Pleasures of eating

I recently finished Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. I highly recommend both that book and Pollan's earlier The Omnivore's Dilemma. Mentioned in Defense of Food is a short essay by Wendell Berry entitled The Pleasures of Eating.

I recommend the essay as it has some practical recommendations to bring our relationships with food into a healthier perspective. I found the following quote especially relevant.

Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. "Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation - for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the "quality" of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in the world.