Analysis Of Chapter 8 Of Omnivore's Dilemma

Everything “boils down to this: As creatures who can eat many different things, how do we know what’s good to eat and what’s not? That’s the omnivore’s dilemma and it’s growing bigger every day” (Pollan 84). A very serious issue that is discussed thoroughly in Chapter 8 of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Through the addition of each section and detail, Pollan slowly gains a basis for his argument. An argument that challenges the very way in what and how we eat. And one that sheds light into the industrialized food chain. Essentially, his argument is to be aware of what we are eating. And that the omnivore’s dilemma had been solved before, as it could still be solved now. If only we fall back to how it had been, before every food item

Over thousands of years ago, humans had built a culture of food that determined what was best to eat and what to avoid. We learned how to find the local foods for ourselves, and how to cook them. And to eat what those before us ate. As everything, there were certain rules and habits that had managed to solve the omnivore’s dilemma. For example, what you ate “also depended on the season. You ate apples in the fall and leafy greens in the spring. In most places people ate small portions of meat, though not at every meal” (Pollan 86). Back then, people had a concrete idea of what it was that they were eating. They knew what was good to eat and what to avoid. And they knew where the food was actually coming from, so that wasn’t ever a mystery, as they were the ones to get the food for themselves. And they also knew how much to eat of a specific type of food. But now, standing “in our giant supermarkets, we feel more lost than someone standing in a forest ten thousand years ago” (Pollan 87). Right now, we’re not sure of which food is good to eat and which is not. Back then, simple rules helped maintain a level of understanding of what we were really eating. But thanks “to the food industry, we don’t even know what it is we’re eating” (Pollan 87). We think we might know, but the truth is that we really don’t know. We really don’t know where the food is coming from. Or the conditions it had been in. All we know is what the finished product looks like. We can’t even be sure of what’s really in there. Sometimes, it is as if we’ve truly forgotten the true purpose of why it is that we eat. With this section, Pollan continues to add onto the doubt and uncertainty of the way that food is in modern times, based upon how it used to be. Slowly, he is beginning to warm up to his main