That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.
Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.
Once you introduce the issue to young people and suggest to them that they have the ability to vote with their forks, either by positively going for certain kinds of foods or rejecting other kinds of foods, they realize that this is a responsibility and an opportunity to shape the world a little bit by their own choices.
The food system is a very complex beast. There are people who are going to get their food at Wal-Mart or at Safeway; they're not going to the farmers' market. Those people need choices too.
My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.
The first step towards solving the omnivore's dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.
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