A college student in Seattle, WA confronts food in its many forms - in restaurants, the quick bites in between classes and work, and, perhaps most importantly, she confronts the great puzzle of how to feed herself now that her mother doesn't make dinner...

Friday, May 30, 2008

Thank you, Mr. Pollan*

So apparently I've become hard to live with. Or at least, I've become annoying. I blame this entirely on the fact that I've recently finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.

I went grocery shopping with my mother last weekend. While I no longer live with my parents in Bremerton, I do go home about every other weekend to see my parents and my pets... and to have my parents buy me things. I'm a typically poor college student who lives on her 20-hour-per-week job as a barista... so it's nice to be able to get my parents to pay for some of my groceries. It's also really nice to go shopping in my hometown of Bremerton, because our grocery store is the Bangor Commecery - a grocery where just about everything, but especially meat, is deeply discounted for the military families that patronize it.

My mother and I were walking through the bakery - one of the first things that you see when you walk into the store. I told my mother what I had read in Pollan's book - that grocery stores are set up in a certain way in order to make people buy things. For instance, research shows that people will buy more food when they smell bread baking - so that's why most grocery stores now have a bakery that churns out French bread 'round the clock. "And do you know why the milk is at the back of the store?" I asked my mother. "Tell me," she said, now probably sensing that I was about to enter into a long shpeal about corruption in the supermarket. "Because milk is what everyone comes to the store for, so they're forcing you to walk past a bunch of other products in hope that you'll be seduced into buying more than you originally intended."

And it continued. Mom asked me to pick out three Bakers - I told her about genetically modified potatoes (like the ones in All Over Creation), and about the way that people normally chose the perfectly oblong potatoes, staying away from the ones that were misshapen because they did not conform to the mental image of the ideal Potato. As we walked past the bagged salads, I told her how baby lettuce marketing was concieved of on a smallish farm in California, and about how it's easier to grow them organically because they only stay in the ground for about 30 days before they're picked, giving them less time to be attacked by pests and choked by weeds. And I told her about the way they grow and harvest the lettuce, the overtilling of the soil, and about the lettuce's refrigerated journey from field to table.

And my Mom was a great sport about all of this. She has told me that while I'm annoying sometimes, she actually likes to listen to jabber on about what I've learned in class - both because she can learn more, and because I can then retain what I've learned by teaching her. However, when we got to the meat department and I began to explain about the slaughter of beef, she'd had enough. "If you're this concerned about all of this, why don't you stop eating meat and just plant a few seeds?"

While my mother said this in frustration and jest, I realized that she had just made quite a profound statement. There was really not that much good to be had by my berating every item in the supermarket - mostly I just ticked people off. What the situation needed was action. Instead of complaining about everything, people (including myself) need to take some action when it comes to the food they eat. Yes, it's effort - but isn't it worth it when you consider the alternatives? I'm not saying I'm becoming a vegetarian. And I'm not going to stop going to the grocery store altogether. But I am going to try to buy as much as I can locally - from the Saturday Farmer's Market, from the stands at Pike Place, from the butcher on the Ave. And hell, maybe when I move out of my current apartment in the fall, into a new one that actually has a porch or balcony, I'll plant a garden - it'll have to be a container garden, but perhaps it will help make me even more aware - and more connected -to where my food actually comes from. Which is what Pollan's book is all about, right?

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