What he notices, is not so much the fact that Earthbound's employees who operate "the baby greens harvester" as opposed to the stoop labor of Mexican "contractors". yeah.
what he notices is that they are wearing blue bandaids. I have no idea why, they just are. In other words, I don't know why it is that so many have band aids on their hands. Pollan doesn't tell me. But his attention, and yours, is riveted on the blueness. They are blue, and also have a special metallic strip, so that they can be spotted amongst all the lettuce leaves as they pass by inspectors and detected by the metal detectors, lest a bandaid get into a bag of salad greens.
but what i notice later is how Pollan's rhetoric works. He's making the point that a tremendous amount of energy and complexity goes into the creation of a freakin' bag of lettuce with hardly any calories.
That complexity is contrasted the simplicity of eating lettuce. He, and we (he insists) eat lettuce and when we do we imagine it as a wholesome activity:
"There are few things humans eat that are quite so elemental -- a handful of leaves, after all, consumed raw. When we're eating salad we're behaving a lot like herbivores, drawing as close as we ever do to all those creatures who bend their heads down to the grass, or reach up into the trees, to nibble on plant leaves. We add only the thinnest veneer of culture to these raw leaves, dressing them in oil and vinegar."
Please pause. The veneer of culture is the salad dressing! culture as opposed to nature. Close to nature. Behaving like herbivores -- fucking thank dog I don't have to bow my head to the ground to eat or get on my tippy toes and crane my neck...
Jesus Aiyth Kryst on a Broken Pogo Stick. It gets better:
"Much virtue attaches to this kind of eating, for what do we regard as more wholesome than tucking into a pile of green leaves?"
fuckifino!
that's all i do when i think of eating a salad: it's wholesome. i feel like... a giraffe. a cow. tomorrow, i can be another herbivore. whole again, i can go on with life once more! until my next salad!
He continues: "The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance in my refrigerated mind."
he goes on to condemn the current organic food industry for, basically, false advertising, for basically being just like the rest of the food industry, etc. etc.
he doesn't like the literary genre of the organic food mart, what he calls "Supermarket Pastoral." That is because it is not true. If it were true, it would be OK. But what he doesn't like about it, really, is the veneer of culture slathered thickly over nature. He wants a thin veneer of culture drizzled over nature, like oil and vinegar dressing over tender greens.
I hate to break it to him, but when i eat lettuce, I'm not fantasizing my spirit-animal, or hoping to get in touch one with my inner herbivore. I'm interested in the contrast between the lettuce and the tuna salad and the bread. Or, when I have a salad for lunch, it's cause I'm often craving the wetness. I'm not sure what it is, but I'll get a hankering for a big ol pile of crispy wetness. And I dump all kinds of hot spicy and tangy on it: black pepper, jalapenos, banana peppers, pepper cheese, blue cheese, parmesan that makes me pucker. There's nothing like a nice thin slice of practically raw cold roasted beef, piled onto some lettuce with blue cheese dressing for dipping.
The last thing from my mind, is my secret life as a giraffe.
honestly.
At 11:46 AM 10/12/2008, shag wrote:
>At 11:37 PM 10/10/2008, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>>First off, I'm annoyed by the cutesy term 'sun food agenda'.
>
>
>heh. i had to laugh as I started on chapter 9, "Big Organic" of Pollan's
>_The Omnivore's Dilemma_. It follows on the heels of a discussion of a
>"beyond organic" farmer in VA, Joel Salatin. Salatin was consulted, Pollan
>says, because he figured he'd get some juicy quotes; Salatin is known for
>railing against the Organic Food Industry.