This past Friday, the Louisville fellows visited The Berry Center, and the major theme throughout our discussions there was that we are detached from our land and therefore detached from our food.  The selections from Pollan, Schlosser, and McKibben verify this idea.  While I am well aware that the fast food industry is expansive, the statistics presented by Schlosser are overwhelming:  McDonald’s opens two thousand new restaurants every year; more people are familiar with the Golden Arches than the Christian cross; Americans consume three burgers and four French fry orders a week on average; etc.  As Wendell Berry said, “eating is an agricultural act,” and every bite we take of our hamburger and fries is a vote for industrial agriculture.  If people had a better sense of where their food comes from beyond the restaurant or supermarket and if they could somehow reconnect with the land and with their community, then perhaps we could slow this ever expanding fast food industry.

Though the uniformity of fast food chains appeases the omnivore’s dilemma, the hidden costs of the food system are enormous and opaque.  Schlosser pointedly mentions that while value meals make people’s wallets happy, “the real price never appears on the menu.”  Pollan suggests eating a thought-intensive meal (one that is very much the opposite of fast) in which you consider how and where your food was made in order to gauge the complexity of the food system and realize the “full karmic price of the meal.”  As with nearly every product in the global market, the visible monetary price is only indicative of a fraction of the costs associated with production and gives no insight as to how the product was made.  Americans pride ourselves in efficiency and often place too little emphasis on quality.  Pollan suggests that there is a “fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry,” and that we must pursue methods that seem to be preindustrial but are actually postindustrial.  Humans have tended to extract from nature rather than contribute to it.  At our visit to Bernheim Arboretum two weeks ago, Claude Stevens shared that when we integrate our systems thinking with an ecological mindset, we can pursue regenerative design and regenerative farming – a method that seeks to work with nature rather than against it or simply amidst it.  McKibben’s narrative about beekeeping is on the right track – he was invested in the process of making honey as part of the team and developed a beautiful appreciation for the bees’ work.

While the readings this week explored different aspects of the eating experience, I think that everything discussed can be talked about within the frame of reference of Berry’s piece.  Cooking is an art form…a dance, and it is an incredibly capable medium of expressing love and creating fond memories.  However, with the era of microwavable dinners and fast food, we lose that personal connection.  As Pollan points out, food nowadays can resemble some sort of scientific experiment, adding more strange ingredients in an attempt to increase tastiness and nutrition, but simple is better.  We need to look for foods made with recognizable ingredients as well as commit to shopping local and in season whenever possible.  When we are not invested in any part of the process of creating our food, we lose that gastronomic experience, and the food itself is degraded to a vehicle for calories and cheap, instant pleasure.  I love Petrini’s commentary on how the Italian linguistics of “sapore” and “sapere” demonstrate the interconnectedness of flavor and knowledge to create taste.  We have become so disconnected from our food that a) it is slightly heretical to consider some food products real food if we truly believe that food should be a wholesome and nourishing substance, and b) our lack of knowledge about the food system has allowed it to slip into a complex industrial nightmare in which the only music and dance is from the humming of cold machinery and hunchbacked laborers’ frantic hands.  The United States of America has increasingly and significantly shifted our percent of income expenditure away from food.  Why is it that we have so little regard for one of the most essential parts of life?  The more I think about it, the more I am confounded by our system in which the people who toil in the fields to feed us are so ignored by the greater population and underprivileged that they can hardly afford to sustain themselves.  I hope to be a part of the revolution, in whatever form it manifests, to take back our food systems and re-instill a respect for all beings involved in the process.  I love Pollan’s discussion on mimicking French culture by paying more, eating less, and spending more time enjoying the meal.  If we pay a bit more for food that is local, humane, ecological, and fair, we invest in the construction of a new food system in which those qualities can become the normal reality.