|
Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma
very interesting read for non fiction
some of the facts he states shocked me.
As it is, artisanal producers like Joel compete on quality, which, oddly enough, is still a somewhat novel idea when it comes to food. "When someone drives up to the farm in a BMW and asks me why our eggs cost more, well, first I try not to get mad," said Joel. "Frankly, any city person who doesn't think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn't deserve my special food. Let them eat E. coli. But I don't say that. Instead I take him outside and point at his car. 'Sir, you clearly understand quality and are willing to pay for it. Well, food is no different: You get what you pay for.'
"Why is it that we exempt food, of all things, from that rule? Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true. But it's downright un-American to suggest that one egg might be nutritionally superior to another." Joel recited the slogan of his local supermarket chain: "'We pile it high and sell it cheap.' What other business would ever sell its products that way?"
When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. Look at any supermarket ad in the newspaper and all you will find in it are quantities--pounds and dollars; qualities of any kind are nowhere to be found. The value of relationship marketing is that it allows many kinds of information besides price to travel up and down the food chain: stories as well as numbers, qualities as well as quantities, values rather than "value." And as soon as that happens, people begin to make different kinds of buying decisions, motivated by criteria other than price. But instead of stories about how it was produced accompanying our food, we get bar codes--as illegible as the industrial food chain itself, and a fair symbol of its almost total opacity.
Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring--to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories--"dolphin safe," "humanely slaughtered," etc.--about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values--and not just "value"--will inform their purchasing decisions.
............
|
|
Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma
Thread Tools
Rate Thread
Display Modes
02-24-2009, 02:39 PM
Linear Mode
