Omnivores Dilemma Response 1

Ryan Crace

4/6/12

Anthro 201

“ The Omnivore’s Dilemma ” – Pages 1-180

            Michael Pollan has made me change the way I look at and eat food. I think everyone in America, if not the whole world, needs to read this book and open their eyes to see what our food is turning into. Not everyone will take Pollan’s word and change the way they eat, but hopefully, to many people it will affect their eating habits. Maybe it will affect enough people to make a change, a movement to end industrialized food.

            So much of what we ingest now is corn, or something laced with corn, or corn additives mixed with more corn additives. Not only is corn feeding us its feeding many of the animals we eat. “Corn feeds the chicken 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.” Pollan says on page 18, take “A chicken nugget, for example, piles on piles of corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of the nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn startch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried in.” Maybe soon a new word will be added to the dictionary, ‘’cornivore’’.

            Corn isn’t the only problem with the industrial food industry but it’s the monocultures and CAFO’s, the feedlots where our meats are being raised and slaughtered. Pollan says on page 69, “Although a mere four giant meat packing companies… now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out wide as the Great Plains.” These concentration camps for cows have greatly effected the environment, and the health of the animals as well as humans.

The cows that have naturally evolved to eat grass are forced to eat corn after they’re taken away from their mothers. Corn disrupts the cows’ natural digestive cycle which creates large amounts of methane gas, a major greenhouse gas contributor, but corn also alters the ph balance of the cows’ rumen. “But the rumen of a corn fed feedlot steer is nearly acidic as our own stomachs, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant strains or E. coli, of which O157:H7 is one, have evolved…” Pollan states on page 82. And the simplest if not most effective way to get rid of these sickening microbes is to feed the cows grass, but most farmers say that grass isn’t practical.

So why aren’t more farmers feeding their cattle grass? Why aren’t there more farms like Polyface Farms, which essentially farms grass while raising many different species of plants and animals that all flourish on the same land? As Michael writes about his stay at Polyface, I begin to wonder why it’s so unique, how is it that something as simple as grass can sustain so much life, why have I not heard about farms like these before? Pollan writes on page 125, “Polyface Farm raises, chickens, beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries on one hundred acres of pasture patchworked into another 450 acres of forest, but if you ask Joel Salatin what he does for a living (is he foremost a cattle rancher? A chicken farmer?) he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms, “I’m a grass farmer.”

Polyface inspires me to become my own farmer, to live off my own land and raise my own food and animals. I hope that one day I can visit Polyface for myself and see what it’s like. I bet its not like many farms you’ll ever see. Michael Pollan makes it out to be the most peaceful and bliss farm that he visited, during all his farm visits across the United States, even the organic ones.