Reading Continues, Too
Moved from Tuesday to Friday.
Here’s a book I have really enjoyed. It took me places I was not aware of. Just as a hint, do you realize that our food system, as we know it, is really only 40 or so years old? And it is based on corn? Our North American bodies test higher for corn in our system than just about anyone else in the world, including Mexico where it all started.

This comes from The Omnivore’s Dilemma where Michael Pollan takes us places in the food chain we probably don’t want to go as he explores the different ways that food can get to our tables. In general, the omnivore’s dilemma is one we share with only a few other animals (rats bein one.) Our bodies are omnivorous, just what is needed for a “hunter-gatherer.” We can eat just about anything. We are not programmed by nature or evolution or God to eat only certain foods.

Pollan decides he’s going to follow the food chain through to the end- a meal that is appropriate for that chain. He chooses four meals. First is the (military?-) industrial food chain that supplies most of us with most of our food. This is a corn and petroleum-based chain- industrial food production. It is cheap, he points out, because it is first of all subsidized and second, we never see the hidden costs of great use of petroleum and a monoculture of agriculture that needs to add chemicals and antibiotics and a great deal of energy. The natural meal for this- the paradigm though we don’t know it, is eating McDonald’s in your car at 65 miles an hour.

He then does two organic/natural meals. One based on the industrialized organic method, which sadly isn’t too awful far from the one that ends up at McDonalds. The other is a local “natural” farmer whose farm rotates crops and animals in a multicultural system of farming. Finally, Pollan becomes a hunter-gatherer again with an excellent discussion of animal rights and a meditation on hunting.

Pollan writes well and personally. He pulls you into his narrative and makes you stop and think. He raises some serious environmental and health issues as well as giving us a natural history of corn- among other things. That's why the first section is the most concerning and the rest offering alternatives to make us think. I’m not going to become a hunter-gatherer. None of us is. But it will make me think a little more deeply about what it is I am supporting and doing simply by going to the supermarket.