Chapter 16 response

Chapter 16 in Omnivores Dilemma was very interesting. When Pollan talks about how Rozin discovered how rats use their digestive tract as kind of a laboratory this actually kept me awake. He also talks about how rats are smart enough to remember the order of what they nibbled to determine if it is okay to eat more of it. The fact that Pollan compares this or even links it to our own omnivorous eating habits is kind of cool too. One example he uses is of someone deciding which kind of cereal to buy and trying to remember if they’ve tasted it before and if they liked it. I liked when Pollan talked about our sense of taste. Explaining how the first step to determining if you like something is tasting it, you would usually come out with a positive or negative conclusion. I like that he explains how sweet tastes attract us more than bitter tastes, which make us cautious. But these bitter tastes can also give us powerful medicines, like he says about the sap of the opium poppy and the bark of a willow. Pollan also brings into account the invention of cooking. How it made it easier to eat and digest the food we ate and I think it helped some disease from spreading because the heat kills bacteria. All in all, this chapter was pretty nice, mostly because I love food and cooking and it wasn’t only about corn.