The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan is a pretty well known book, so I have come to learn.  I personally had not heard of this book until ENGL 1100 however I am starting to realize why so many other folks have heard about it.  This book brings together a lot of the components of our everyday diet, starting with where most of our food products come from.  
Corn.  This is the starting material if not the main component of what we eat on a regular basis.  Pollan goes into great detail about corn and where it comes from and how it has become such a huge part of our diets.  He explains how corn is in more than a quarter of the forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket.  From the coating on our produce to part of what makes up a Twinkie, we are virtually always eating corn.  The Europeans who colonized America considered themselves wheat people and most American's probably would still if they had to choose, Pollan explains, however we are now truly corn people seeing as how it primarily makes up most of our diet.  It is actually very impressive how corn, a tropical grass, has taken over not just our diets, but our land too.  
Pollan starts this book discussing how people who eat both meat and plants, also known as omnivore's, face a difficult decision on a regular basis.  This decision that we all have to make is really as simple as the question, what should I have for dinner tonight?  The answer really is not as simple as deciding that it's pizza night so let's just go with that, but it boils down to what type of food, not just what kind...  Should we go with the organic route or not, but what does organic really entail anyway?  Does it mean there are no added hormones or does it just mean that there is nothing immediately added?  These are only a few of the questions that could arise when attempting to determine what route to take for the type of food you might like to enjoy.  Personally, I have no idea what route to take anymore...  I like to try to eat healthy with the occasional treat but then I find myself wondering, is the power food asparagus really as healthy as I think it is or are there so many chemicals added during growth that it just cancels out the healthy.  The way I look at it is that eating healthy doesn't just mean eating foods that will keep you thin, but being able to have food that won't end up giving us long term problems in the future.  Will we ever really know what we are eating?

I always look forward to dinner time.

Growing up I always looked forward to dinner time because my mom always made something good for the family.  Dinner time always came around 6:00 and was usually something everyone enjoyed.  Every so often we would go out to dinner, that came in waves though.  I remember at one point in my life my parents and I would go out to eat dinner as often as every other week.  Also, for a long period, Friday nights were pizza nights.  The only problem with this dinner was that we all liked different pizza places, however we would always come to a middle ground or take turns every other week.  Regardless of what was for dinner, it was always something to look forward to as I was growing up.

Then I went away to college, this was when that all changed.  No longer was I coming home or downstairs to my moms home cooked meals, but I was going to the caf to have, well I never really knew, whatever it was that they put on the menu that night.  I dreaded the caf and the strange food they offered at dinner time.  Breakfast wasn’t so bad, I was able to have a bagel or cereal and lunch I would make a sandwich, but dinner, dinner was not a time I enjoyed there.  The hot meals they offered always made me cringe because I really didn’t know what meat was being served or how long some of the food had been out for, and then there was the day that I found a bone in my chicken strip and decided to call it quits after that and made sandwiches for lunch and dinner the rest of the year. 

When I finally left the dorms and moved into my own apartment I was excited to finally buy and cook for myself!  However I didn’t realize all that went into cooking a real meal and I ended up making a lot of pizza rolls my sophomore year, which wasn’t much better than the caf...  It took until the end of my junior year to finally start really cooking.  Sure I would make nice meals before when people were visiting and special occasions but never just for myself.

When I did start really cooking I realized how great it felt, not only to b able to eat and enjoy something I made, but to learn new ways to work with different foods, to find out new foods I never knew I liked and even things I never knew existed!  The best of all was the day I decided to attempt to cook my favorite meal from my favorite restaurant.  It was Cajun chicken tortellini.  I googled the recipe, mostly under assumption I would be buying some Cajun chicken and adding some Alfredo sauce with some seasoning.  I was wrong.  The whole recipe was from scratch and I didn’t even understand half of the directions.  I read through and found myself wondering, what the heck does ‘deglaze the pan with white wine’ even mean?!  I was determined to make this dinner though, so I went to the store with my recipe, along with many other questions and unknown ingredients, and searched for what I needed.  

It ended up taking me quite some time to cook this desired meal and I was afraid to try it when it was served up, but to my surprise it turned out perfect, better actually.  The meal I made was more delicious than when I order it at the restaurant.  I don’t know if this is because I made something I didn’t think I could and it turned out or if it’s because the of the extra kick of Cajun I used while blackening the chicken... Either way this disastrous preparation of an amazing meal gave me a whole new outlook on cooking and now I make dinners for myself and my roommate almost every night and get to look forward to them like I used to when I was younger!