Reading Response: The Omnivore's Dilemma, Hunting and Gathering

It seems like violence—or rather killing—was a recurring theme in my readings and experiences this weekend. As I read the hunting and gathering section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan for Food and Travel Writing, I also read the ending of On Killing by Dave Grossman for Social Psychology. I also learned about the job of a foreign war correspondent while I was at a journalism conference in Chicago. This weekend was the most fantastic intersection of all of these bits of learning and they all converged as I read about Michael Pollan killing a wild boar in Northern California. Woah.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan embarks on a hunting adventure to reach the ultimate level of knowing where food comes from. He seems determined to finish his journey through the food chain, and an experiment with the hunter-gatherer diet is his final stop. It is fascinating to me that Pollan thought reading anti-meat-eating-literature and becoming a temporary vegetarian were crucial elements in achieving his goal. He seems to conflicted about hunting and so reluctant to identify with other hunters. In fact, Pollan says he’s embarrassed to write the way hunters like Ortega y Gasset do about killing animals in the wild.

Why, then, does Pollan seem so proud when he finally kills a boar? Why does he take on the prideful, masculine, and aggressive writing voice typical of what he calls “hunter porn?” In fact, after killing, Pollan writes, “The one emotion I expected to feel but did not, inexplicably, was remorse, or even ambivalence… I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific—unambiguously happy” (353).

According to Dave Grossman, Pollan’s feelings all have to do with the psychology that surrounds the act of killing other living beings. Grossman argues that pride and ecstasy are common responses to adrenaline rushes after a kill. Many soldiers experience these feelings in combat. This elated feeling can develop into what Grossman calls addiction to combat. The more some soldiers fire and kill, the more they want to continue killing. This addiction isn’t always permanent and sometimes goes away.

Grossman’s thoughts on military combat parallel Angelo’s sentiments about hunting addiction and sport in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan describes a conversation in which Angelo talks about his friend who keeps on catching and releasing even after he’s reached the limit on fish per fishing trip. By contrast, when Angelo hunts enough pig to make a dinner, he says he’s finished. The catch in release game, according to Angelo, is like “playing with your food. You shouldn’t play with your food” (339).

I was struck again by this concept of killing addiction this weekend when I listened to a war correspondent tell her story about reporting from Iraq. This Washington Post reporter and Columbia College professor noted that in all of the pictures taken of her embedded in the United States Army and reporting from the front lines, she’s smiling. “I can’t figure it out—I seem so happy,” she said. The reporter suggested that her happiness could be the result of some kind of adrenaline addiction; she kept requesting to be sent back to Iraq.

I was so thrilled to find these connections in my reading and experiences this weekend. Sigmund Freud wrapped it all up for me. He theorized that humans need a balance between Eros, the drive for life, and Thanatos, the drive for death. I think that’s what Pollan is searching for in solving the Omnivore’s Dilemma. 

Final Restaurant Review: Lee's Garden

On a chilly fall night in Kalamazoo, Mich., the big, blue front doors of a small Korean restaurant on Westnedge Avenue open to reveal all the coziness of a homey living room. An open sign blinks in the window. “You okay?” the balding restaurant owner, Mr. Lee, asked a group of customers one night with a smile and a nod. He placed three Styrofoam cups of barley tea on a yellowed table. The reddish-brown, nutty tea replaces chilled water on tables at Lee’s Garden Bibimbop in Kalamazoo. The food is delivered with packets of cutlery that add to the restaurant’s quaint feel: a paper napkin, mismatched silver spoon and fork, and chopsticks. A quick glance around the restaurant reveals chopsticks feverishly dipping and diving into dishes from bibimbop to bulgogi.

While the rice and beef based dishes at Lee’s Garden are delicious, and entrees between seven and nine dollars are reasonably priced, the food might not be enough by itself to make this restaurant a Kalamazoo favorite. Instead, Mr. Lee’s warm charm adds just enough to the dining experience to make every meal special. With their silent, but caring service, he and his wife make patrons feel like they’re at a quiet dinner party—one where the hosts are just as fascinating as the food.

Mr. Lee and his wife work together in the kitchen and the dining room. It’s clear that Lee’s Garden isn’t just a place of work for Mr. and Mrs. Lee. Pamphlets for Hosanna Church, a Korean American Presbyterian Church, sit on the counter next to menus. Christian worship music plays on a speaker somewhere in the restaurant and makes it feel more and more like a small, urban church; three windows are outfitted with deep colored stained glass.

Outfitted in a blue apron with green trim, Mr. Lee carries orders of mandoo dumplings on red cafeteria trays with individual servings of soy sauce. These shiny fried dumplings with a bubbly golden skin are a must-order for any Lee’s patron. The crescent shaped appetizers are filled with pork, green onion, and garlic and are easy to pinch between chopsticks. “Three for each of you,” he said one night as he set the plates at a booth in a corner. Five girls ordered the appetizer: ten dumplings for $4.99. Instead, the ceramic plate held fifteen. The girls didn’t pay for the dumplings anyway. “The mandoo is free,” said Mr. Lee with a grin when the girls went to the counter after their meal.

The sweet service found at Lee’s Garden makes it a restaurant worth returning to. Mr. Lee personally serves each table. The pink, leathery booths and the gray metal chairs scattered around tables in the white dining room might seem lonely if not for Mr. Lee’s attentive, yet relaxed and customized service. He is present, but not overbearing. On one night, only three couples dined in the restaurant between 6:00 and 7:45. At other restaurants, one might wonder why more diners didn’t arrive, but the dining room at Lee’s still felt full.

Mr. Lee quietly helped the customers decide what to order and almost silently delivered their food. He hovered at one table for a moment to watch the first bites of a dish, but then quickly disappeared with a swish of his blue apron to join his wife in the kitchen. While not a chatty member of the dinner party, Mr. Lee brings a lot to the table.

He delivers each meal item as soon as his wife finishes cooking it in the kitchen to make sure each plate, bowl, and cup is hot and fresh in diners’ mouths. Customers are meant to eat as they’re served. The first bite of mandoo might surprise a first-time customer when a scalding green onion or bit of pork lands on the tongue with a spray of hot oil or grease.

In fact, almost everything at Lee’s is warm but the kimchi. A bowl of this spicy fermented cabbage comes with each entrée the same way fries and potato chips casually accompany burgers and sandwiches at other restaurants. Though this dish is sometimes considered one of the spiciest in the world, Mr. Lee delivers it to each table without warning of the potential burn first-time kimchi eaters could experience from their seemingly tame and strangely chilled bowls. Several pieces of yellowed cabbage are soaked in red sauce and packed into each side serving.

Some diners pinch a piece of cabbage between chopsticks and shake off the sauce in the hopes of reducing the intense flavor. One might call kimchi an acquired taste, delicious after the mouth is numb to the spice. Experienced diners add some rice to dilute the heat in this sour and salty side. The red kimchi sauce drips down the side of the bowls and mixes with soy sauce and white rice on the tables as meals at Lee’s continue.

The spicy, sour kimchi contrasts with the sweet, sesame, barbecue taste of the bulgogi entrée. After a few bites of kimchi, customers might expect this dish to be similarly spicy. Instead, bulgogi at Lee’s Garden is a pleasantly sweet surprise. It is a must-order for any diner. Narrow strips of beef are heaped into a bowl and mixed with chopped onions, peas, and carrots and left to marinate on a wooden board with a full bowl of white rice on the side. The sauce tastes like sesame paste and soy sauce and diners don’t let the sweetness go to waste; some sop the extra up with their rice.

The strips of beef in bulgogi, tender, moist, and soaked in broth, offer a pleasant contrast to one of the most disappointing dishes at Lee’s.  The fatty, chewy chunks of chopped beef in jobchebop are mixed with tough, half-baked carrots and rice noodles beside a mound of oily rice. On a table cluttered with small bowls of spicy kimchi, plates of bulgogi, and a large dish of yukgaegang soup, the plate of jobchebop might be left nearly full. The greasy and bland flavors of this dish don’t match the rich flavors of the other plates and bowls. Still, this steaming plate may offer a subtle, nearly bland introduction to Korean cuisine for diners whose taste buds aren’t quite ready for kimchi.

Lee’s Garden is not a restaurant for customers whose stomachs are already full. It’s almost obligatory to order appetizers ranging from $2.99 for five mandoo dumplings to $9.95 for a kimchijeon pancake platter and entrées with rice and kimchi between $7.95 and $12.99. Each portion is large enough for one person, though many customers order a few entrées to share. In fact, the full plates and bowls at Lee’s Garden are best that way. No matter what the order, Mr. Lee’s friendly allure leaves most customers happy, full, and ready to return to this small, blue restaurant. 

Reading Response: The Omnivore's Dilemma Part I

When I was in fifth grade, my class took a field trip to the wastewater treatment plant in Holland, Mich. My twenty classmates and I followed the manager on a tour and he told us about the process by which water comes from our toilets, sinks, and bathtubs and is purified before returning to Lake Macatawa. He showed us a big computer used to monitor the water and a huge pile of Happy Meal toys that had been flushed down various toilets and sent to the plant. The toy collection was cool, but the most memorable part of the field trip came when our tour guide lifted a big garage door and showed us a pile of corn taller than our fifth grade teacher. According to the manager, corn doesn’t digest very well and whole kernels come through water pipes and into wastewater treatment plants. I didn’t understand why they kept such a large pile of corn waste in a pile in a shed and I was absolutely disgusted by it. No part of the previous discussion of human waste made me cringe as much as that pile of mushy, yellow corn did.

I felt the same gag reflux when I read the first part of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Throughout this third of the book, Pollan discusses the impact corn has on the American industrial food culture. He makes a pretty convincing argument that corn has conquered the food system in a complex and relatively permanent way. Apparently, we eat corn with almost every fruit, vegetable, meat, and processed food item. It’s even in the vegetable wax that coats cucumbers at the supermarket. Corn is everywhere and Michael Pollan doesn’t seem very happy about it.

He’s convinced me to not be very happy about it either. I am terrified about the impact corn has on our government, our agricultural system, our bodies, and our ecological system. I think it’s really scary that Pollan talked with a farmer who said, “Growing corm is just riding tractors and spraying” (40). I like to think that the food I eat is varied and nutrient rich—that it nourishes my body and becomes part of me—but after reading part one of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’m starting to think that isn’t true. Is it really possible that most of the food I eat comes from the same corn that ends up in big piles of golden, mushy waste at water treatment plants across the United States? Gross.

Michael Pollan’s report on the life cycle of corn makes me want to break down the entire American food system. I feel the urge to chop and drop every ear of corn in Iowa and bulldoze the feedyards that house the steers we eat. I want to go back in time and shake the crazy out of Earl Butz and the heads of General Mills and Cargill. I feel so confused and betrayed by supermarkets and marketers. At the beginning of the book, Pollan writes that many Americans might feel this way and, “as a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety” (1).

Still, Pollan gives me hope that the rest of The Omnivore’s Dilemma might not be so terrifying. He writes, “in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing” (11). I’m crossing my fingers that this pleasure is yet to come. 

Lee's Garden Review

On a fall night in Kalamazoo, Mich., the big, blue front doors of a small Korean restaurant on Westnedge Avenue open to reveal all the warmth and coziness of a homey living room. “You okay?” the balding restaurant owner asked a group of customers one night with a smile and a nod. He placed three Styrofoam cups of barley tea on a yellowed table. “It’s Just toasted barley,” he said. “Barley tea.” The reddish-brown, nutty tea replaces chilled water on tables at Lee’s Garden Bibimbop in Kalamazoo. Most customers seem to enjoy the light flavor in place of water with ice. A silvery warmer, a large thermos full of barley tea sits next to the door. Customers feel free to refill their white cups throughout their meals. If customers would rather not leave their tables, Mr. Lee brings refills. By the end of a dinner at Lee’s, some customers have a stack of four or five Styrofoam cups next to their empty plates, depending on the level of spice and heat in their dishes.

The food is delivered with packets of cutlery: paper napkins, mismatched silver spoon and fork, chopsticks. The green striped chopstick packages are scattered around the booths at Lee’s. Around the restaurant, chopsticks hover over metallic bowls of bibimbop, beef or tofu and vegetables served over rice, they dip into large ceramic bowls of yukgaejang, a spicy beef soup with rice noodles and sprouts, and they dive into a shallow black bulgogi dish, sweet beef piled high with onions.

Shiny fried dumplings with a bubbly golden skin arrived first. The crescent shaped appetizers filled with pork, green onion, and garlic. In a blue apron with green trim, Mr. Lee carried the dumplings on a red cafeteria tray with plastic dishes of soy sauce in individual servings. “Three for each of you,” Lee said as he set the plates at a booth in a corner lit by the yellow light of a gold chandelier. Five girls ordered the appetizer: ten dumplings for $4.99. Instead, the ceramic plate held fifteen. The girls didn’t pay for the dumplings anyway. “The mandoo is free,” said Mr. Lee with a grin when the girls went to the counter to pay.

This is Lee’s Garden; a small, blue restaurant perched on a little hill on Westnedge Ave. An open sign blinks in the window. Mr. Lee and his wife work together in the kitchen and the dining room. Pamphlets for Hosanna Church, a Korean American Presbyterian Church, sit on the counter next to menus. Halfway through a meal at Lee’s contemporary Christian worship music might begin to play on a speaker somewhere in the restaurant. Three windows are outfitted with deep colored stained glass.

It’s the warm charm at Lee’s Garden that makes it a restaurant worth returning to. Mr. Lee personally serves each table. The pink, leathery booths and the gray metal chairs scattered around tables in the white dining room might seem lonely if not for Mr. Lee’s attentive, yet relaxed and customized service. He is present, but not overbearing. On one night, only three couples dined in the restaurant between 6:00 and 7:45. At other restaurants, one might wonder why more diners didn’t arrive, but the dining room at Lee’s still felt full. Mr. Lee quietly helped each customer decide what to order and almost silently delivered their food on red cafeteria trays. He hovered at one table for a moment to watch the first bites of a dish, but then quickly disappeared with a swish of his blue apron to join his wife in the kitchen. While not a chatty member of the dinner party, Mr. Lee brings a lot to the table.

He delivers each meal item as soon as his wife finishes cooking in the kitchen to make sure each plate, bowl, and cup is hot and fresh in diners’ mouths. If a customer at Lee’s Garden tried to wait politely for each member of a party to be served, his food would be cold by the time it was finally pinched between chopsticks. That’s not the way it works at Lee’s. Customers are meant to eat as they’re served to ensure proper warmth. The first bite of mandoo might surprise a first-time customer when a scalding green onion or bit of pork lands on the tongue with a spray of hot oil or grease.

In fact, almost everything at Lee’s is warm but the kimchi. A bowl of this spicy fermented cabbage comes with each entrée the same way fries and potato chips casually accompany burgers and sandwiches at other restaurants. Customers pull pieces of kimchi from small Styrofoam bowls and add some rice to dilute the spice in this red, sour, salty side. The red kimchi sauce drips down the side of the bowls and mixes with the mandoo soy sauce on the table.

The spicy sour kimchi contrasts with the sweet, sesame, barbecue taste of the bulgogi entrée. Customers might expect this dish to be hot and spicy. They might prepare several cups of barley tea and white rice in anticipation of sweltering spicy heat. Instead, bulgogi at Lee’s Kitchen tasted sweet. The temperature is what classifies this dish under the “HOT! HOT! HOT!” heading on the Lee’s Garden menu. Strips of beef are heaped into a bowl and mixed with chopped onions, peas, and carrots and left to marinate on a wooden board with white rice on the side. A wooden board keeps the warm, black bowl from burning the dining table.

The strips of beef in bulgogi are tender and moist, soaked in broth. This beef offers contrast to the fatty, chewy chunks of chopped beef in the jobchebop, mixed with tough, half-baked carrots and rice noodles mixed with the beef beside a mound of oily rice. On a table cluttered with small bowls of cold kimchi, plates of bulgogi, and spicy yukgaegang soup, the plate of jobchebop was left nearly full. This dish just doesn’t offer the same rich flavors as the other plates and bowls. Still, while not exciting and flavorful, this steaming plate offers a subtle, nearly bland introduction to Korean cuisine.

Lee’s Garden is not a restaurant for customers whose stomachs are already full. The beefy, fried rice dishes with sides of kimchi are meant to be shared. If not distributed and eaten immediately, plates at Lee’s might go cold. 

Before the Lee's Garden Meal

Here’s what I know about Korean things: 

1. I had a friend from Korea in elementary school named Gina Kim. Once in middle school we had a study party at her house and I remember eating pork dumplings her mom made for us. 
2. My friend Haley has been to Korea on vacation and a few of the international students who live in Trowbridge are from Korea. They talk about the food sometimes.
3. I know there’s a difference between North and South Korea and I recognize Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un.

These three friendly facts seem to be the extent of Korean food, culture, and politics knowledge. I’m not proud of this. I generally consider myself a cultured person. Still, when I try to recall Korean facts, my mind goes blank but for Mrs. Kim’s dumplings and I am embarrassed by my lack of Korean awareness.

The truth is, besides Mrs. Kim’s pork dumplings, I haven’t ever eaten Korean food before. I don’t think there are any Korean restaurants in Holland, Mich., my small, very Dutch hometown. If there are Korean restaurants in Holland, I haven’t been to them. I’ve eaten Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and a little bit of Vietnamese foods, but I’m afraid this list marks the end of my Asian food repertory.

I’m perhaps even more embarrassed to write that as I visualize the meal I might have at Lee’s Garden for dinner tonight, all I can see are the golds and reds and dragons, menus with pictures of white rice and the tofu dishes of Asian restaurants past. Lee’s Garden may or may not be decorated this way. I don’t know how the dishes will taste or what the restaurant will look like on the inside, but I’m troubled by the schema by which I’m forming assumptions about this restaurant. I feel like an example in Jennie Germann Molz’s essay, “Tasting an Imagined Thailand.” 

On the Lee’s Garden Bibimbop website, text at the bottom of the page reads, “Come in & sign up for FREE Korean language classes. The owners are the teachers.” I wonder if this advertisement is a plea for the authenticity of this Korean restaurant. Are non-Korean customers meant to think that because the owners of Lee’s Garden speak Korean and teach language classes, they must be real Koreans? Should these customers feel like they’re eating an “authentic” Korean meal because the restaurant owners speak Korean well enough to teach it?

I’m worried that when I go to Lee’s Garden tomorrow, I will only be able to look at my experience through an ethnographer’s lens. Will the bits of theory I took from “Tasting an Imagined Thailand” taint my eating experience? Will tomorrow be more about cultural differences and my own insecurities than about the food?

I don’t think my first complete Korean meal needs to be blanketed with anthropological analysis and self-reflection. I know it’s important to recognize the problematic strings attached to ethnic “authenticity.” In fact, I think this new level of awareness will help me focus on the food I’m eating. It won’t hinder my consumption by making me insecure about my reactions to the food. 

I’ve acknowledged my assumptions about tomorrow night’s meal and I know recognize that it’s a little bit silly to expect to be surrounded by dragons and tofu. Instead, I’ve decided to focus on how yummy the beef bibimbop and mandoo dumplings look in the pictures on the Lee’s Garden website. 

Like the recreational tourists described in Moltz’s essay, I’ve decided to prioritize my own enjoyment in the Lee’s Garden experience. According to Cohen, quoted in Moltz, “Recreational tourists ‘seek in the Other mainly enjoyable restoration and recuperation, and hence tend to approach the cultural products encountered on their trip with a playful attitude of make believe, and therefore will entertain much broader criteria of authenticity’” (Moltz 69).

I don’t know if this approach to my first Korean food experience will work and I’m not sure if I can choose the type of culinary tourist I want to be tonight, but I hope that by embracing the experience with a playful attitude and hopes of relaxation, tonight’s dinner at Lee’s Garden will end with an appreciation for a food I’ve never experienced and know nothing about.