Editing The Chef In The Food Part 2 (section)

==== Revisiting the Ancient Dilemma: What to Eat? ====
For millennia, ever since the onset of culture, man has had no problem in thinking of what to eat for dinner. The menu was pretty fixed given the things available in a certain season and region. It was considered a mark of culture not having to think about what to eat for dinner. It signaled prosperity. For only, the very poor or the very deficient had to think about what to eat. The prosperous always had the familiar fare on their plates.

Moreover, it was considered that thinking about what to eat and what not to eat is also the mark of the uncivilized man. For a cultural society has already tried most of the permutations and combinations in a given region and time and thus the question of what to eat has already been settled. A cultural man who has the experience and benefit of a great culture behind him does not have to think about what to eat. The influential tradition that guides him also informs him about food. Michael Pollan describes this very well in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:<blockquote>“The human omnivore has, in addition to his sense and memory, the incalculable advantage of a culture, which stores the experience and accumulated wisdom of countless human tasters before us. I don’t need to experiment with the mushroom now called, rather helpfully, the “death cap”… Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal.” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma 4)</blockquote>Pollan calls the predicament of a modern diner with the ‘omnivore’s dilemma’ because biologically man is one of the few creatures who can digest a wide variety of foods. Most of mammals cannot eat just anything even if everything was available for they won’t be able to digest it. Man, unlike most mammals can digest a wide variety of foods and with the agency of cooking, just about anything.

That is why while evolving on the plains of Africa, he faced the question of ‘what to eat’. The onset of culture settled this question for him by fixing what to eat and what not to eat in a given time and place. Modern America in the 1920s once again set the clock to the prehistoric hunter-gatherer times as far as ‘what to eat’ question is considered.

When the women were encouraged to stop cooking in the 1920s in America and restaurants opened for the common public and for pleasure eating and not just for necessary eating. Michael Pollan attests to the fact that feminists were employed to campaign for abandoning cooking at home, as it encouraged the food and restaurant industry. (Cooked 131) For the first time after the onset of culture, the man had once again put his mind to the dilemma of what to eat for dinner: Mexican or Chinese? Organic or Regular? Vegan or Lacto-Vegetarian? Pollan again:<blockquote>“One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma. The cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back on a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a poisonous mushroom, but just as surely.)” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma 4-5)</blockquote>