Our contemplative practice with chocolate in Lecture 7 left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. This may be because we were ingesting raw cocoa nibs, but it was mostly due to the new information I received from this lecture that was difficult to digest. Prior to this contemplative practice, I loved eating, or baking/cooking with chocolate. I’ve always… Read more »
One of the many problems resulting from the state of our current food system directly impacts human health. Pollan claims to offer a simple solution however it is exclusive, many socio-economic barriers render people incapable of practicing his three rules. Furthermore, the rules he lays out are trivial when situated in the modern-ecological context, post-agrarian-revolution and post-industrial-revolution. Revolutions bring with… Read more »
Collective action is the way to achieve any change whether socially, economically, politically, environmentally, locally, or globally. We understand this when it comes to climate change, or political regimes. So why do we not believe the same to be true about food? One person growing their own food sustainably won’t change industrial food system. I had believed that by being… Read more »
Within his book, Pollan discusses how chronic diseases were “quickly acquired” by immigrants in America. This reminded me of an experience I had while living in Dubai, as it was only people from North America that were allergic to nuts. Within our expat community growing up, it became a ‘running joke’ to identify North American’s through their nut allergies. New… Read more »
Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” is problematic. He identifies key food issues we face today and their causes. This is important, but his supposed ‘solutions’ are subpar at best. He pushes for individualized effort, but just like many other issues we face currently, the issue of food has become systemic, so individual efforts will have little to no effect. … Read more »
I think a big point from lecture that was thought-provoking to me was the idea of metabolic rift. In particular the idea that because of how global, food consumption has become we have created imbalances in natural levels of nutrients/water from food producing countries by transporting nutrient rich foods to wealthier countries to be consumed. This cycle is countering the… Read more »
The Australian Aborigines experiment from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food peeked my interest due to its findings and its connections to my background in biology. The basis of the experiment was to isolate recently westernized Aborigines with type 2 diabetes into an area away from western civilization. This coerced the relocated Aborigines to rely on foraging to obtain food,… Read more »
My mother and I would yell about the compost while I was growing up, quite literally scream at each other over an apple core. But before that apple was bit into, eaten, and mistakenly sent to the landfill rather than our compost bin, the question was had I washed it or not? Because “Yes Willa I always buy organic apples,… Read more »
While Michael Pollan makes a lot of recommendations about what to eat to have a balanced diet in their own life, there are a lot of practicality issues that I can observe in real life that can not be applied from the readings. Pollan has made a lot of simple recommendations that can be done such has diversifying the types… Read more »
In his article, Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?, author Michael F. Maniates grapples with what he calls the individualization of responsibility that has become embedded into neoliberal environmentalism. This critique starkly undermines Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, which ends with a vague prescription for prudent consumer choices as a method of subverting the industrial… Read more »