The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [150]
Yet the surfeit of choice that confronts the omnivore brings stresses and anxieties also undreamed of by the cow or the koala, for whom the distinction between The Good Things to Eat and the Bad is second nature. And while our senses can help us draw the first rough distinctions between good and bad foods, we humans have to rely on culture to remember and keep it all straight. So we codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, manners, and culinary traditions, covering everything from the proper size of portions to the order in which foods should be consumed to the kinds of animals it is and is not okay to eat. Anthropologists argue over whether all these rules make biological sense—some, like the kosher rules, are probably designed more to enforce group identity than to protect health. But certainly a great many of our food rules do make biological sense, and they keep each of us from having to confront the omnivore’s dilemma every time we visit the supermarket or sit down to eat.
That set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine, for example, specifies combinations of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties. The meso-American practice of cooking corn with lime and serving it with beans, like the Asian practice of fermenting soy and serving it with rice, turn out to render these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would be. When not fermented, soy contains an antitrypsin factor that blocks the absorption of protein, rendering the bean indigestible; unless corn is cooked with an alkali like lime its niacin is unavailable, leading to the nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance is restored. Similarly, a dish that combines fermented soy with rice is nutritionally balanced. As Rozin writes, “[C]uisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food.” Often when one culture imports another’s food species without importing the associated cuisine, and its embodied wisdom, they make themselves sick.
Rozin suggests that cuisines also help negotiate the tension between the omnivore’s neophilia and neophobia. By preparing a novel kind of food using a familiar complex of flavors—by cooking it with traditional spices, say, or sauces—the new is rendered familiar, “reducing the tension of ingestion.”
ANTHROPOLOGISTS MARVEL at just how much cultural energy goes into managing the food problem. But as students of human nature have long suspected, the food problem is closely tied to…well, to several other big existential problems. Leon Kass, the ethicist, wrote a fascinating book called The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of Our Nature in which he teases out the many philosophical implications of human eating. In a chapter on omnivorousness Kass quotes at length from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his Second Discourse on man draws a connection between our freedom from instinct in eating and the larger problem of free will. Rousseau is after somewhat bigger game in this passage, but along the way he offers as good a statement of the omnivore’s dilemma as you’re likely to find:
…nature does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to