“Most of us no longer eat what our mothers fed us as children. This is, historically speaking, an unusual state of affairs.” (Pollan p3) Pollan expresses concern for the health of the world because he believes the world’s diet is modeled after the American diet, the American diet that is quickly becoming unsafe and unnatural. With technological advances and scientific research, the Western diet has emerged, providing nutrition information for healthier lifestyles. Pollan believes this to be a bad situation? If the world truly ate what our ancestors consumed, we would all be chomping on slabs of meat and foraging for berries and grasses.
I do agree, however, that “…new, scientific-sounding terms like “cholesterol” and “fiber” and “saturated fat” began rising to large-type prominence.” (Pollan p19) It doesn’t make sense that the consumers are more concerned with the ‘invisible’ things within the product than the actual product itself are more important and influential than the actual product at hand. But, with this, the population has the power to choose what they consume. Rather than solely complaining about the content of the food being purchased or consumed, the consumer has the ultimate choice if they are to consume the food that is natural or processed.
“You are what you eat – and, perhaps surprisingly, you also are what your ancestors ate.” (Challem) Jack Challem illustrates this in, 'Paleolithic Nutrition: Your Future is in Your Dietary Past'. The diet one chooses to follow today will affect future generations. “Looked at in another way, 100,000 generations of people were hunter-gatherers, 500 generations have depended on agriculture, and only 10 generations have lived since the start of the industrial age, and only two generations have grown up with highly processed fast foods.” (Challem) It appears as if though the food society Americans struggle with today are a new trend in the evolutionary path of food consumption. Which direction will the world’s population choose to go in the future? Will it continue to follow the technological path to a more unnatural plate of food?
