Rocko402003’s Weblog

Reading through Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, somethings that stands out to me right off the bat are Camille’s recipes.  As a matter of fact, I often catch myself going to look back at them over and over.  Recently, though, I couldn’t help but wonder about some similarities in this book’s recipes to two other books that have been recently in the press.  There are skillful methods used in Camille’s recipes to incorporate certain vegetables into main course dishes that many people may not have thought of.  However, The Sneaky Chefand Jessica Seinfeld’s new book, do exactly the same thing. The only difference is that these two books target their audience by selling their books not as healthy alternatives, but as ways to get children to eat vegetables.  It makes me wonder how much of their ideas for their books stemmed somehow off of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

After watching King Corn this week, and doing all the assigned reading, which all dealt with corn (big surprise, right?), I couldn’t help but feel horrible about any kind of food that I even set eyes on for the week.  I thought that I would attempt to at least for a week try to change the way that I ate and viewed food, but there was a big problem.  No matter how much they may claim otherwise, college isn’t exactly the place to turn a new leaf when it comes to your diet.

I live in a dormitory that continually claims that they are concerned with your health needs, but when I started walking around the dining hall to pick my meal, nothing seemed to fit the criteria for health food.  Everything in the place was swimming in grease and had been deep fried in corn oil, even the tiny selection of food that was deemed the vegetarian section that only included reheated, packaged veggie burgers, tofu nuggets that were deep fried so long they looked like you could kill somebody with a good arm, and what was supposed to be steamed vegetables.  I then proceeded to the salad bar, which I quickly walked away from because it was apparent that the “fresh” produce had probably been sitting there all day untouched.

I decided to quickly just head upstairs to my room where I could easily make something that was descent to eat, until I got there and realized that every single one of my food items, you guessed it, had corn.  I normally wouldn’t have been so resistant to eat the products I had casually purchased a few weeks ago, but everything I looked at just seemed to strike a chord in me as I pictured the commodity crop being chemically altered in some lab then being mixed into my food.  I can’t help but recall the guys from King Corn making High Fructose Corn Syrup and how dangerous and complicated it was as I searched for something to nourish my hunger pains.

Even though I firmly believe that knowledge about our food is a helpful tool, I can’t help but wonder if I will ever look at food the same way, as I sat down with a bottle of water eating my bag of overpriced almonds purchased from Whole Foods two weeks ago, still feeling hungry. 

In chapter eight of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan makes the argument that everything is grass, and that almost everything that we eat is tied back to it in some way, shape or form.  He basis the ground for the argument in pointing out that all the animals that we consume for food either eats grass, or has been affected by grass.  One example that he gives of this is chicken eggs.  When he visits a farm to see how it runs and operates he quickly notes that because of the grass that they were consuming, the chickens on the farm produced a greater number of eggs.  He doesn’t claim that we are directly tied to grass through food, instead he notes that grass is a common link between all of our major sources of food.

It’s a little odd to think that grass is the main component that links all in the food change, but it’s true in many ways.  Even now, people who have shifted away from eating meat have often turned to drinking wheat grass juice.  It may sound like a dumb comparison, but those same people who drink it, may not have ever linked to the idea that they could be consuming the same grass that the cow sitting on their friends lunch plate as a hamburger once dined on.  You hear all of these references to the circle of life, but because we hear it so often, I think that people kind of blow off the idea and don’t even think about it.

Who thought that the stupid Disney song from the Lion King would hold true to readings assigned for a rhetoric class in college?