When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms – about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it’s possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food and health. If my explorations of the food chain have taught me anything, it’s that it is a food chain, and all the links in it are in fact linked: the health of the soil to the health of the plants and animals we eat to the health of the food culture in which we eat them to the health of the eater, in body as well as mind. Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.
We went to a fund-raiser at church this weekend, which linked food+companionship+cause -- all of the things in Pollan's mesage. And although the food was the least of the elements (don't mean to criticize too much), it set the tone for the evening, at least for us. People put a lot of work into that food, but I'm not sure they put a lot of thought into it in the way that Pollan does. Like the 100 mile dinner we produced last fall, it serves as a measure of how far we have come and how far we have to go before any of us individually or all of us collectively begin to look at food as an ecological element.
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