Grace before meals a quaint and foreign tradition? One odd note at the end of an otherwise great book on whole foods

I terrifically enjoyed the book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan – and agreed with many of the author's arguments, including: people (myself included) should generally eat better quality food and less of it, people should eat real food, not processed food product, and that people should eat more leaves. Right on. However near the end of the book there were a couple of moments that jarred enough that I had to wonder at the distance Pollan's life, experiences and acquaintances and my own must be at from each other. The author, while discussing the slow food movement, points out that at one time people ate not only more slowly, but deliberately.  And he recalls one traditional method for creating this sense of deliberation: "Many food cultures, particularly those at less of a remove from the land than ours, have rituals to encourage this sort of eating – such as offering a blessing over the food or saying grace before the meal."  Whoa!  While the Pollan wasn't disparaging the ritual of the blessing, rather praising it, he was certainly implying in the context of the passage that this is something associated with the same foreign and rustic cultures he's hoping we'll emulate in our food practices.  He also dissociates it from God and making its highest purpose psychological, with no nod toward other reasons these cultures may have had for the practice – a nutritionist perspective on grace if there ever was one. (Pollan criticizes nutritionist scientific thinking for valuing food solely on the basis of its constituent nutrient parts and not as whole items – which has consistently proven to miss what's really beneficial to people … the quixotic quest to make a baby formula as healthful as human mother's milk is a great example of nutritionist thinking failing again and again to pin down what part of a food is doing the baby the good.)  Is it possible that for some folks in this country, grace before a meal is not only something they don't do, but something they can't imagine any modern Westerners doing so?  I grew up with this practice, and my family says it before each dinner now.  Are we the last ones?  Our family is deeply engaged in the culture – in it, but not of it perhaps, yet we don't feel like anachronisms … Even so the sense of disconnect continued with the book's general assumptions that most Americans don't cook their own food, and that families rarely eat together anymore.  Maybe it's that Pollan's a big city guy and that we live in a small city in a still fairly rural state – but I still find this surprising.  Most of the people I know, even if they don't cook only because it would be financially ruinous to eat out or get takeout for every meal, cook for fun.  Just as, perhaps, for Pollan, the opposite may be true.  Anyhow, this bit at the end struck me as interesting, especially because I was so moved by the rest of the book.  Pollan is a wonderful writer and does a great job digging into the damage processing and nutritionism in general does to the actual nourishment food provides us, and gives some great tips for finding and eating "real" food amidst the welter of processed stuff that lines the supermarket shelves and fills up the brown paper bags at fast food joints.  His arguments for eating organic and locally grown food are good ones, and would that we could do that all the time…ever since I wrote a story about local farms for the Magazine a few years back I've been longing to make all of our family's food locally grown – but it's just so expensive, both in money and time.  Which is, I suppose, where the argument to eat better food, but to eat less food comes in.  Maybe it would all balance out.  But then again – if we cut the occassional giant steakhouse steak, goopy cheese pizza, Snickers bar and Cinnamon Toast Crunch out of the family diet entirely, I think there might be a rebellion…and it may not start with the kids.

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