Michael Pollan - The Omnivores Dilemma - Chapter 1
Precis
Corn is essential to our lives today, it is easy to cross breed corn and human beings have been doing this for years. Corn has been around for over 500 years and is still as fascinating and important but has had to adapt to being processed in well... almost everything. From beer to ketchup you will find corn in almost everything you eat.
Gems
"You are what you eat, it's often said, and if this is true, then what we most are is corn-or more precisely, processed corn" I think it this is a great quote because it sums up the main idea of the chapter in once sentence
Thoughts & Questions
-I thought it was interesting how Pollan did that much research on corn, from finding out how how corn breeds, how corn was introduced to america and how corn is in virtually anything we eat today.
Michael Pollan - The Omnivores Dilemma - Chapter 2
Precis
George Naylor owns a 470 acre farm in a part of Iowa that has some of the richest soil in the world. Pollan follows Naylor through his days working on the farm and discussing the essential and controversial crop that is corn, and how the government encouraged farm owners to increase the production and size of farms for corn. This chapter also discusses the idea of why farmers still grow corn when it costs more to make it than to sell
Gems
"He calls it the Naylor Curve. ('Remember the Laffer Curve? Well, this one looks a little like that one, only it's true.') Basically it purports to show why falling farm prices force farmers to increase production in defiance of all rational economic behavior"
Thoughts & Questions
-I found it interesting how although corn is used in almost everything we eat it's a hard crop to grow enough of to sustain a balanced life style (paying your bills etc..)
-I didn't much understand the sections in the chapter about using nitrogen for energy as many times as i read it back. From my understand at one point people basically started using a different source of energy rather than the sun
Michael Pollan - The Omnivores Dilemma - Chapter 3
Precis
The history of how corn used to be transported from place to place dates back to the 1850's when farmers used to just grow as much corn as possible and throw the bags of corn on to trains until they soon realized that didn't work and started a system of organizing the corn. The system of checks given by the Iowa Farmers Cooperative and USDA to George Naylor is designed to keep "production high and prices low" so the only way farmers can make a living is by growing a very large amount of corn
Gems
"Grain elevators, the only significant verticals for miles around in this part of Iowa, resemble tight clusters of window-less concrete office towers, but this day the cement sky had robbed them of contrast, rendering the great cylinders nearly invisible"-great imagery
"Though the companies won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America"
Thoughts & Questions
-When Pollan was talking about how corn is processed through animals, specifically what does that mean?
-I think that the whole idea of making a living off corn requires you to work extra hard is interesting because typically a farmers work ethic is usually more-so than any other worker (it makes sense to me, regardless of the messed up economics of it all)
Michael Pollan - The Omnivores Dilemma - Chapter 4
Precis
While visiting the "poky" cattle pen Pollan spends time with a young calf number 534 and gets to learn about it's origins and the whole system of how the USDA feeds cows processed corn and even other cows to make the cows fatter to produce as much as possible. Feeding cows cows (redundant i know) creates a bigger chance for mad cow disease, and along with the conditions these cows live in when we eat these cows we are essentially eating "number 2 corn and oil"
Gems
"You are what you eat' is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too."
"So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer"
Thoughts & Questions
I liked how this chapter really dug deep in to the facts of where these cows are fed and how. It really painted a disgusting and convincing enough image in my mind to not want to eat cow meat. But as Pollan stated: "Yet i'm sure that after enough time goes by, and the stink of this place is gone from my nostrils, i will eat feedlot beef again"
Michael Pollan - The Omnivores Dilemma - Chapter 5
Precis
In this chapter Pollan goes in to specific detail of how much corn is actually used in the foods we eat today and how it is exactly distributed.
Gems
"corn has done more than any other species to help the food industry realize the dream of freeing food from nature's limitations and seducing the omnivore into eating more of a single plant than anyone would ever have thought possible"
Thoughts & Questions
what exactly is "sub-stitutionism" as Pollan describes on page 95?
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