Since the 2017 fall quarter, my friends and I have been working out regularly at the IMA, putting in about 1-2 hours every day.\u00a0 There, we often overhear conversations about fats, carbs, and proteins. We also talk about food a lot, and we never realized we acquired a different way of talking and thinking when it comes to food.\u00a0 What stands out to me the most is how nutrients plays a vital and political role in our modern society.<\/p>\n
In Michael Pollan\u2019s In\u00a0<\/em>Defense of Food<\/em>, he points out that \u201cscientific reductionism\u201d helped codify the official dietary language we speak today.\u00a0 Now being more conscious of my food, I commodify whatever is on my plate into compounds, distinguishing what is protein, how much carbs I want to eat, and how much fat I have already eaten.\u00a0\u00a0 Visiting the gym where food is nearly always addressed in its basic nutritional forms, I had unconsciously adopted this classification as my way of looking at what I eat.<\/p>\n However, what I found most disturbing in Pollan’s In Defense of Food<\/em> was his whole subchapter on \u201cPay More, Eat Less.\u201d\u00a0 I know this is a required reading for class, but once I reached that section, I thought it would be difficult for me to finish reading the book.\u00a0 I am not sure why I felt so much distaste for Pollan\u2019s eating strategies at the time.\u00a0 Perhaps it was the digestion of previous sections like \u201cIf You Have the Space, Buy a Freezer\u201d and \u201cEat Wild Foods When You Can,\u201d that built up to my stomachache.\u00a0 But I think the real reason is because mostly everything he said is unrealistic and unattainable, at least for me.<\/p>\n I think Pollan’s methods are so unrealistic because of many factors, such as time, money, and location. \u00a0I commute to school every day; I leave around 8:00 a.m., attend all my classes, and arrive back at home usually around 7:00 p.m.\u00a0 Pollan wants everyone to cook their own meals, since he sees that as an indicator of how healthy a person is.\u00a0 From discussions in class, cooking normally takes around 2-3 hours, depending on the type of food you\u2019re making, and how much of it you plan to cook.\u00a0 Given my personal schedule, this means after arriving home around 7:00 p.m., the earliest I could potentially be eating dinner if I followed what Pollan says, would be around 9:00 p.m.\u00a0 Not only that, I would have to cook for my family of 5, which would take even longer!<\/p>\n Both my mom and dad work, sometimes coming home later than I do.\u00a0 When we go grocery shopping, the money we spend is the money they earn.\u00a0 I know for a fact if I asked my parents to switch to spending more money on organic food, which is more expensive, they would be angry, simply because why would we pay more for less?\u00a0 And in terms of shopping at a farmers’ market, I can only think of Pike Place Market, PCC, and Whole Foods as the closest matches for a true farmers’ market.\u00a0 Even so, those stores are still quite some distance away from where I live.\u00a0 And they don\u2019t sell the authentic Chinese and other Asian foods that we like \u2013 and if they did, it\u2019s still over-priced.\u00a0 Ultimately, I think Pollan overlooks how expensive and unrealistic it is for most people to live by his \u201cdietary strategies\u201d in modern society, particularly when it comes to buying\u00a0and storing half a steer, or growing a personal crop of wild purslane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the 2017 fall quarter, my friends and I have been working out regularly at the IMA, putting in about 1-2 hours every day.\u00a0 There, we often overhear conversations about fats, carbs, and proteins. We also talk about food a lot, and we never realized we acquired a different way of talking and thinking when it comes to food.\u00a0 What… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,25,23],"tags":[45,32,48,34],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meat","category-other","category-seeds","tag-eating-habits","tag-individual-response","tag-pollan","tag-takeaways"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}