Ominvores Delima - Rethinking Where Our Food Comes From

The industrialized food system is unsustainable. Read the book.



The Omnivore's dilemma is this: When you can eat just about anything
nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir
anxiety. The Koala doesn't worry about food- he just chews eucalyptus
leaves. Rats and humans have bigger issues. Pollan says that the way we
eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. He
is no vegan, but is a cook and appalled by modern industrial food
production, and how it separates us from the sources of our food. Pollan
looks at the three principal food chains : Industrial, Organic and
Hunter/Gatherer and has a meal from each.If you eat industrially, you
are made of corn. It holds together your McNuggets, it sweetens your
soda pop, it fattens your meat, it is everywhere. You are also partially
fossil fuel- the corn needs a lot of nitrogen and gets it from
fertilizer instead of the soil, which used to get it from rotating
crops. The corn is fed to cows who are designed to eat grass and get
sick from it, so they are pumped with antibiotics. It is fed to us in
many forms, because it is cheap- a dollar buys you 875 calories in soda
pop but only 170 in fruit juice. The meal was a McDonalds, and was
analyzed as almost entirely corn. He does not seem to have enjoyed it
very much. For this reader, this section was by far the most shocking-
industrial agriculture exposed as nothing but a giant yellow matrix.
Section
Two covers the Organic industry, and is far more bucolic. Here, all is
grass. Much of the chapter is spent on Joe Salatin's very doctrinaire
and remarkable farm. However you will not find his foods in your Whole
Foods- he only sells locally. The larger organic industry covers many
different interpretations of organic, some of which are pretty
borderline but all are better than anything from the corn economy.
However the organic food industry is huge; transportation is a major
cost. Pollan thinks that industrial organic is a contradiction in terms
and is unsustainable, "floating on a stinking sea of petroleum". We may
all be eating the 100 mile diet soon, whether we want to or not. The meal sounded good, but a little heavy on the diesel fuel.

After reading this book it is clear that we all have to change our
eating habits-. Buying organic asparagus flown in from Argentina is no
more morally defensible than eating a locally and sustainably raised
cow. Finding my nearest farmers market has never seemed more important.