The Omnivore's Dilemmas

Instructor Lang
English 101
25 August 2013
The Omnivores Obsession Everybody loves food, especially America. Americans are obsessed with food, and that is correlated to the fact that in America, food is almost always readily available to us. We have fast food restaurants, grocery stores, restaurants, and farmers markets with most of the food being relatively affordable. Our nation without a doubt has many dilemmas that need to be solved, however if you were to group all of these dilemmas into different sets and focus on the “food” set of the dilemmas, which would be our nation’s current food dilemma? Taking everything into account, finding healthy, tasteful foods seems to be the main concern of many Americans today. With obesity on the
Hamburgers have been transformed into veggie burgers and pizzas have been changed to white pizzas. The problem with veggie burgers and white pizzas are they simply do not taste as good as a regular hamburger or pizza. As Michael Pollen stated, “to think of some of the most delicious components of food as toxins, as nutritionism has taught us to do in the case of fat, does little for our happiness as eaters” (13). When Americans try and eat healthy, they opt to go for the healthy options and not the unhealthy options even though those are the foods that taste the best. So to conquer the dilemma of finding healthy, tasteful foods, we must find healthy foods that taste as good as the unhealthy
However, how do we as consumers know what make all these healthy foods healthy? All of the information we know about food comes from inside a laboratory where food scientists study the components of all the food imaginable. Because of this, any food with any trace of fat in it is automatically thrown out of consideration for being labeled healthy. On the other hand, sure fat may not be healthy, but what if there is a health benefit to eating a certain kind of fat. Maybe down the line scientists will discover a certain kind of fat can help prevent cancer. Going back to Michael Pollen’s article of Nutritionism, Pollen’s quotes Harvey Levenstein when he states “taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of foods cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories” (14). Important qualities of foods now a day are calories, fat and carbohydrates while in the past they were vitamin B, protein and calcium. When producers take out all the unhealthy nutrients in food, the tastefulness of the food indeed goes down, making it a less desirable option. Once again, with the “important” qualities of food being limited and constraint to a strict standard, it is harder to combat the problem of finding healthy, tasteful