Paper Palate

I wonder if it happened while we were sleeping. Or while we had our backs turned. Or maybe it was while we were at the dinner table. Seemingly overnight, we’ve become an educated public. We know where our food comes from, how it’s made, and what it’s doing to us. Organics are now a supermarket staple (though the political argument still rages about whether or not big businesses can truly be organic), free-range and grass-fed animals have gone from an oddity to a neccessity, and food additives are subtracted from more and more diets every day. At this rate, the United States may not be a fast food nation much longer. 

This newfound public awareness about responsible eating has largely been made possible by a new crop of books on the ethics and implications of the modern diet. Marion Nestle’s nutrition book What To Eat can be found on many sophisticated eaters’ coffee tables. Michael Singer and Jim Mason’s criticisms of the commercial food industry in The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter are turning more and more people onto veganism. And the erudite journalist Michael Pollan’s The Onnivore’s Dilemma has brought the debate on processed food into the limelight. Of course, Nestle, Singer, Mason, and Pollan aren’t the first authors to question our eating habits — they just timed their books incredibly well. In 1994, microbiology professor Richard Lacey tackled the same subject in a book called Hard to Swallow: A Brief History of Food. His study is divided into six sections (”Farming,” “Food processing,” “Composition of food,” “Getting ready to eat,” “The ideal diet,” and “Is there a solution?”), which are still on track with our concerns and preoccupations about food today. “The central purpose of each chapter is to tell you about different aspects of what has come to be called the food chain,” Lacey writes in his preface. “This is an appropriate phrase,” he continues, “as it suggests the possibility of a few weak links…”

His discussion of the perils of salmon farms (then just a few pilot projects in the North Atlantic, now as commonplace as tuna canneries) shows how prophetic his analysis was. The book’s only shortcoming is that it’s a bit dry — at the time, the topic was far from trendy. But even with all of the other texts available today, Hard to Swallow is worth a read, to remind us of the progress we have already made. “Another purpose of the book is that it will stimulate you to question in the future what exactly you are eating,” writes Lacey. The future is now, and we are doing exactly that.