Eating_Habits

The sheer amount of homework I have is disappointing. I have a midterm the day I return to Berkeley. What I find most unbelievable is that, while the professor offered to move the midterm to the Wednesday after we came back, he claimed that a couple people objected to such a move (preferring Monday), and that their opinions had precedence since that was the way things were originally planned. Thus, I am really finding it hard to grasp how some people like having the midterm then, and that means I have to study over spring break. Sadly, trying to keep up with my academics over break has not been going well so far. I suppose that overall it is an improvement considering I have accomplished more than I would have on average over a two-day period in the past two months. Yet, I am already lagging behind in terms of what I planned to do. For one thing, The Paradox of Plenty isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be about. I expected it to lambast fast food and provide me with a lot to base my paper on, but so far it has been about the eating habits of Americans in and around The Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, WWII, and the Baby Boom years. It did talk about how large corporations were able to have a big influence on government and how they successfully manipulated the masses into being “hooked” onto their products and thus gain large profits. Most surprising was that this era in American history wasn’t presented in as positive a light as Michael Pollan presented it in Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan seems to credit Earl Butz in the 1970s for our disastrous eating habits today), yet Paradox of Plenty showed that, even in the 1930s, large corporations were homogenizing the American diet, and even the prominent FDR often had to give in to the corporations’ interests. I suppose the book so far has foreshadowed the rise of fast food by showing the social fabric of America at that time as being “perfect” for fast food as it favored large corporations, showed that Americans wanted above all a lot of food for cheap prices (quantity over quality), and that society had a homogenizing tendency quite different from the notion of America as a “melting pot” of many different diverse peoples. Instead, America was a land where diverse peoples soon lost their cultural identity (specifically in terms of diet), and surprisingly quickly adopted “American” food—which seemed not so concerned about creating pleasurable aromas as it did focusing on “plain” foods and letting those foods “speak for themselves”—and lots of it. Thus, American food doesn’t care too much about using seasonings to create a distinctive flavor, but rather leaves the food (like a steak) rather bland, and emphasizes a love for beef because of the good feeling obtained from eating it rather than the peculiar spices that gave it its flavor. I regret to say that I myself am probably a victim of this trend. My family has tried to keep alive in me a love for Chinese cuisine, but I must say that my palette is rather “Americanized”. It seems that the efforts of the public school system to encourage uniformity and put pressure on immigrant kids to adopt the American diet worked in my case. I find only a narrow selection of foods edible in my case, and the very idea of exotic foods with ingredients very different from what I am used to makes me a bit uncomfortable. My taste for food is exactly what America’s large corporations want, and seems by this point in my life irreversible. I regret that I can’t do much about this. For the first time, I feel that I consider McDonalds damaging enough to human health, the environment, and to various other smaller businesses who simply can’t compete with a business as large, powerful, and far reaching as McDonalds, that I don’t want to eat McDonalds ever again. Yet, I am still finding it hard to shy away from all fast food. For example, yesterday, I gave into temptation and tried some of KFC’s popcorn chicken, something I haven’t tried in years. They were absolutely delicious, but I found myself asking myself WHY. I tried to concentrate a bit more on the flavors of the popcorn chicken. I realized the good taste was not coming from any sort of herb or spice. Rather, I found the only way I could describe the flavor was that it “tasted like KFC”. This was no doubt due to some artificial chemical, or a combination of many, specifically engineered to give a pleasurable sensation in the mouth. Also, it was extremely salty and I realized that a lot of the pleasurable taste was probably coming from the sodium, and that the extreme saltiness was probably masking something else. I wondered how it would taste without all the salt. When I was done, my stomach felt full and satisfied, a sort of “good” feeling I couldn’t get from eating a meal of all vegetables (not that I eat a lot of those meals in the first place—I try eating salads, but they don’t seem to give me as much satisfaction when I’m full as meat does). I suppose I like the feeling in my stomach after completing a fast food meal (or any meat-intensive meal for that matter) because I was raised that way—fast food has been my reward and “dream food” ever since my early childhood and I guess this is the result of years and years of “feeling happy” after finishing a fast food meal. A vegetarian meal, by contrast, leaves a strange and bizarre feeling in my stomach after I’m full. I guess the reason is that I am relatively unused to it, and it feels exotic and foreign.