“ Several years ago, in a book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, sociologist David Bell called attention to the tendency of capitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, to erode the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization. The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest casualty of capitalism. These rules and rituals stood in the way of the food industry’s need to sell a well-fed population more food, through ingenious new ways of processing, packaging, and marketing it.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
