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Secondly, he looks at the world of organic food, free range food, and all natural foods. It is an investigative masterpiece on the agricultural and food industries. This book is wonderful. We learn that we should not trust food labels, but we also learn a lot about the philosophy of agriculture and how we are all linked in a circle of life where you cannot change one link without affecting all the others. Pollan provides us with a view of those worlds that we are rarely exposed to, yet we all should see. He begins by following a corn seed from its planting to its final destination in a fast food meal. Lastly, Pollan comes to grips with the responsibility of eating and shows the reader that we need to think more about the food we eat, the way we eat it, and the consequences of the whole process.This was a unique and excellent book, I recommend it to all my friends. We need to take the power back as individuals and demand that we know what we are consuming, instead of letting industry blindly poison us for the sake of making the almighty dollar.
I borrowed this book, read many parts of it out loud to my husband, then, at his insistence, bought our own copy so we could have more time with it. Pollan isn't a hard-driving idealogue, and presents our food choices (and growing choices) as true dilemmas. He explores how we plant, grow, harvest and eat, and thoroughly inserts himself into all aspects of our food culture. I learned more than I thought possible from this book, and - as a hobby farmer - will reread it and check out its references for years to come.
Focusing mostly on corn this book just drives home the point that corn subsidies have ruined the American farmer and made us fat. Its about taking a system that works well after millions of years of evolution and industrializing and it explains all the problems this creates. A great book along with Fat Land, Fast Food Nation and Don't Eat this Book.
One phrase, "cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing," bespeaks the findings of his quest.Pollan long-windely traces super market-bought, food products from the corn fields in Iowa, to the slaughtering feed lots of Kansas, to the grain elevators, and then to countless food products where corn is used. Corn. Corn. In between these main topics, the author, through liberal use of unique phrasing and uncommon words, uses his personal experiences to elucidate how the modern meal arrives at your dinner table, courtesy of governmental regulations and the agricultural-industrial complex. The author makes some great points in this treatise, and with some exceptions, takes you where the action is in the food industry. Corn everywhere.
His view is that "corn sweetner is to the republic of fat what corn whiskey was to the alcoholic republic." His bottom line assessment of today's mass market, food industry is that it exposes the consumer to unhealthy foods, as well as increases the probability of someone succumbing to contaminated food.The author also takes the "organic" food industry to task in that its use of mass production and transportation techniques barely elevates that industry in food quality above the agricultural-industrial complex." He abundantly illustrates the relative glibness of how the adjective, "organic," is used by organic food growers and sellers to prey on the naiveté of the organic food afficiendos.For the best quality and healthiest foods, the book promotes the concept of buying only grass fed meat products. Corn. These applications run the gamut, such as cattle feed, various meats, food fillers, emulsifiers, nutraceuticals, and eventually into various forms of sweetened products. After muddling through the first few chapters, the reader may arrive at the feeling that this book will focus entirely on corn. Mercifully, the author moves on to other mundane topics, like grass, cattle, and mushrooms. In short, one should buy fresh---buy in season---and buy locally, like from farmers' markets, farm co-ops, the farm itself, or your own backyard.
However, to obtain those insights, the reader has to muddle through an inordinate amount of Pollan masticating and digesting his thoughts, as well as his detailed digressions, like into hunting pigs and mushrooms.
It has gone from a pastoral to an industrial farm with "inputs" of fertilizer and pesticides and "outputs" that are inputs for other industrial farming processes such as cattle feeding. Today it has only corn and soy. Fifty years ago our family farm in Alcester, SD, had row crops, an orchard, cows, chickens, horses, pastures, woods and a cycle of rotation that preserved the land without chemicals. We rent the farm house to a man who works in a nearby slaughter house. There are no animals, no orchard, no pasture. The land is farmed from fence row to fence row with the fields no longer bordered in trees. The barn stores cars he rebuilds. This book explains how these not uncommon changes came about and how the fundamental changes in the food chain leave us vulnerable to disease, crop failure and taxpayer subsidized food.
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