Politics of Eating: Are Your Really Going to Eat That? Food Fanaticism Gets Out of Control.

By Emily Nunn, Chicago Tribune

Mar. 1–Remember when the only food fight was vegetarians vs. the meat-eaters? That quaint and comical little war was set for decades in our college restaurants, where people wore plastic shoes and asked, practically every time they came to eat, if any animal flesh was cooked on the premises.

“I can’t eat it if it’s been cooked near a chicken,” a fellow student once said, as I poured him a glass of iced tea to drink with his tofu-and-vegetable scramble with nutritional yeast and whole-wheat biscuits, in the earnest cafe where I worked. This guy — he was the real vegetarian.

And yet, he was also exactly the kind of guy who would leave his dog on a rope in front of the library with no water for six hours in the hot sun, wearing a cute bandana tied around its neck, as if that made the cruelty all right. Or, who lived on cigarettes and Yoo-Hoo soda all day long, and did LSD all night.

Ah, those were the days. Vegetarianism was the refuge of pious hypocrites! But it was so blessedly easy to make yourself feel better about all the crap you ate (by simply attacking the eating habits of others).

And in exchange for worrying aloud about the conditions in slaughterhouses while people were trying to eat bacon cheeseburgers, a person was allowed the lazy moral luxury of being oblivious to the fact that things were a lot worse in the big-food industry than anyone cared to imagine back then.

Today, though, food is a fraught, in-your-face subject that we must all contend with, and food piety has gone truly global, not to mention Big Brother.

In addition to the legislation banning foie gras in Chicago and transfats in New York, we also have big-food capitalism masquerading as social concern. Whole Foods, the purveyor of ridiculously expensive health food — that bossy college vegetarian cafe writ large! — had banned live lobster sales because fishermen’s catch-and-ship methods had been equated with torture; they recently made the God-like gesture of lifting that ban on a store in Maine, where lobstering is an obvious livelihood, after one New Hampshire company devised a method of getting the lobsters to the stores with a minimum of human contact before selling them — after which they will then be slain and eaten.

High fructose, low fructose

And, unless you have been living in a sealed tomb, you are aware — at least subliminally — of the many related philosophical, economical, geopolitical and health issues, not to mention confusing personal concerns: do I want my beef irradiated or am I against that sort of thing? How can a fish be both “wild” and “caught”? Why is there “high fructose” but no “low fructose”?

This is thanks, in large part, to the barrage of fraught-food books that have been published in the recent past (see list), and many of which I purchased in the recent past, believing that one should stay informed in such a climate.

What a mistake.

Just look at “Fast Food Nation,” a book that I especially like to blame for bringing food fear and loathing into the modern mainstream. People love this book. I have never read it, and really do not plan to, but like many others I spent $14.95 on it, and it is sitting right here on my desk so that I can look at it and roll my eyes. I realize I should probably be happy to know that there are feces in my hamburger, but somehow, crazily, I am not.

Even Michael Pollan, the eloquent and thought-provoking author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” the boffo best seller that foodies can’t stop talking about because it “promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating,” seems impractical to somebody like me, which is to say someone too cynical and lazy to do anything but read a few really interesting chapters then skim the rest because it didn’t really seem to have all that many answers for the mainstream population, now less popularly known as “poor people.” : I realize that such books could help change the world, especially if all of them were so entertainingly written as Pollan’s. But they’re not, and some of them contain an abundance of sentences such as this one: “As for udders, the more milk a cow produces, the more likely she is to get an udder infection (mastitis).” And this one: “Triglycerides are composed of three fatty acids attached to a backbone of a small sugar alcohol (glycerol), arranged much like the letter E, only with longer arms.” And, unfortunately, their presence on my bookshelves makes me not curious but so defensive and guilty and overwhelmed and frightened that I may give up eating altogether.

Which certainly wouldn’t be healthy.

On the other hand, if I continue to eat the way I do, it could hurt me socially.

My friend David, who has actually read Pollan’s book in its entirety, and has also really read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” recently picked up a milk carton from which I’d poured the milk in his coffee and looked at it as if it were a live grenade with the pin out: “You don’t even buy organic milk?” he asked. Our relationship may be imperiled; he clearly now suspects I will feed his daughter Kraft singles and Pez.

Keep eating the poison

And yet, the truth is I’ll probably just keep eating the poison. I’m well into my 40s, I should be dead soon, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket, anyway. It’s just the easiest thing to do.

If remaining blissfully ignorant doesn’t continue to work, though, I have a backup solution: I may buy all my food from the most pious purveyor of provender I have yet to find: www.houseofdavid.net, which bills itself as America’s Premier Distributor of Biblical Health Products, and sells such items as the Seeds of Samson bar ($45.36 for two dozen), and King David’s Treat (same price) and Bible Bars (6 bars for $11.94) — all taking off from that old chestnut about the body being a temple.

It can’t be any more expensive than Whole Foods, andwho among us would have the nerve to cast the first stone?

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Latest books

“What to Eat” (by Marion Nestle)

“What to Eat” (by Luise Light)

“Real Food: What to Eat and Why”

“Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health”

“Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think”

“Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children”

“The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter”

“Eating Between the Lines: The Supermarket Shopper’s Guide to the Truth Behind Food Labels”

“The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong”

“Food Is the Antichrist, and You Are a Pawn of the Devil” *

–Emily Nunn

*I made that last one up, but I may actually try to publish it: It would sell like an organic hotcake.

ernunn@tribune.com

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Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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