Preparing a Meal

Recently, a group of my friends and I got together and decided to have a homemade meal night. The first step was deciding what we all wanted to make. We figured spaghetti would be easy enough, and everyone would each make a different part of the meal, in order to split costs. I got the part of making our sauce, and after remembering how good my mom makes it back home, decided to give her a call to get the proper ingredients. Making this meal was a lot of fun because all of my friends were working towards a common goal: eating really good food. We all got to work in the kitchen together, using the time to relax and not worry about school. Each step was important because we wanted to make sure all the food worked together. You did not want too much sauce, or too many noodles, we had to figure out who was making what, where we were eating, and other little details. It really took some thinking ahead on our parts.

After reading the section in In Defense of Food, I agree with what Pollan has to say. For the most part, we as Americans do not east food to relax and enjoy the food and the company along with it, but merely eat quickly as possible without concerning ourselves with whether or not it actually tastes good, but with the fact that it is low fat and had needed nutrients in it. The blog Blisstree describes how actually taking the time to eat and enjoy our food can overall help us to become healthier.

I think that the meal my friends and I created does not affect my opinion. For the most part we were doing exactly as Pollan describes we should be. We were not concerned about whether or not what we were making was every definition of healthy, but more concerned about whether or not we were having fun together while we made it.

*image taken from google images

Response to In Defense of Food

Basically, what Pollan is trying to say to us is that we should go back to the traditional way of eating. None of this business about vitamins, nutrient-enriched and omega-3's. Back to a time when dinner was about good food and good company--not how much protein and vitamin A is in the meatloaf. As a nation, we need to stop processing, altering, and genetically engineering our food in the quest to make us "healthier" but instead take food for its face value.

Pollan makes a point with the idea that we should stop trying to adjust the things that should already be healthy for us. After all, do cows really need to eat flax seed so that they have the same nutrient quantity as fish? Every other nation gets along fine without feeling the need to do any of this, yet health-conscious America is so focused on inventing new ways to become healthier. Instead of focusing on one specific nutrient or vitamin, for example in an orange, that could possibly play a part in preventing heart disease (and then of course adding that one specific nutrient or vitamin to everything we eat), thought should be put into the concept that it is more than just that one thing that could make the orange so beneficial to our health.

Another side to this argument is that the changes intended to help our food become better for us, may in fact be doing the opposite. The need for hydrogenated vegetable oils that were supposed to revolutionize healthier cooking, we are now finding out may actually be harming us in the long run. In fact, they may be a contributor to the problems with our health. This could mean that some of the other developments being made are just as damaging, scientists are just not yet aware of the long term effects.

*Picture taken from Google images