Edibility

After reading the first chapter of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I can’t help but look at everything as a by-product of corn. I remember when I was younger and found out that those little stickers on apples and mangoes were edible. “They have to be edible” said my stepbrother, “Because they are in relation to food”. I am not so sure of that certainty anymore. I mean, grass is edible, paper is edible. A Big Mac® is edible, but that doesn’t mean I want to eat it. This is the true root of our, the Omnivores, dilemma. We have the mental/evolutionary capability to decide what’s edible and not, what’s good or harmful, and why this is true. We don’t eat berries off of random trees because somewhere along our gene pool someone did that and died. We are hardwired to know better. And yet, this new evolution of food processing seems to be a new wave of biological Russian roulette. Scientists are risking the survival of our species by testing Franken-food with recent generation’s as lab rats. For example, heavily processed foods are being fed daily to children in the form of breakfast cereal’s and granola bars. Dinner may seems to be born out of the microwave, but what did it go through first to get there? And a burger is a burger, hard to see the smoke and mirror tricks there, but nonetheless what lies beneath the naked eye is genetic evidence of manipulative inputs, attempting to defy, beat, and train nature into obeying the consumer’s every demand.

While this is all daunting and frightening, a technique that I use is to try and not eat anything that I can’t pronounce and/or only things with ingredients that I recognize. Also, if there are more than 15 ingredients, chances are it’s a processed food.

It’s a test of will to forgoe what our taste buds find titillating, and yet, that act of taste has been so tested and manipulated that the people who crafted that flavor know our weaknesses and play off of that. My body is not a test tube.