Hw # 7

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Chapter 1:

Precis: One always thinks to oneself, " What should I have for dinner." And due to the huge variety one has it is often difficult, as you can see by just looking inside a supermarket. But this question to leads to two also more important questions. " what am I eating? and where did it come from?" So I started to follow this industrial chain and at the end (and also the beginning) of this chain I always found myself at a farm field in American Corn Belt. Showing that most of what you see around you is somehow connected to corn, we are even corn because we constantly intake corn.

Gems: Before reading this book I honestly never put any interest where the food I ate came from, you can say I was being ignorant but sometimes there are things you just don't question because your busy trying to find other answers to your own life. So the idea that most of what we eat goes back to corn, at first sounded absurd to me but the author gives several examples in how this is true. How Mayans in Mexico had the right idea when they referred themselves as " corn people." because Mexicans and even those outside from Mexico consume are corn. The fact they were making many of animals who naturally didn't eat corn like Salmon was interesting to know.

Questions:

Wonder what isn't made of corn?

What would happen if one day we no longer could produce corn, would we all be in havoc?

Why did they feed the animals corn instead of grass?

Chapter 2:

Precis: Following the life of a farmer one learns how much work goes into farming corn fields, must be able to grow large amounts of corn to prosper. Although in the end many of them have debt while those buying the corn gain because they get corn for cheaper prices.

Gems: " Iowa livestock farmers couldn't compete with the factory - farmed animals their own cheap spawn, so the chickens and cattle disappeared from the farm, and with them the pastures and hay fields and fences. In their place the farmers planted more of the one crop they could grow more than anything else: corn. And whenever the price of corn slipped they planted a little more of it, to cover expanses and stay even." - pg. 39

" As in so many other "self made" American successes, the closer you look the more you find the federal government leading a hand - a patent, a monopoly, a tax break - to our hero at a critical juncture..... There's a good reason I met farmers in Iowa who don't respect corn, who tell you in disgust that the plant has become a " welfare queen." - pg.41

Questions:

Why do farmers keep planting corn if they don't get what they deserve?

More and more i read and see corn affects us wonder what we'd do without it? What other source would take its place?

Chapter 3:

Precis: I visited a grain elevator in Iowa and what I saw would make any look away in revolt, laying are golden kernels ground into mud by tires and boots and floating in rain puddles. But this is because this corn is not made for us to eat but growing huge amounts so price goes down and ends up in stomach of food animals.

Gems: " The place where most of these kernels wind up - about three of every five - is on the American factory farm, a place that could not exist without them. Here, hundreds of millions of food animals that once lived on family farms and ranches are gathered together in great commissaries, where they consume as much of the mounting pile surplus corn as they can digest, turning it into meat." - pg. 64

" To be honest, I felt revulsion. In Mexico, even today, you do not let corn lay on the ground; it is considered almost sacrilegious." -pg.58

Questions: For farmer producing still more corn helps their income from declining, is this correct? Why must they when they're always finding way for it to be consumed?

Thought: I realized that a farmer must put a lot of thought into a crop, for example where to send it, making sure it succeeds and then after verifying that it is good quality corn. Putting so much time, money and labor to get only half their income due to federal payments.

Chapter 4:

Precis: Curious to know the life process of the cattle we eat and see where most of our kernels end up, I bought and followed a young black steer. He had 6 months of the good life before he was separated from the grasslands and his mother to be castrated and fed corn. Then after 14 to 16 months he was to be slaughtered. But at the end of watching this process one no longer felt hunger for this meat, at least i didn't.

Gems: " This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than, say, a chicken or pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain: The short, unhappy of a corn - feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution." pg. 68

"The coevolutionary relationship between cows and grass is one of nature's unappreciated wonders; it also happens to be the key to understanding just about everything about modern meat." - pg. 70

"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 what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil." - pg. 84

Question: Wonder if the author after learning all this will still eat meat? what about the readers?

Why must we feed cattle corn when feeding cattle grass is not only what they should eat but also environmentally friendly?

How do we know that the drugs and stuff their are giving to cattle is healthy for us or actually bad for us?

Chapter 5:

Precis: This chapter I explain the milling process of corn and how it becomes the many things we see around us. Into the meat we eat, the corn syrup, sweetener in soda, corn oil we use, etc. And how through the years found new ways to use this corn like resistant starch that is indigestible.

Gems: " Sure, we grind some of it to make cornmeal, but mot of the corn we eat as corn - whether on the cob, flaked, or baked into muffins or tortillas or chips - comes from varieties other than number 2: usually sweet corn or white corn. These uses represent a tiny fraction of the harvest - less than a bushel per person per year - which probably why we don"t think of ourselves as big corn eaters. And yet each of us is personally responsible for consuming a ton of the stuff every year." - pg. 84

" Even after people had learned the rudiments of preserving food, however, the dream of liberating food from nature continued to flourish - indeed to expand in ambition and confidence. In the third age of food processing, which begins with the end of World War Two, merely preserving the fruits of nature was deemed too modest: The goal now was to improve on nature." - pg.91

Questions/Thoughts: Wonder why the two companies who wet mill most of America's corn wouldn't let him watch them do it? Are they hiding something?

Modern technology affected food in a bad way, replaced healthier foods for more convenient foods. So in way this can be a negative side effect of technology.