Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food highlights that although it seems so obvious, scientists have trouble pinpointing the “why” of the benefits of plant-based diets. Think about your five-year-old cousin who has that typical, exasperating habit of asking, “Why?” after everything you say.
“Eat your carrots, Jimmy.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re rich in antioxidants that help you battle carcinogens.”
“Why?”
“Because your body can’t just make Vitamin C by itself anymore!”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the best decision for your own health and the health of the planet!”
“Why?!”
“BECAUSE IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”
We can answer this question as many ways as we want, but when pushed to our limit we will inevitably scream at this child in frustration because he knows the real answer. It may be buried under Wendell Berry’s “cultural amnesia” and social brainwashing, but somewhere in our reptilian minds we know that against all of our fat and sugar cravings we have an innate understanding that fruits and vegetables are just plain “good for us.”
This goes beyond USDA Food Pyramids and One-A-Day labels. It is a kind of “good for us” that we know intuitively but can’t prove with reductionism and nutritionism. There is something in nature that makes plant foods “more than the sum of their nutrient parts.” It is the “mystery” that Berry describes, the fact that we live “from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” I am not religious, but I too share the sense that something sublime is found in the goodness of plants that will never be explained by human intelligence. Human intuition needs to let us be humbled by this greater nature and feed it without question.
Carrots are “good for you” in Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food definition of the word “good.” Plants and vegetables are at once universal and adaptive to relativism—there are plant diets for every culture and society, while any plant from any sphere of the world is inherently “good” to another. Eating something because it is good for us and we know it is exercising the human right to pleasure that is being widely obscured in the United States by industrial food production and cultural eating habits.
I am comforted by these readings. There is hope. We, too, have power greater than the sum of our parts to know what is good for us, and we will always pursue pleasure. The challenge of our time is discerning real pleasure from what we are told is pleasure.
The scenario you describe at the beginning of your response made me think a lot about how education and “good”, by Petrini’s definition, choices play into one another. How exactly do you teach the 5-year-old that eating the tomato that’s not the perfect, ruby red sphere from picture books is better because it’s a more conscious decision? Socially, environmentally, health consciousness are not ideas they are familiar with, let alone understand the importance of. However, from my own personal experience, introducing topics of sustainability early on is the best way to frame a more, as you put it, a hopeful future. Hearing that some children have no idea that carrots came from the ground and not a grocery store is Wendell Berry’s ideas of food distance and ignorance to the utmost. Obviously then all those pestering “why” questions need to have answers, and we need to educate from a young age by telling the full stories of food. The question I’m lingering with is how exactly to do so in a convincing and children-centric manner.