The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [209]
Perhaps the perfect meal is one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted. The reason I didn’t open a can of stock was because stock doesn’t come from a can; it comes from the bones of animals. And the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a packet but from the air we breathe. The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as much as the meadows. If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore’s Thanksgiving.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to prepare and eat a meal quite so physically, intellectually, and emotionally costly without thinking about the incalculably larger debts we incur when we eat industrially—which is to say, when we eat without a thought to what we’re doing. To compare my transcendently slow meal to the fast-food meal I “served” my family at that McDonald’s in Marin, the one that set me back fourteen bucks for the three of us and was consumed in ten minutes at sixty-five miles per hour, is to marvel at the multiplicity of a world that could produce two such different methods of accomplishing the same thing: feeding ourselves, I mean.
The two meals stand at the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating—of the different ways we have to engage the world that sustains us. The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance. The diversity of the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry, especially its ability to tease a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape: a monoculture of corn. The cost of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future.
Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers—outliers of a real life. Or better yet, preserve them but purely as ritual, for the lessons they have to teach us about the different uses to which the world can be put. Going to McDonald’s would be something that happens once a year, a kind of Thanksgiving in reverse, and so would a meal like mine, as slow and storied as the Passover seder.
Without such a thing as fast food there would be no need for slow food, and the stories we tell at such meals would lose much of their interest. Food would be…well, what it always was, neither slow nor fast, just food: this particular plant or that particular animal, grown here or there, prepared this way or that. For countless generations eating was something that took place in the steadying context