The Implications of Ones Economic Disposition in the Omnivores Dilemma - Essay Example

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan poses a very important question that will circle this discussion, which is, “What should we have for dinner?” According to his book, nature offers varieties of food choices, and through the years, humans were successfully able to take note of which of these food choices are essential and detrimental to health. Pollan’s work focuses more on the dangers of eating food from what he called “the modern supermarket”, which in his point of view leads humans to go back to discerning if the food is good or bad for their health.

But the omnivore’s dilemma is far more than just the confusion about what food to eat. It opens up a more important question about the factors that affect a person in choosing that food and the economic, as well as the social disposition, of a person, plays an important role in one’s food preferences. According to Julie Guthman, some of these considerations are the “policies not even directly related to food and agriculture, such as taxation, financial regulation, and economic development policies that have created huge disparities between rich and poor” (Merberg, 2012).

Looking across cultures, indeed, some people are well enough not well-enough to be able to think of what they will have to eat three times a day. Some people are considered lucky if they have something to eat just to surpass the challenges of the entire day or two. Take for example the people in the African region who are suffering from severe malnutrition due to starvation caused by financial challenges and insufficient resources. More than choosing and contemplating what food to eat, they are thinking about where to get the food to eat.

As observed, people in the African region are relatively thin compared to those living in a more civilized nation like America, where the most percentage of people suffer from obesity. Take into consideration the statistics that Pollan presented. “One in every three American children eats fast food every day. One in every five American meals today is eaten in the car” (Pollan, 2006). This only means aside from the fact that as compared to Africa, America has more rich natural resources to produce food, the country also has more food sources made available by the government through different policies than those in the African region.

Guthman said that “to the extent that socioeconomic status and body size are associated, these policies must somehow be implicated in fatness and thinness” (Merberg, 2012). Whereas Pollan thinks that dietary habits and humans’ current problematic food preferences are alarming problems of the modern world, it is believed that one more problem to consider is the economic structure that lies beyond every human’s disposition. The way one eats is highly dependent and relative to one’s lifestyle, which is also relative to one’s economic disposition.

For example, Guthman stated that “the decline in family wages…has pushed many women into the workforce, and many household providers hold multiple jobs to make ends meet” (Merberg, 2012). This incident, according to Guthman, increased the demand for more convenient food choices causing a considerable decline in the traditional way of family meals. These fast food chains conveniently produced heat and serve meals that cater to those who are busy working and who earn just enough to pay for those cheaply-valued foods.