Let Them Eat Brioche
In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2008), is a book I bought for my foodie ex-chef husband for Christmas, but in fact he was too preoccupied with The Wire , and The Road (apparently only able to digest manly nominalized materials, where I need that feminized genitive connection). So I read it. Pollan's argument is that we (for 'we', he means Americans, but it's the 'we' of the Western diet) are being fed an enormous amount of calories deriving from a small group of less than nutritious things -- soy, corn, wheat -- all dressed up as an Aladdin's cave of food-like products. We should, so his antidote goes, be hunting and gathering a vast array of plant foods that have a deeply simple relationship with the land they grew on. We are, thus, to invert the relationship between mono- and multicultural that has been foisted upon us, and are ourselves to seek out diversity from origins that are simple, rather than consuming what is frighteningly simplif...