Response to Omnivore's Dilemma: The Perfect Meal

Pollan's idea and procedure for his perfect meal is both elaborate and intimidating. The amount of labor the man was willing to put into one day in order to produce one meal seems near insanity to me. When talking about his eleven hour day of cooking Pollan asks, “Why, I asked myself when I took a ten-minute break for lunch around 4:00, had I ever undertaken to prepare such an elaborate meal by myself?” “Elaborate” seems like an understatement. Not only did Pollan spend an incredible amount of time preparing the meal on the day it was to be eaten, but he spent weeks beforehand going out and gathering all of his ingredients by hand. My favorite story of him gathering his own ingredients, is the story of him trying to find his own abalone. He describes his abalone hunting experience this way, “There's no question that you burn more calories looking for abalone than you can possibly collect, making this a perfectly absurd human enterprise.” After his detailed description of what it is to hunt abalone and how difficult it is, and after he cited a fact that more people are killed hunting abalone (by sharks) than they are hunting species on land, the fact that he didn't know he wouldn't be able to freeze the abalone and save it for later was really the icing on the cake for me. I couldn't help but laugh and feel bad for him at the same time.

 I also enjoyed how Pollan divided his journey to creating the perfect meal into three sections: 1. Planning the Menu 2. In the Kitchen 3. At the Table. The first section takes us through his thought process when considering what would be his idea of the perfect meal, and it takes us through is personal hunter/gathering and cooking ethics about how the process should be carried out. The second section takes us through how he had planned to actually cook the food and what parts of his plan did and did not work out. The third section talks about the actual meal itself, and how Pollan's making of the feast was a testament to his devotion and appreciation of the people he made it for. The evening starts a little tense and maybe even awkward, but quickly progresses to a higher-level of conversation (mostly about food and foraging), as the people at the table begin to gel more as the evening progresses and the food comes out. Here, Pollan's deeper idea of food means comes out. He says that eat item of food at the table represented different stories to all the different individuals eating there. He says that food feeds both body and soul with “the threads of narrative knitting us together as a group, and knitting the group into the larger fabric of the given world.” This is a very powerful insight to me, and I think it gets at the very reason food is so important and powerful in our lives.