Chapter 16 and 17

In chapter 16, Michael Pollen begins to discuss the idea of "good to eat, good to think" through the three main factors of taste, cooking, and appetite. Pollen first brings up the subject of specialized eaters and how animals make their food choices. The monarch butterfly for example, notices milkweed as food and everything else in the environment is not food. I found this to be very interesting because it allows many animals to only focus on one food group. If this particular food group goes away than their animal group will go extinct, unlike the human and the rat who can survive off basically anything that comes their way. Pollen that continues to talk about taste, and how sweetness, bitterness, and disgust are major factors that show what we can and cannot eat. From there, the idea of cooking is brought upon by Pollen, in which he states that, "cooking, one of the omnivores most cleverest tools, opened up whole new vistas of edibility" (Pollen, 293). I would have to agree with this because before the time of cooking, the foods that we ate had no way of bringing out all the nutrients that certain provisions had to offer. Appetite is the last idea that Pollen had to offer, and we notice this by the growing amount of eating disorders in today's society. Harvey Levenstein sums this up perfectly by saying, "that taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten ; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys" (Pollen, 300).

Chapter 17 goes on to talk about the ethics of eating animals. Many people believe that the idea of eating a once lived animal is completely immoral. That's why many people in today's world have decided to make the switch from a carnivore lifestyle to the vegetarian or vegan diet. For me personally i do not see the problem in eating a perfectly cooked steak but for other people they see the steak as cow that once a leaving being and it brings them away from that diet. I agree with Pollen on the fact "that humans have been eating animals for tens of thousands of years without to much ethical heartburn," so why stop now (Pollen, 305)?