Pollan Makin' Food

These last few chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma were easily my favorite ones. While I enjoyed the information and opinions in the previous chapters, I found these to be the most engaging and thought provoking chapters of the novel. I'm thinking in particular of the Hunting chapter here because I found myself both shaking my head in disappointment at Pollan's half-hearted attempt to marginalize hunting and nodding at his struggle to wrap his mind around how he felt after killing and harvesting the pig. After seeing Pollan's conclusions about hunting I see that he purposefully gave hunting a narrow definition, and wrote a little "hunter porn" for good measure, so that he could dispel it and recreate the idea of hunting with the reader in tow. Pollan couldn't have asked for a better hunting partner, Angelo not only sees the pig as wild food waiting to be tamed but seems to have none of the macho tendencies that he (and probably the great majority of his readers) would react to with distaste and write off as foolish and ignorant behavior. I was actually a little disappointed that Angelo (or Pollan) didn't have a little more of a ritual in regards to the animal and killing it, especially since Pollan brings up in the previous chapter that some of these customs (praying before a meal, eating only parts of an animal) are what make meat eating more palatable to us. I'm not asking for him to tell the pig "I see you" or "your spirit goes with Ehwah" but I think he wastes his breath telling us on page 358 that a virtue of hunting is that it brings up questions of the relationship between man and animals-breath he should have used giving the pig at the very least a "I'm sorry buddy." I've never been hunting but I think fishing is close enough and part of respecting the animals you eat is acknowledging that you took their life, but I feel like Pollan is too distanced from this by his journalistic (see: ironic) viewing of the scene and editorializes rather that become fully engrossed in what he's doing. Despite having these problems with it I really enjoyed his conclusions and thought it was pretty wise of him to preface it with the ethics of eating animals chapter and follow it with the gathering fungi chapter. I have more to say about this but I gotta go..