The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [151]
Guided by no natural instinct, the prodigious and open-ended human appetite is liable to get us into all sorts of trouble, well beyond the stomachache. For if nature is silent what’s to stop the human omnivore from eating anything—including, most alarmingly, other human omnivores? A potential for savagery lurks in a creature capable of eating anything. If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all the various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture. There is a short and direct path from the omnivore’s dilemma to the astounding number of ethical rules with which people have sought to regulate eating for as long as they have been living in groups.
“Without virtue” to govern his appetites, Aristotle wrote, man of all the animals “is most unholy and savage, and worst in regard to sex and eating.” Paul Rozin has suggested, only partly in jest, that Freud would have done well to build his psychology around our appetite for food rather than our appetite for sex. Both are fundamental biological drives necessary to our survival as a species, and both must be carefully channeled and socialized for the good of society. (“You can’t just grab any tasty-looking morsel,” he points out.) But food is more important than sex, Rozin contends. Sex we can live without (at least as individuals), and it occurs with far less frequency than eating. Since we also do rather more of our eating in public there has been “a more elaborate cultural transformation of our relationship to food than there is to sex.”
4. AMERICA’S NATIONAL EATING DISORDER
Rozin doesn’t say as much, but all the customs and rules culture has devised to mediate the clash of human appetite and society probably bring greater comfort to us as eaters than as sexual beings. Freud and others lay the blame for many of our sexual neuroses at the door of an overly repressive culture, but that doesn’t appear to be the principal culprit in our neurotic eating. To the contrary, it seems as though our eating tends to grow more tortured as our culture’s power to manage our relationship to food weakens.
This seems to me precisely the predicament we find ourselves in today as eaters, particularly in America. America has never had a stable national cuisine; each immigrant population has brought its own foodways to the American table, but none has ever been powerful enough to hold the national diet very steady. We seem bent on reinventing the American way of eating every generation, in great paroxysms of neophilia and neophobia. That might explain why Americans have been such easy marks for food fads and diets of every description.
This is the country, after all, where at the turn of the last century Dr. John Harvey Kellogg persuaded great numbers of the country’s most affluent and best educated to pay good money to sign themselves into his legendarily nutty sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, where they submitted to a regime that included all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas. Around the same time millions of Americans succumbed to the vogue for “Fletcherizing”—chewing each bite of food as many as one hundred times—introduced by Horace Fletcher, also known as the Great Masticator.
This period marked