Question

What does Pollan mean when he writes that the meal he created himself and the McDon- ald’s meal are at “the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating” and that “the pleasures of one are based on a nearly per- fect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance”?

Answer 1

What does Pollan mean when he writes that the meal he created himself?

Author "Michael Pollan" has challenged himself to create a meal using only ingredients he gathered himself, investigating whether such a thing was conceivable in the modern world and wrote about his experiences. He prioritizes his own individual efforts which strictly limiting the scope to a one man job, but concedes he will need help from experienced others.

Michael Pollan demonstrates an interest in first hand experimental knowledge gathering that recognizes the mediating effects of locations such as stores, farms and strives instead for a more direct encounter with the natural world.

The McDonald’s meal are at “the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating” and that “the pleasures of one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance”.

In essence, the modernization of food industry can be described as incurring hidden costs as the complexity of a system spirals out of possible coherent comprehension. Ingenuity and the increasing range of available products coincide with the inability to deeply connect with or understand food. An individual scope of this experimental endeavor refocuses the issue on a personal level at its core calling readers to resist the ease of industry and really think about what they eat every day with a critical eye.