Chapters 15,18,19 and 20 -- 3/2/10's Blog

In this week’s reading of chapters 15, 18, 19 and 20, Michael Pollan takes us through his journey on creating the "perfect meal", where he forages, hunts, and gathers all the necessary ingredients for his meal. Throughout Chapter 15, Pollan discusses some of the finer points of the "Omnivore's Dilemma", which he defines a few different ways. One part of the dilemma is knowing what we can and cannot eat before someone else has already tried it. He questions us, as readers, what if we did not know whether or not these foods would be edible: no one is given a guide of what to eat at birth of what exactly to eat and what not to eat.
While hunting the entree of his meal, Pollan believes that he had stumbled upon a more natural mode of human life, one that only those who partake in the hunting lifestyle will ever feel. He felt one with the environment. We aren’t getting to ever experience this mode of human life that is engraved in our DNA. Who decided it was a good idea to steer clear of this lifestyle in the first place? The other portions of his meal, such as the fungi and fruit, were equally challenging to obtain, as well as enlightening. Will it ever be possible for all of humanity to go backward in evolution to this prehistoric mode of living? Most likely not as the population now heavily outweighs the population then, but we, as a species, would benefit integrating parts of this lifestyle though.

Reading for Tues. 2/23

In Chapters 16 and 17, Pollan writes about what the true definition of Omnivore is, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. People normally associate the need to eat both meat and vegetables just human life, without recognizing how their meat and/or vegetables got to their plate. As humans, we need both the luscious nutrients from greens, as well as the fatty acids and proteins contained in meat. Is it ethically or morally wrong to eat meat? I would like to believe no. We have been eating meat since the dawn of human existence, and no one has fussed about it since to the extent we are now.
Most people when they eat a hamburger, they have no idea at all where that meat came from, be it a healthy cow on a pasture or a cow cramped on a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (just the name is terrifying, let alone what they do there). Should we be referring to our farming as an “operation” of any sort? Sounds significantly underhanded to me that we are hiding these terms, although if we were to hear about them, they would be referred to by a more euphemistic term such as “natural feed lot”…

The Omnivore's Dilemma Ch8,10,11

In this weekend's reading, Pollan focuses on one farmer and his farm: Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms, the same Joel Salatin from last reading. This week, Pollan continues to talk about how Joel's farm is a wondrous adventure compared to the industrial farms who wreak havoc on the environments and the animals themselves. What Joel does is use a more natural rotation which does not rob the soil of its nitrogen and other nutrients and allows for multiple crops to be sown, not just corn. Along with this rotation, his animals are grass-fed and have area to roam, unlike the majority of industrial farms.
Now if Joel’s farming techniques are so great and natural, the epitome of organic, why do we have industrial farms? The answer is rather simple: it's consistent, inexpensive, and efficient. Industrial farms were created for the same exact reason that most other human inventions base their usefulness on. During, roughly, the 18th century is where the agricultural revolution began, when hundreds of new inventions were created to make farming much easier and more manageable, which often allowed for more organized farms. Farms shrank and as a result, so did the health-awareness of the farmers and consumers. Could we possibly get along without industrial farms? Could we fill the world with organic farms? Without reorganizing urban vs. rural land distribution, I doubt so.

(Sorry if it is a bit late.. blogger decided to not post it last night and only noticed when I got up this morning >.<)

2/8/10 - Slaughter and the Market

In this week's reading, Pollan chronicles his experiences at the Polyface farm. I believe that I connect well with this reading for a few reasons: the first being that my great grandfather is both a farmer and logger who believes in organic and chemical-free farming. He slaughters all his animals humanely and by himself, selling the products to our family and his friends in Northport. His teachings have given most of Northport a good reason to abstain from using chemicals and doing everything the old-fashioned way. Joel of Polyface farm and his family take this one step further, turning their beliefs into a political act, pushing their beliefs past just their small communities.

In the second chapter, Joel and his brother Art speak about how they sell their meats: the biggest shock to me was that most of their meat/crops were sold through CSAs, or rather community supported agricultures, where groups of people from the city would place orders for farmers’ goods and they would either be shipped over short distances or picked up by the customer. I remember my great grandfather did this but, it was only for a few people and not nearly the large portion of income that it is for Joel and his family. If I were a farmer, I’d model my farm after Joel’s ideals.

2/1/10 - Chapter 9

Chapter nine of The Omnivore’s Dilemma was rather interesting to me personally for a few reasons. For the past year and a half, my mother has been attempting to feed us only organic food as much as she possibly can. The only reason why she has been doing this, however, is not because she believes that the process of industrial food is wrong or inhumane as many uninformed individuals love to accept as true. In this chapter, Michael Pollan chooses to follow organic food back to its roots to compare it to how pesticides and other chemicals are not used in the process of organic farming to begin with, but as any other commerce, industrialized or not, will eventually turn into the process they were trying to avoid in order to conform to the market.
In his experiences, Pollan followed back products such as organic milk and organic chicken. The process for creating organic milk was rather vague in both legality of the term “organic” being applied to their process and just how organic they could be considered compared to a real organic farm. For example, the USDA allows producers to apply the term “organic” to their products if the animals bearing the original products have access to a natural environment they would normally be in with the absence of chemicals. In one case, the cows were only allowed to go out and graze the last few weeks before they were slaughtered: this was also the same with chicken, who were not allowed to leave their cages until they were upwards of eight weeks old. Should the process of becoming an “organic” product be more constrictive and more straight-forward?