9/15/16
Omnivore’s Dilemma Vocabulary #2: Context Clues
1. Is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders? In the absence of any lasting consensus about what and how and where and when to eat, the omnivore's dilemma has returned to America with an almost atavistic force.
Extreme; powerful
2. The cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back on a bewil-
dering food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us.
Variety
3. I don't need to experiment with the mushroom now called, rather helpfully, the "death cap," and it is common knowledge that that first intrepid lobster eater was on to something very good.
Original; first
4. Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore's dilemma at every meal.
Someone who eats both meat and plants
5. Before the commodity system farmers prided themselves on a panoply of qualities in their crop: big ears, plump kernels, straight rows, various colors; even the height of their corn plants became a point of pride. Now none
of these distinctions mattered; "bushels per acre" became the only
boast you heard.
Differences or variations
6. Being a generalist is of course a great boon as well as a challenge; it
is what allows humans to successfully inhabit virtually every terrestrial
environment on the planet.
Land or earthly
7. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the
work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the
cooked — nature into culture.
One who studies dinosaurs and rocks
8. Taste in humans gets complicated, but it starts with two
powerful instinctual biases, one positive, the other negative. The first
bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly
rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature.
Persuades
9. The cow depends on the ingenious adaptation of the rumen to turn an exclusive diet of grasses into a balanced meal; we depend instead on the prodigious powers of
recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to cook cassava
or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information.
Exception; extraordinary; superior
10. Anthropologists marvel at just how much cultural energy goes into
managing the food problem. But as students of human nature have long
suspected, the food problem is closely tied to . . . well, to several other
big existential problems.
Big ideas about the world
11. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always
may be, a speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that
which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.
Unable to be changed; no control over
12. The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory
farm there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheap-
est, most convenient source of calories on the market.
Unique; origional
13. As noted at the beginning of this book, the omnivore 's dilemma, or
paradox, was first described in the 1976 paper, "The Selection of Foods
by Rats, Humans, and Other Animals," by University of Pennsylvania
psychologist Paul Rozin.
Dilemma; problem
14. It remains to be seen whether the current Atkins school theory of ketosis — the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates — will someday seem as quaintly quackish as Kellogg 's theory of colonic autointoxication.
Similarly
15. A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for
the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It
would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or
fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another.
New ideas
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