foods, I have recently been enlightened with the perspective of wanting to know my food better: where it comes from, what it does for me and what it goes through to reach my table and thus - my tummy. This enlightened perspective can be attributed to Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” and many other books or articles on the topic of food, it’s origins, it’s social, health, economic, or environmental impact on our daily lives. Through reading his work, I have developed the keen awareness for more than what I used to just eat unwittingly. I pay more attention to my food and have therefore found a deeper appreciation for it because of the closure behind considering food’s process, and by process I mean not only what it went through to reach me, but also how it was prepared and presented before consumption. Food, as hopefully all of humanity will understand, has many costs that affects all networks of life. There’s so much that goes into what we eat and we often put forth very little thought about it; but when one reaches this revelation it makes for an enriched experience. When my mother made food, she did it with a caring and graceful disposition, using spices that carried strong undertones of Vietnamese culture into the arms of a joyful palette. When reflecting on my mothers cooking and the work of Michael Pollan, it is safe to say that food can once again be appreciated, starting from the ground up. With the reflection of personal experiences and excerpts from Pollan’s work, I hope to point out aspects of food as to isolate factors, on how it gets to you or what happens on it’s way, that would otherwise be overlooked. From the roots to the dish, food can be appreciated the entire way there.

                  Over time, the conventional idea of cooking at home has evolved, traveling down a food-chain-conveyor belt of natural taste to processed perfection. My mom, accustomed to ingredients that went through only a minor process to get to her, relied on the freshness of meats from local butchers and the abundance of produce to make her traditional and health-conscious meals. The foods, found at Vietnamese markets, went through low-level processes that would have demanded very little economic costs or presented no unordinary health concerns. The economic costs would only entail fuel used for the transportation of goods and health risks wouldn’t be anything other than known food-born germs and bacteria. Unlike the Asian food communities my mom frequents, Pollan would compare current social trends with cooking as to say that it has developed a dependency on highly processed ingredients that end up producing significant health risks, social and economic costs and lead to the downfall of authentic cooking. In Pollan’s article, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”, he interviews a food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, and highlights his main point of consumer behavior and that is that, “…[consumers are] ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both.” Balzer comes to that conclusion after identifying the downward spiral of how people perceive the verb, “to cook”, as a limited and easy process to produce immediate gratification. As I put this idea into the context of my life, it brought me to a homemade dish that I had prepared recently. This dish was pork sausage fried rice. Pollan’s implication to the overuse of processed ingredients made me realize that although I’m making fried rice from scratch, there are other costs at hand that needed to be realized. The sausage for example had a high health cost because of the fatty content and the many preservatives used to prolong the shelf life of it. The eggs used were an economic cost because they were bought from Safeway, a food chain, which also means that local farmers are not the ones raking in revenue. Even spices I often use had seemingly gone through one or two steps, minced garlic, lemon pepper or steak seasoning, in efforts to reduce one or two steps in my cooking process (the perks of American culture). The use of foods that have seen little processing is a dying art and if we learn from, and appreciate, cooking styles of different cultures, we can bring cooking back to the grassroots level.

                  As cooking in modern America piggybacks on convenience, or dwindles down to completely altered food groups, American belt sizes steadily rise in unison with the American trend. This is because of additives and preservatives that are either directly harmful to your health or detrimental to your body’s natural metabolism. As discussed in more of Pollan’s article, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch”, recent research, done by David Cutler and colleagues at Harvard University, showed links between cooking and dietary health. They found that the, “…’time cost’ of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up [therefore] people who cooked less ate more as a result”. People are cooking less, because they don’t have to. And because there’s time spared as a result, they end up eating more. This is solely a result of conveniently placed and highly processed foods that we all know so well. This trend is staggering as I personally find myself picking up food as I transition from school to work. I, like many others, am a victim of convenience. I do argue that although the nacho cheese on my nachos is the epitome of processed food, it was the only ingredient on my lunch that day that was undoubtedly a health cost to me. What Pollan suggests is that, “The fact that we no longer have to plan or even wait to enjoy these items, as we would if we were making them ourselves, makes us that much more likely to indulge impulsively.” I love nacho cheese. That’s evident; but because it’s so easily accessible, I’m more prone to it as an option. The goal is to get American Culture to wean itself from the prevalence of processed foods. Although this may seem far-fetched, the social and health benefits of cooking for yourself are exponential if considered before steering towards aimless consumption. As Harry Balzer sarcastically preaches to Pollan, “I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple…Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

                   As I recall ordering a hamburger from a well-known food chain, that is needless to identify, I found myself wondering: where the meat came from; what nutrients it provided – if any at all, considering the treatment and diet of the cow; the economic costs – corporate farms versus local farmers; and ultimately, the typical life of an industrial farm cow. The burger not even yet in my hands and this brief revelation had already overwhelmed me. It turns out that cows, and other grazers alike, work diligently in an ecosystem that calls for their participation, providing food in exchange for spreading grass seed and preventing shrubs and trees from uprooting. This delicate relationship between land and grazer is explained in, “Power Steer”, another great article by Michael Pollan. He elaborates on this relationship as to say that, although it’s better for the cow and it’s natural environment, “Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet…” and then he adds sarcastically that, “… the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth”.  In order to meet the demands of fast food America, these cows are fed corn, supplements and growth hormones to reach slaughter weight in a fraction of the time that farmers could do sixty years ago. None of this sounds natural, because it isn’t. There are health risks here not only for the cows, but also for the people eating their meat.  When natural diets are altered with unnatural enhancements, the food chain is affected negatively.  For cows, Pollan explains that there are high stress levels from calves being weaned from the mother prematurely, but the biggest factor in their compromised health is the feed. “The shift to a ‘hot ration’ of grain can so disturb the cow’s digestive process—its rumen, in particular—that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully”, all while being, “…accompanied by antibiotics”. For humans, this leads to well-familiarized diseases – mad-cow, etc. – and others alike. From reading “Power Steer”, it is evident that more consideration is needed in the purchasing and handling of the food we take for granted. It is a testament to the rising food-chain industry and the risks of supporting it without question. If we put more thought and care into it, food appreciation and cooking at home could one day be revived.

Michael Pollan has enabled readers and people with insatiable appetites to be more attuned to the food they consume on a daily basis. With making this effort to eat healthier, local food, we’re creating social, environmental, health and economical benefits for our communities. Like my mom has done for years, people might also be encouraged to spend more time preparing food. In turn, this would lead to consuming less premade, pre-processed foods. If our consumer culture could return to the curiousness of culinary arts and spend more time in our kitchens, communities and that of their members would reap the surplus of social, economic and health benefits indefinitely. It’s a matter of being more aware, being curious, appreciating the slower movement of food. As I have learned through documenting what I eat in a given week, the lack of a consistent schedule forced me to eat foods on the go, which were usually highly processed, and devote less time to preparing meals or experimenting with new recipes. Knowing now what I do now, food will always have top shelf on my list of importance.