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| The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals |
| By: | Michael Pollan |
| Media: | Book |
| ISBN: | 0143038583 |
| Average Rating: |  |
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Fantastic book on our food supply
Focusing mostly on corn this book just drives home the point that corn subsidies have ruined the American farmer and made us fat. Its about taking a system that works well after millions of years of evolution and industrializing and it explains all the problems this creates. A great book along with Fat Land, Fast Food Nation and Don't Eat this Book.
Corn, Grass, & the Government
Corn. Corn. Corn. Corn everywhere. After muddling through the first few chapters, the reader may arrive at the feeling that this book will focus entirely on corn. Mercifully, the author moves on to other mundane topics, like grass, cattle, and mushrooms.
In between these main topics, the author, through liberal use of unique phrasing and uncommon words, uses his personal experiences to elucidate how the modern meal arrives at your dinner table, courtesy of governmental regulations and the agricultural-industrial complex. One phrase, "cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing," bespeaks the findings of his quest.
Pollan long-windely traces super market-bought, food products from the corn fields in Iowa, to the slaughtering feed lots of Kansas, to the grain elevators, and then to countless food products where corn is used. These applications run the gamut, such as cattle feed, various meats, food fillers, emulsifiers, nutraceuticals, and eventually into various forms of sweetened products. His view is that "corn sweetner is to the republic of fat what corn whiskey was to the alcoholic republic." His bottom line assessment of today's mass market, food industry is that it exposes the consumer to unhealthy foods, as well as increases the probability of someone succumbing to contaminated food.
The author also takes the "organic" food industry to task in that its use of mass production and transportation techniques barely elevates that industry in food quality above the agricultural-industrial complex." He abundantly illustrates the relative glibness of how the adjective, "organic," is used by organic food growers and sellers to prey on the naiveté of the organic food afficiendos.
For the best quality and healthiest foods, the book promotes the concept of buying only grass fed meat products. In short, one should buy fresh---buy in season---and buy locally, like from farmers' markets, farm co-ops, the farm itself, or your own backyard.
The author makes some great points in this treatise, and with some exceptions, takes you where the action is in the food industry. However, to obtain those insights, the reader has to muddle through an inordinate amount of Pollan masticating and digesting his thoughts, as well as his detailed digressions, like into hunting pigs and mushrooms.
Breath-taking perspective
Fifty years ago our family farm in Alcester, SD, had row crops, an orchard, cows, chickens, horses, pastures, woods and a cycle of rotation that preserved the land without chemicals. Today it has only corn and soy. There are no animals, no orchard, no pasture. The land is farmed from fence row to fence row with the fields no longer bordered in trees. It has gone from a pastoral to an industrial farm with "inputs" of fertilizer and pesticides and "outputs" that are inputs for other industrial farming processes such as cattle feeding. We rent the farm house to a man who works in a nearby slaughter house. The barn stores cars he rebuilds. This book explains how these not uncommon changes came about and how the fundamental changes in the food chain leave us vulnerable to disease, crop failure and taxpayer subsidized food.
You'll Question Why You're Eating What You're Eating
What shall we eat? Should we eat chicken once we know how inhumanely chickens are treated on industrial farms? Once you see how animals are killed, slaughtered and eviscerated, do you really want to eat them? If you're hunting for mushrooms, how do you know which ones will agree with you and which ones are poisonous? Should we eat only humanely treated animals off the farm? Should we eat processed foods loaded with chemicals made with corn syrup, corn starch, or glucose and fructoses derived from the inside of the corn cob and now mixed with chemicals?
This is the omnivore's dilemma. Michael Pollan spends time on an industrial corn farm in Iowa, watching corn get harvested and sent to a feed mill, which is then purchased by cattle farmers, who then get fat on the corn (even though they are gastronomically designed to eat pasture, not corn). The cows are purchased, then taken to an industrial plant where they are slaughtered, and after a while, the cow becomes ingredients in our Big Macs and in our processed foods and in our supermarkets.
Pollan then spends a week on Joel Salatin's organic farm where he is duly impressed with the farm's efficiency and better treatment of the animals, though he grimaces at the prospect of butchering chickens.
Pollan then goes vegetarian for a while as he considers the arguments of the animal rights groups. Then he goes boar hunting and shoots his own boar and prepares a completely organic meal at the end of the book consisting of food where he does all the hunting and gathering.
It's a good book and definitely makes you think about where your food comes from, how it is prepared, and whether or not you really want to eat it.
The most amazing thing to me was learning how many of our foods are made from corn. Almost everything either has that nasty no good for you corn syrup or corn starch, or is made up of processed sugars from the cob of the corn.
Makes you want to eat veggies and fruits and nothing else. Read at your own risk.
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