We have been told from a young age that humans started as a hunter-gatherer society. However, as time has progressed we stopped hunting; humans have progressed to the search for something more artificial, something easier to grab and gather. With the uprising of the industrialization of food we have come to find that nutrition, the quality of our foods, has been sacrificed to quantity. Throughout the mechanization of food the “growing” of food has become a process with pesticides, growth modification, and advantageous relationships. As a species, the capitalistic tendencies within developed nations have has created a way to prey upon those still developing creating these advantageous relationships. If it is not a nation as a whole then the hunting for workers happens on a smaller scale such as the use of immigrant workers. The food that comes out of a system filled with the idea of quantity over quality has created a market where we need to eat more of a “variety” of foods. When we used to hunt for leaves, berries, bark, animals, and more, the reward was not always plentiful. But the necessary nutrients our bodies needed was found in the foods we hunted and gathered. Now when we hunt we get into our cars and drive to the nearest store, if not the fast food chain down the street. We buy apples that we are convinced will meet those nutrients we have always been told we need. Yet the apples meet a third of what they used to. We have foods we hunt that are not satisfying the true needs of our bodies. Foods that come from a predatory relationship, foods all found in one part of the food pyramid, foods that are meant to look good as opposed to making you feel good. Pollan said it best we have started to eat; “Foods that lie leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses.” Which begs the question, what should we be hunting for?
