In his book, The Ominvore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan succinctly captures a not-so-hidden question that plagues us as a people -
To one degree or another, the question of what to have for dinner assails every omnivore, and always has. When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you.
As a people, we prize the freedom to choose, but it is precisely the abundance of our choices that can wind up holding us captive. Pollan writes -
The koala doesn’t worry about what to eat. If it looks and smells and tastes like a eucalyptus leaf, it must be for dinner. The koala’s culinary preferences are hardwired into its genes. But for omnivores like us a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential dishes nature lays on are safe to eat.
It is reaction against this crippling anxiety of too many choices and uncertainty over possibly making the wrong choice that leads people to strange behavior when it comes to food.
A laid off worker takes to spending a lot more for pre-processed and prepared foods so as “not to have to think about what to fix for dinner.”
A family stocks the freezer full of nearly unrecognizable battered food for each family member to throw in the deep fryer when they are ready to eat.
A college student drives around eating fast food instead of eating better food with fellowship in the cafeteria.
As a nation, we have an eating dis-order and, as Pollan claims -
One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengence, of the omnivore’s dilemma. The cornucopia of the American supermarket has drawn us back on a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a poisonous mushroom, but just as surely.)
