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Last week, I had the opportunity to make ranch dressing and stir fry for Anna-Kate Bruns and her roommates as part of my Honors project for English Comp. II. As Michael Pollan brought up in his book “In Defense of Food,” the modern Western diet has devalued shared meals, replacing them with solitary snacking; so I wanted to examine Pollan’s statements from Anna-Kate’s perspective as well as my own.
In chapter four, part three of “In Defense of Food,” Pollan explains how he believes we are to eat: “If food is more than the sum of its nutrients and a diet is more than the sum of its foods, it follows that a food culture is more than the sum of its menus - it embraces as well the set of manners, eating habits, and unspoken rules that together govern people’s relationship to food and eating. How a culture eats may have just as much of a bearing on health as what a culture eats.”
He blames much of the modern Western diet’s problems on how cheap our food is in more ways than just one. Food, if you can still call it that, has become so inexpensive that we can afford to overeat.
“In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income,” said Pollan.
Secondly, Pollan argues that food has become too cheap with regards to time. He exposes how little actual experience we have with food and those who make it with studies and examples of families eating microwave dinners in separate rooms.
I was brought up eating every meal with my parents, brothers and sisters. It was our way of life. We would pitch in and help make meals, get the table set, eat at the same time, talk about anything that interested us, and clean up afterward. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes it was not so fun, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Now that one of my brothers and I are going to college, we don’t don’t get the chance to eat dinner as a family every night, but we still make it a goal to sit down and eat at least one meal per day together. Until I read Pollan’s book, I took eating with others for granted. I came to see eating with my family as just another fact of life. I didn’t eat with a lot of other people growing up, so I didn’t get to see anything different from a family sitting down to eat dinner together every night.
So when I decided on this part of my Honors project, I knew I’d have to do more than just interview Anna-Kate Bruns again to understand how she ate. This time, I decided to make a meal for her and her roommates and observe how they ate together as well as get an interview in.