And yet what is this place if not a landscape (man-made, it’s true) teeming with plants and animals?
In keeping with my tradition of discussing books years after they’ve been published, I bring you “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.There’s a few things I want to get out of the way before I tell you how much Pollan annoyed me with his attitude toward animals and how it reached a point where I couldn’t believe the things this jackass was saying and doing. [8], The book has also been published in a young reader's edition,[9] and it is being used in cross curricular lessons by teachers interested in promoting its message. Tautly written and eloquently argued, In Defense of Food shows us how simple—and how strangely complicated—those three little rules can be. (Of course, even that energy originally came from the sun, but unlike sunlight it is finite and irreplaceable.) “When you look at the isotope ratios,” Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who’s done this sort of research, told me, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. It begins with a farmer supporting a family on a dozen different species of plants and animals. He says that the creatures on the small farm he stayed at for a week are clearly happy, while admitting that this is “but a speck on the monolith of modern agriculture.” Yet he goes on to use this small farm as evidence that “animal rightists betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature.” Who’s arguing from the marginal case now? ( Log Out / Despite his rambling rationalizations for eating animal products, I thought the book was worth reading for things like his description of the organic bagged salad industry, to name but one. To my surprise, I discovered that the scientists had less to teach us about eating healthfully than I expected—that the science of nutrition is still a very primitive science—and that there is a much more reliable source of wisdom on the subject. I say the plant world’s success story because it is no longer clear that corn’s triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world, and because we should give credit where credit is due. The corporation, assured for the first time of a return on its investment in breeding, showered corn with attention—R&D, promotion, advertising—and the plant responded, multiplying its fruitfulness year after year. Welcome! More than most domesticated plants (a few of whose offspring will usually find a way to grow unassisted), corn completely threw its lot in with humanity when it evolved its peculiar husked ear. I was flabbergasted by the response. So I began researching the whole question of food and health to see if I could come up with a few simple rules of eating. It is by being so obliging that corn has won itself as much human attention and habitat as it has. We don’t get too many opportunities like that. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. [4], Studies have shown that the locavorism Pollan advocates is not necessarily beneficial to the environment. ( Log Out / [6], The New York Times named The Omnivore's Dilemma one of the ten best books of 2006,[7] Additionally, Pollan received a James Beard Award for the work. Reading this article reminded me that I am not the only one totally frustrated by this line of thinking, and so much of the other material in Pollan’s book. As I traveled across the country talking about that book, I found that readers were, first, astounded to learn what they were eating, and second, eager to know how they might change the way they eat. The current thinking among botanists is that several thousand years ago teosinte underwent an abrupt series of mutations that turned it into corn; geneticists calculate that changes on as few as four chromosomes could account for the main traits that distinguish teosinte from maize. To him, being able to see HOW the chicken is killed also provides the reason WHY it’s okay to kill it.
The Question and Answer section for The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great What, if anything, rubs you the wrong way? Not Too Much.
You should think about guest blogging something on my blog, it could help promote your blog. I would also say food is a national security issue. Farmers now had to buy new seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation. Discover how microbes help turn raw ingredients into delicacies like chocolate and cheese as Pollan tackles the mysterious process of fermentation. What is “Nutritionism” and why is it good for the food industry but bad for our health? Join kitty enthusiast Gabby and her sidekick Pandy Paws as they team up for a series of animated adventures. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. But is this practical for most people in this country? So far, this reckless-seeming act of evolutionary faith in us has been richly rewarded. Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a PastureEleven. He goes to such great lengths to justify and rationalize his consumption of meat and other animal products that you feel like you’re his shrink sitting there while he prattles on and on in a manner that you can’t imagine even he finds convincing.
Only the New York Times would be dumb enough to believe the Farm Bureau still speaks for American farmers!”) led me to expect someone considerably more ornery than the shy fellow who climbed down from his tractor cab to greet me in the middle of a field in the middle of a slate-gray day threatening rain. By recruiting extra atoms of carbon during each instance of photosynthesis, the corn plant is able to limit its loss of water and “fix”—that is, take from the atmosphere and link in a useful molecule—significantly more carbon than other plants. If you care about preserving farms where you live, then buy local. The result of this innovation has been a vast increase in the amount of food energy available to our species; this has been a boon to humanity (allowing us to multiply our numbers), but not an unalloyed one. Though in Meat the creaturely character of the species on display does seem to be fading, as the cows and pigs increasingly come subdivided into boneless and bloodless geometrical cuts. And that they all need to think twice about making any dish that requires cracking a few thoughtlessly acquired eggs. But even before it could master these tricks and make a place for itself in the bright sunshine of capitalism, corn first had to turn itself into something never before seen in the plant world: a form of intellectual property. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. It had to adapt itself not just to humans but to their machines, which it did by learning to grow as upright, stiff-stalked, and uniform as soldiers. And while I’m sure that’s not his usual favorite dining spot, how often does he know the providence of the eggs used in the gourmet items I’m sure he consumes at fine restaurants on a regular basis. Cooking opened up whole new vistas of edibility by rendering various plants and animals more digestible, and overcoming many of the chemical defenses other species deploy against being eaten. First, all the seeds in that first generation (F-1, in the plant breeder’s vocabulary) produced genetically identical plants—a trait that, among other things, facilitates mechanization. You just heard about the process from the woman who designed it – do you think conditions might actually be BETTER than what she’s telling you? Since The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve been engaged in a kind of conversation with my readers, both in person and online, and this book flowed naturally out of that give-and-take. If you take a snip of hair or a nail clipping from an American and run it through a mass spectrometer, as I have done, you will discover that most of the carbon in his or her body (and we consist mostly of atoms of carbon) originally came from corn. -The Washington Post "Outstanding... a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." Corn’s success might seem fated in retrospect, but it was not something anyone would have predicted on that day in May 1493 when Columbus first described the botanical oddity he had encountered in the New World to Isabella’s court. Did you eat a tortured animal today? And it surely would not be nearly so fat. How is the “Western Diet” making us sick? It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air. Find out more about how we use your information in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Q. But what clinched it for me was watching how, in 2002, a great spasm of Carbophobia seized the American diet and the most wholesome and wonderful food of all—bread!—a food which had been revered as a staple of human life for tens of thousands of years came to be regarded as a virtual poison. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. What’s wrong with it? Naturalists regard biodiversity as a measure of a landscape’s health, and the modern supermarket’s devotion to variety and choice would seem to reflect, perhaps even promote, precisely that sort of ecological vigor. – another insufferable and totally frustrated vegan. If you look hard enough, you can still find teosinte growing in certain Central American highlands; you can find maize, its mutant offspring, anywhere you find people. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Your Privacy Controls. Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. When blight hit the Irish potato crop, it was decimated overnight, and a million Irishmen starved. The Omnivore's Dilemma study guide contains a biography of Pollan, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
Did the response surprise you? George’s grandfather moved his family to Iowa from Derbyshire, England, in the 1880s, a coal miner hoping to improve his lot in life. The usual way a domesticated species figures out what traits its human ally will reward is through the slow and wasteful process of Darwinian trial and error. It’s true that not everyone in this country can afford to buy honestly priced food—and we need to find a way to put healthy food in reach of those people. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Omnivory offers the pleasures of variety, too. More and more organic food is coming all the way from China.
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