transitional times....

Rather than choosing one particular meal as the assignment requires, I choose to rebel and talk about how my whole eating decision-making process has been shifting to the left over the past few years.  When I moved in with my current roommate, in 2008, I had not realized that he was a complete non-meat eater (until I made him a real steak - turns out he was a closet carnivore).  But worse, he was in to recycling, composting, backyard gardening and wanted to build a chicken coop, too.  Now, I spent the first six weeks in my new home sort of nodding and laughing and making it clear that I was a proud consumer - I used things, ate things and threw things away; I was an unrepentant customer of big national chains and corporate looters (I felt I couldn't beat them, so I joined them).

As time passed however, I began to internalize some of the sideways glances I was receiving at home and  became self-conscious about how my best friend might feel relatively hostile about some of my blatantly un-green choices.  I do not typically cave to pressure from external sources (my internal pressures are more than enough, thank you), but this dissonance between Jordan and I was starting to eat at me; thus, very incrementally, I began to emulate some of the shopping and eating choices of my best friend, more out of guilt than a sense of social responsibility.

Once the seed is planted (forgive me), it is difficult to stop the growth.  I began to read labels and look into companies with which I was about to do business.  This was especially difficult for me because of the work I was doing - my clients were Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Chemical, and, coincidentally, the biggest corn processor in Chicago (and thus in the country).  I made a lot of money from these big companies and I was glad to be working.

Once I was laid off from my position and had a lot more time to think about social responsibility, I found myself taking a lot more trouble to buy locally, organically, and raw.  I am still a consumer.  I still use things, eat things, and throw things away, but I now stop to ask and check and recycle.  Guilt was a good place to start, but the black boxing of the entire processed food industry has left me with a very strong suspicion that we have been duped.  Mr. Pollan helped to confirm that, not only have we been duped, we have been robbed, tied up, thrown in the trunk of a car and driven off a cliff (AND we paid dearly for the privilege).

If the banks in the United States can be so outrageously irresponsible as they have proven to be, what then reassures us that food companies are any less susceptible to cutting corners, making wildly erroneous guesses, risking nearly anything to keep profits as high as possible, or just plain eviscerating the truth to avoid accountability at any cost?  If you have the legitimacy and the authority of the federal government behind you (FDA, etc.), the extraordinary spending power to purchase your own R&D complex full of "yes"-"scientists" (mercenary-legitimizers) to toe the line, AND a willing poor-ish population to buy your (non-food) products at a high profit margin, well, that's what companies are for, right?  Profit: it's what America proudly eats.

I have come to believe that the only truly effective voice the typical American has left is not experienced by way of the vote.  The only truly effective voice left for the post-modern American is the spend.  A vote surely sounds America's voice by choosing one of only two viable ideological polarities; the two polarities are nearly the same aside from the ways in which they allocate our spend as a nation.  There are other differences, but, most clearly, the effective difference between the two choices lies in the way the money is spent.  The spending power of every individual, however, is a science; our individual spend is the black box companies have spent decades - well over a century, actually - trying to demystify.  We individuals are facing an entirely new black box ourselves, one which makes sweeping gestures in order to separate an individual from the dollars he or she possesses and food is a primary source and method of profit for a vast number of companies - what's in your hot dog?