Something I’ve always been fascinated by is the varying role food can play in a person’s life. As the saying goes, some eat to live, others live to eat. I would guess that most of the western population would fall closer to the latter of the two options. The idea that one might even have the option of ‘living to eat’ (a luxury that has only been feasible in recent history and that is still only enjoyed by a fraction of the population) is almost entirely dependent on a surplus of production. Thanks to industrialization this mass production of food was made possible for western society and thus food began to take on new roles. Food is now a hobby, a sport, a national pass time-but most importantly a commodity.
In my opinion the commodification of food is not all bad. To have a substantial and competitive food market and to be able to produce food abundantly should be a victory not a defeat. However, somewhere along the road of this abundant production, the lines became blurred. By this I mean that though food is being produced cheaply and has been made readily available, mass production in itself has also created a distance between the true value and production process of a product and the consumer. Largely, consumers fail to know what their potato chips are made of, let alone where they come from!
In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser expands on this idea by suggesting that the commodification of food both literally and figuratively portrays the effects of mass production- that being over-consumption. We see this literal and figurative portrayal in rising obesity rates and growing health epidemics related to consumption. Personally, however, my biggest concerns with the industrialization of food are less related to health and more related to the mental and meta-physical effects created by this production distance. As Pollan writes in The Omnivores Dilemma “The way we eat represents our most profound engagements with the natural world”. By denying ourselves the knowledge of where our food comes from and how exactly it is created, I fear that we are denying ourselves, most importantly, a fundamental and vital life experience.
I completely agree. I think that connection with food is extremely important, and I like how you’ve put it as losing out on “fundamental and vital life experience.” Most people have likely heard that expression before, live to eat vs eat to live, but you’re right to mention how that is a fairly recent shift and how that’s only really an option in developed areas of the world. It’s almost comical what we do with food in the US. As you put it, food has become a “hobby.” There are websites dedicated to culinary arts and creative eating. Food is so readily available that sometimes its not even about the taste or the quality, but rather aesthetic value. I think food as a hobby says a lot about our habits and also wasteful tendencies. That food has become an activity, a pastime, is so far from our agrarian roots and where most countries are today.