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In the selections we read this past week, the bit about Rosie the "free-range" chicken stuck with me the most.  At first it was just the way-too creepy fact that anyone in his or her right mind would think that giving a dinner a name would make it more appetizing and likely to sell.  As I said in class on Tuesday, the American people are disconnected from their food and its origins and have been for some time (we collectively deduced that it was from the invention of the can?).  The last thing we want is to think what we're eating ever lived, ever felt pain or happiness or slept or ran about or has any sort of connection to us whatsoever, besides nutritional value.  People and chairs from Ikea have names (what is up with that?!), not dinner.  It's just dinner, just chicken, not roasted Rosie with a slice of Fred on the side and some Preston Peas and Chloe Custard for dessert.

 And how is it that we've almost all been swayed this way, that we've all become ultra-sensitive?  Is it a strain of the poltically correct virus?  The years of getting our meat in geometric form, sealed neatly with cellophane, almost bloodless altered us.  There is no life in our meat, but we like it that way.  I've dissected two pigeons-- it isn't pretty.  But I love chicken.  I learned what type of birds have white meat, and why.  Yet I sit there, at my kitchen table, eating my white meat, often boneless chicken breast.  And when I think of the hassle it was to cook, the energy my mom put into it, the energy I put into helping her, it is nowehere near what it must have been, nowehere near the effort my two friends and I put into those pigeons.  We're babied by these clean cuts, pampered to a point.  We want animal rights, we want Rosie to go outdoors and join in all the chicken games and squak and bob her head about the grass...but we want Rosie in our grocery stores neatly packaged and precise so we can forget it's even Rosie.

But back to sway...since before I was born (1989. take that, 1990.), food's been presented to us that way.  In the reading for Thursday's class, Pollan wrote about fad diets, how in 2002 the Atkins story turned the nation's food ideology upside-down.  We dive head-first into what we're given, what's available.  As omnivores, we're both neophiles and neophobics, and these fads appeal to our neophilic (is that a word?) side.  And so we get Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator, doomed to a suggestive nickname all because he thought he'd try chewing his food 100 times before swallowing it.  We're slaves to industrial food, Horace was a slave to excess mastication, the desperate folks who followed Atkins were slaves to, well, not carbs...in our natural desire to find new things to eat and new ways to eat, our fear of doing just that traps us in the new things we've come up with, at least for awhile (briefly in the case of fads, but not in industrial food).  Being omnivorous is truly a dilemma.