The title of this post is a line from a 1996 article on Slate, The Omnivore: Learning to eat everything, by Jeffrey Steingarten. Reading it was one of the sparks that inspired this effort of mine and, by extension, this site, although I didn’t happen across the article until a year ago or so.
‘By shutting ourselves off from the bounties of nature, we become failed omnivores. We let the omnivore team down. And that is only the beginning….People should be ashamed of the irrational food phobias that keep them from sharing food with each other. Instead, they have become proud and arrogant and aggressively misinformed. But not me. When I donned the heavy mantle of food critic, I sketched out a six-step program to rid myself of all puissant and crippling likes and dislikes.’
Go have a read of the whole article, which describes the process Steingarten goes through to not just rid himself of food phobias, but to embrace his role of food critic — and of omnivore.
And what is one of those?
Well, most school children — especially those in love with dinosaurs — could probably tell you that a carnivore eats strictly meat, while a herbivore eats strictly plant matter. (Interestingly, many carnivores meet some of their dietary needs via the stomach contents of their herbivore prey.) In between those two lies a quirky group of animals that includes humans and other primates, as well as pigs, bears, domesticated dogs and cats, and various birds and rodents.
So here we are, in need of plant life to eat. Later on, I might like to explore what it is we get from various plants exactly, beyond the vague ‘vitamins and minerals.’
My specifying of humans as omnivores should not be construed as condeming either vegetarians or those folks who agree with the joke, ‘I love vegetarians. Some of my favorite food are vegetarians.’ We were, however, physically set up to meet our nutritional needs by consuming both vegetation and animal flesh. That doesn’t mean we have to eat meat, now that we can consciously choose not to, but it does mean we have to compensate for that legacy when making our food choices.
Me, I love a good steak. It’s the rest of the omni- prefix that I’m still working on.