handtomouth

“We eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.” So Steven Shapin quotes Michael Pollan, who has written a book about organic food and its production. Seems all is not butterflies and moonbeams in the organic universe, with the industry now running at large scales and according to the same brutal methods of much capitalist endeavour. Is Pollan’s sentiment just pretty poetry, will food end up being the protein gloop of The Matrix or a pill? I have a feeling that factors that currently don’t feature in the debates (like the availability of water) may have the deciding vote. In the meanwhile, I think it helps if food is treated with more reverence or at the very least if people think and talk about food more. The vocabulary of taste needs to develop.