The second quarter of the Omnivore's Dilemma includes the chapters: 6) The Consumer: A Republic of Fat, 7) The Meal: Fast Food, 8) All Flesh is Grass, 9) Big Organic, 10) Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture.
Pollan says American farmers are producing 500 extra calories per person, each day, than they were during the Nixon Administration. He also explains some of the ways we have been manipulated into eating more. Such as being given larger portions in fast food chains. An 8 oz. Coke used to be given with meals, now it is 22 oz. This is cheap for companies to do, but is much more harmful to our health. A baby born in 2000 has a one third chance of developing type two diabetes in their lifetime. Three out of five Americans are considered overweight. One of the main antagonists in all of this? High fructose corn syrup. All of this helps paint the picture that this is potentially the first generation of children whose life expectancy is shorter than their parents'.
In the chapter The Meal, Pollan eats an actual meal. He and his family eat at McDonalds, and when he thinks about where his chicken nuggets have come from, he realizes is is overwhelmingly from corn. He also talks about what it takes to process the corn into food, that corn loses up to 90% of its energy in the process.
He then visits a farm where the farm is nearly self sufficient. The cows eat the grass, whose manure feeds the chickens, whose manure fertilizes the grass. Pollan writes that if humans were to go back to a grass rooted farming cycle, it might be possible to create the agricultural equivalent of a free lunch.
In the Big Organic chapter, Pollan talks at length about how we want to imagine where our food comes from, and that we want to feel good about it. He learns that organic cows are fed organic corn to be considered organic, but are raised much in the same way another cow would be. This goes for many other types of animal.
Pollan also devotes a chapter to grass. He explains what it means to be a 'grass farmer'. To be a grass farmer means that the animals that provide product use grass as the main ingredient to their diets.
Cool new words!
zero-sum proposition: of or denoting a system in which the sum of the gains equals the sum of the loses.
I think that we need to be able to understand where our organic food is coming from, and whether it is truly organic. We need to be able to distance ourselves emotionally from food in order to make the right decisions for ourselves and what we want to eat. I would personally like to see the industry stick towards the grass farmer system described in this book.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Read 'n' Seed 2: First quarter of The Omnivore's Dilemma
The chapters I covered for the first quarter of this book were 1-5. Chapters 1-5 covered pages 1-99 in this book. They are titled: 1) The Plant: Corn's Conquest, 2) The Farm, 3) The Elevator, 4) The Feedlot: Making Meat, and 5) The processing Plant: Making Complex Foods.
The first of the main topics covered was corn. It was discovered that corn, or some derivative of corn exists in one form or another, in nearly everything we eat. Even salmon and cows are being fed corn when they are being groomed for our consumption. Corn pops up in everything from soda, to beer, canned fruit, and hot sauce.
The Farm is the second chapter in the book. Pollan goes to a farm in Iowa to see how much corn makes it to our supermarkets. He discovers that the farmer is going broke, and that the corn and soybeans cant be eaten unless they have been processed or fed back to livestock. And yet, because corn is in almost everything we eat, this is where most of our food comes from. The corn only grows two kinds of food! Another problem: corn is taking up more and more farmland, but because of its abundance, its price is dropping, keeping farmers close to the red.
The Feedlot describes how the cheap corn in The Elevator is used to become our hamburgers. It talks about how corn is used as feed to help dispose of our nations corn surplus. It explains that as much as 60% of America's corn goes to livestock.
And lastly, the Processing Plant chapter discusses how one of the oddest things about the corn we produce, is how little we actually eat. The corn we consume as corn, off the cob, or in tortilla style foods, amounts to less than a bushel of corn per person, a year.
Cool new words!
That is didn't know before:
atavistic: of, pertaining to, or characterized by atavism; reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type.
Most of what I have read seems to make the point that we overproduce corn to the point that its worth drops so far that about half of the money farmers live on is stipends from the government. Farming has become a job that it is becoming nearly impossible to make your own living at it. What is confusing to me about this is that it is still so needed. We have found or created many new ways to use our surplus of corn that no matter how much we will have, we can always find use for it feeding livestock or creating new products.
The first of the main topics covered was corn. It was discovered that corn, or some derivative of corn exists in one form or another, in nearly everything we eat. Even salmon and cows are being fed corn when they are being groomed for our consumption. Corn pops up in everything from soda, to beer, canned fruit, and hot sauce.
The Farm is the second chapter in the book. Pollan goes to a farm in Iowa to see how much corn makes it to our supermarkets. He discovers that the farmer is going broke, and that the corn and soybeans cant be eaten unless they have been processed or fed back to livestock. And yet, because corn is in almost everything we eat, this is where most of our food comes from. The corn only grows two kinds of food! Another problem: corn is taking up more and more farmland, but because of its abundance, its price is dropping, keeping farmers close to the red.
The Feedlot describes how the cheap corn in The Elevator is used to become our hamburgers. It talks about how corn is used as feed to help dispose of our nations corn surplus. It explains that as much as 60% of America's corn goes to livestock.
And lastly, the Processing Plant chapter discusses how one of the oddest things about the corn we produce, is how little we actually eat. The corn we consume as corn, off the cob, or in tortilla style foods, amounts to less than a bushel of corn per person, a year.
Cool new words!
That is didn't know before:
atavistic: of, pertaining to, or characterized by atavism; reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type.
Most of what I have read seems to make the point that we overproduce corn to the point that its worth drops so far that about half of the money farmers live on is stipends from the government. Farming has become a job that it is becoming nearly impossible to make your own living at it. What is confusing to me about this is that it is still so needed. We have found or created many new ways to use our surplus of corn that no matter how much we will have, we can always find use for it feeding livestock or creating new products.
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