Sweetpea Bicycles

I’ve been thinking about a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan; I read an excerpt from it in The Sun many months ago. It tackles the unique human question “What should I eat?” On one level, this looks like standing at the refrigerator door with the door open, peering in for an answer. But there is a broader global pantry. Compared to the koala, which only eats eucalyptus, we can digest pretty much anything we put in our mouths.

Apparently the koala used to eat a more varied diet and had a bigger brain. Then through the course of evolution it became specifically adapted to a euco-only diet. And its brain got smaller. I suppose if you have the skills to digest eucalyptus trees, who needs calculus?

The Omnivore’s Dilemma looks at how we choose what we consider edible and what we don’t – from kosher food laws to raw food diets. Pollan comes down kind of hard on fad diets – is it because we become more koala-like in the process?

Well, today I confronted my own tendencies to limit my dietary options. At lunch for example, I reached for a yogurt that I knew was local and the same locally produced granola I had munched on yesterday. I fought the urge to simple replicate yesterday’s lunch, so I had the soy yogurt.

Still again for dinner, I walked over to the Food Front Grocery Cooperative, marched up to the tofu case and readily identified my familiar Portland tofu brand. Upon closer inspection I found another brand of Portland tofu that I hadn’t seen anywhere else, but I opted for the known over the unknown.

So, while I did very well in the “buying local” arena of this experiment today, I did not in fact try something I have never tried before. Whether I define my consumption by labels of local, vegetarian, organic, or what have ya, the strongest impulse may be my inner-koala.