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?