HW # 11 - Final Food Project 1

Based on what I learned from Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma about small organic farms being bought out by big organic companies and the resulting cheapening of products, I decided to go to our local health food store in Brooklyn and check out for myself which products seemed better based on their ingredients. My plan was to buy some food products to use in preparation for a dinner I would make for my family consisting of grass-fed beef and vegetables from local farms from the farmer's markets in Union Square and on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn.

At the Back to the Land health food store I decided to check out the juices first. I found out that juices made from Santa Cruz, a big organic company in California, adds sugar to all its different fruit juices. Another big organic company, R.W. Knudsen, adds xanthun gum and sodium algenate gums to many of its organic juices. However, its ginger ale is sweetened with white grape and apple juice and has no bad additives. I bought 8 cans. The best organic juice company is Lakewood, which not only has no added sugar but also donates 10% of its proceeds to the capitol Environmental Education Charitable Foundation. Had I not seen the ginger ale, I would definitely have bought the Lakewood juice. The manager told me that probably the best form of sugar to buy is Xylitol, which used to come from birch trees in Finland, then from fresh fruits, and now from non-GMO corn. He says it is still good because it fights bacteria and keeps cavities from forming. Stevia is another good sugar that comes from plants grown in South America and Asia primarily. Because it was not grown in the U.S., the FDA tried to say that it was unhealthy. Now it is grown in California and a couple of other states, and you can find it in health food stores. The manager also told me that the worst form of sweetener is aspertame, which is used in Diet Coke. It is a neuro-toxin, can cause brain damage, and was originally an insecticide. He said that when Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense uder George W. Bush, was the head of a drug company called Searle, he was able to get the FDA to push aspertame through as a sweetener. It is also sometimes called vanillan and should be avoided at all costs.

I next went to the ketchup section because I was going to mix it with horseradish to create a dazzling shrimp cocktail sauce for my first course. I first looked at Annie's Ketchup, which had sugar in it. I noticed that Annie's Barbeque Sauce not only had sugar in it, but also had brown rice sugar syrup, molasses, cornstarch, alcohol, and xanthun gum. What is this doing in a health food store? I also looked at Muir Glenn ketchup and Organicville ketchup, both of which have sugar in it. I bought Organicville Ketchup, the only brand that did not have sugar in it. While I was in the ketchup section, I saw this bottle of ginger-lime sauce that my mother used to buy a lot when it was owned by Ginger People. The manager told me that this good small company was bought out by Royal Pacific Foods and now has in it brown sugar, regular sugar, and cornstarch, which were not in it before. The manager said he was going to discontinue it and go with another company called Spectrum, which so far does not add sugar or other additives to its sauces. I also bought horseradish and freshly crushed ginger, neither of which had any additives in them.

I then went to look at pasta sauces. There were three main brands: Muir Glenn, which has sugar and calcium cholride in it: Enrico's, which has sugar in it: and Newman's Own, which also has sugar in it. I decided to go with Classico, which only has tomatoes, basil, and olive oil in it. While I was in the pasta section, I checked out the nearby jams out of curiosity about their ingredients. Cascadian Farms, which Michael Pollan says is now owned by General Mills, now has sugar in all of its jams. Sorrel Ridge and St. Dalfour, a French company, both make jams that are only sweetened with fruit juice, and both taste better than the Cascadian Farms jam.

I made my dinner of grass-fed beef, organic pasta with tomato sauce, broccoli and green salad with tomatos from local farmers, and my family gave the dinner a 8.5 out of 10. I overcooked the broccoli. The sauce for my first course of shrimp, the salad dressing, the pasta sauce, and the ginger ale had no sugar in it or other additives. I learned from my shopping experience that sugar, xanthum gum, and corn starch are sneaking into everything, and Michael Pollan got everything right in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Local farmer's markets and small organic companies provide the best food that still have nutrients in them. Just as Michael Pollan says, when big companies buy out the smaller ones, even if they are organic, they start using additives to save money and because they need more preservatives for long distance traveling. I have a lot of respect for the manager of our local health food store, and it was interesting to leaarn that he is a big fan of Michael Pollan and that he finds it discouraging that organic health standards usually go down when bigger companies take over smaller ones. I was pleased with the meal I prepared, especially since it was my first time ever making dinner, and think that the next time (if there ever is one due to athletics), I would try to be more creative with the menu. I would always want to buy as much of the food at farmer's markets because the more I learn about what goes into processed food products the less hungry I feel.

HW # 12 - Final Food Project 2 - Outline

Final Food Project 2 Outline

Individuals living in our culture must recognize and respond to the nightmarish industrial atrocities at the root of dominant social practices in order to promote healthy practices that counter the injustices and damage the atrocities cause.


Major Claim: The only way to change the damage caused by industrial food companies to society and to nature is to have individuals take action against them by telling the truth about their life-threatening practices and trying to change individuals’ eating behavior.

Supporting Claim 1: The greed of the food industries is responsible for eating and food growing practices that have many negative outcomes for individuals and society.

Evidence: rising obesity rates especially for poor children and adults http://www.nytimes.com/info/obesity/

Evidence: rising diabetes rates especially for poor adults and now for poor young people http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/29/opinion/l-children-and-obesity-292362.html

Evidence: expansion of fast food restaurants used especially by poor people and young people
homepage.ntlworld.com/.../Bad%20News%20for%20Fast%20Food.doc

Evidence: continued increases in use of corn syrup even in organic foods
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02syrup.html?pagewanted=all

Evidence: purchase of organic companies by non-organic companies
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/when-big-business-eats-organic/

Evidence: cruelty to animals used for meat and dangerous results for carnivores
http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/slaughterhouses.html

Evidence: danger to land, especially pasture land
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-25-corn-ethanol-meat-hfcs

Evidence: danger to environment through huge fossil fuel consumption doc
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_case_against_biofuels_probing_ethanols_hidden_costs_/2251/

Supporting Claim 2: Actions by individuals to create awareness of food industry atrocities and dangerous eating practices are beginning to make a difference.

Evidence: rising number of green markets
www.mnn.com/food/.../number-of-farmers-markets-jumps-16-percent

Evidence: food labels on grocery products
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/nutrition-facts/NU00293

Evidence: some restaurants listing number of calories in food products
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/2010-01-28-kids-meals_N.htm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1301315/Restaurants-cafes-pubs-list-calories-item-menu.html

Evidence: anti-obesity programs (Michelle Obama’s program and others)
http://www.latimes.com/sns-health-michelle-obama-anti-obesity-initiative,0,876648.story
http://childrensnyp.org/Mschony/primary-care-community-programs.html

Evidence: sales of books by Michael Pollan,
http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/archives/998/a-hidden-history-of-the-world

Evidence: success of movies like Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-robbins/how-bad-is-mcdonalds-food_b_754814.html

Evidence: nutrition counseling by coaches and in schools?
http://www.eatright.org/Media/content.aspx?id=10201

HW # 10 - Food, Inc. Response

HW 10 – Food Inc. Response

1. The main idea that Food Inc gets across is that the major industrial food companies care more about profit made from their food than they do about quality and the health of their consumers. The low income and mostly overweight family featured in the super market and the drive-through Burger King are victims of the greedy food companies. The father has to take expensive medication for his diabetes making the choice between expensive broccoli and a whopper end up in the whopper’s favor. Then we see the inhumanity of the meat industry with a visit to a hog processing plant where black and Hispanic workers are shipped in daily in packed vans during a 50 mile drive to work with dangerous conveyer belts speedily slicing raw meat parts. The environment is so nasty that it is not surprising that harmful bacteria like E.coli gets into the meat. There is a picture of a 2 year old child who dies from E.coli and an interview with his mother who is leading a campaign to shut down unsafe processing plants. The movie next deals with the production of corn and soybeans, and we find out that our taxes subsidized farmers to produce far more corn than is needed in order to make animal feed, plastics, diapers, Motrin, and corn syrup for Coke and a thousand other products. We learn that the Monsanto company, for example, forces farmers to buy new seeds of corn every year and would sue them if they tried to hold seeds over for the next year. It seems that in every way the farmer gets screwed by the big agribusinesses and the tax payers get screwed for having to subsidize the farmers. Industrial agricultural companies, in other words, only benefit themselves.

2. By showing an actual processing plant, and feed lot with crammed in cattle and a half dead cow, the movie makes the cruelty to workers and animals very real. It is also great to see the real Joel Salatin in the flesh because he has such an important role in The Omnivore’s Dillemma. The book, on the other hand gives a lot more information about Joel and explains why his method of farming is so different and better than industrial organic farming.

3. At the end of the movie someone says that the truth about all theat is bad in the food industry in this country will come out the way it did with the tobacco industry but it doesn’t seem that this will happen fast enough. As corrupt and dangerous as the situation is, you would think that there would be some kind of huge protest recommended to be made by the American public. Instead the movie just ends telling you to eat local foods that are in season, but it doesn’t tell you the way the book does that by eating local foods there is much less use of fossil fuels for the transportation of the food.

HW # 9 - Freakonomics Response

1. The Freakonomic "tools" that the economist and the journalist use to help explain the world include (a) identifying questions about accepted theories, (b) looking for incentives, and (c) finding out what to measure and how to measure it through the right data collection.

An example of the use of tool (a) is when they asked themselves why crime in the U.S. went down so dramatically in the 1990s and did not accept the conventional thinking that it was due to more police and better police strategies. They kept asking the question because they knew that crime went down everywhere in the U.S. not just in the cities with more police and better policing. What they found was that poor women were having far fewer babies beginning in 1973 when abortion was legalized. Crime had gone down in the 1990s because criminals had not been born thanks to legalized abortion.

An example of the use of tool (b) is when they were asking whether real estate people could be trusted to give you the best deal selling your house. They asked themselves what the incentive is for real estate agents to get a certain price for selling someone else's house versus selling their own house. It turns out that because they are only getting a small percentage fee if they made the effort to get a higher price than the one offered, it might not be worth the effort to look for another buyer. If it was their own house they were selling it, would be worth it to get the extra $10,000 or whatever the higher amount would be.

An example of the use of tool (c) is when the authors discovered patterns that suggested cheating in sumo wrestling and found data to prove their theory. In sumo wrestling there are 6 tournaments each year that determine whether a wrestler can significantly advance or decrease his ranking. These tournaments last 15 days during which each wrestler has one match for 15 consecutive days. If a wrestler records at least 8 victories, his ranking will increase, and if a wrestler records 7 or fewer victories, his ranking will decrease. They found out from their data that when a wrestler is on the cusp of entering that elite group (7 wins) of wrestlers and is wrestling someone who is already a member of that group with 8 wins, the wrestler who badly needs the win wins 80% of the time. What makes this fact even more interesting is that when the two wrestlers meet again in a future bout the wrestler who "throws" the match the first time around wins 60% of the time. That is a 40% drop off between the initial meeting and the second meeting causing the authors to believe that there was definite cheating going on in this the most sacred sport in all of Japan.

2. The Frekonomics authors think that the fact that two things are correlated does not indicate that one thing is the cause of the other. Two things that are correlated have some kind of relationship, but we don't know whether the first thing causes the second thing or the seconf thing causes the first thing or if there is something else that causes both things. For example, with the question of why crime went down so much in the 1990s the number of police and the reduction in crime were correlations and it was commonly thought that the increased number of police was the cause of the reduced crime level. The authors are able to prove that the actual causation was the reduced number of criminals due to legalized abortion - specifically of unwanted babies of poor women.

I agree that Freakonomics is a great example of the "hidden-in-plain-sight" weirdness of a lot of our social practices. For example, everyone believes that teachers are upright citizens. The Freakonomics authors showed that the high stakes testing in Chicago could cause schools with low scores to be shut down gave teachers a big incentive to cheat on their student scores. In the same way, we like to think today that organic food is always far superior to non-organic food, but Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma shows that this is not always the case. Now that there are two huge organic food companies that provide organic food nationally they use up a tremendous amount of fossil fuels transporting all the foods even if they don't use fertilizer and pesticides made from petroleum. Also, because they are producing organic food in huge quantities, their "free-range" chickens have a very tiny space to "range" in.

HW # 7 - Reading Response Monday

Book title - The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Introduction:

Precis

The dilemma in The Omnivore's Dilemma is trying to figure out what to eat. This is essentially the problem with Americans who are attracted to food fads like an all protein diet of chicken without any pasta or bread. Like rats, we are constantly trying to decide what is good to eat and what could be poison. The food industry has a great opportunity to market stuff to us because "as a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us." This is why we are stuck with trying to figure out all the labels on food like "heart healthy," "no trans fats," "cage-free," or "range-fed." Of the three main food chains we have today, the industrial one, the organic one, and the hunter-gatherer one, the industrial chain is by far the biggest, and its energy unfortunately comes more from fossil fuels than from the sun. It allows us to be ignorant or confused about where food comes from.

Gems

"Many anthropologists believe that the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely help us deal with the omnivore's dilemma."
"To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too."
“By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented.”

Thoughts and Questions

“what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world – and what becomes of it,” I hope that Michael Pollan will tell us what we need to do to stop some people getting rich off of other people (adults and children) who can’t afford to eat healthy food and as a result get sick and obese.

Chapter 1 The Plant

Precis

In an American supermarket, despite the huge diversity of goods especially in the produce section where you can get a ton of different mushrooms, there is still a huge amount of stuff that is hard to trace back in a food chain to an original plant getting energy from the sun. Regarding meat, "The label doesn't mention that that rib-eye steak came from a steer born in South Dakota and fattened in a Kansas feedlot on grain grown in Iowa." Despite all the supposed diversity in food we have, when it comes to finding the food chain for processed foods, we always seem to get back to one main plant, and that is corn. Meat, milk, cheese, yogurt, eggs, are all made of corn because that is what almost all farm animals eat. Regarding processed foods, corn is everywhere in sweeteners and in the gluey starch that holds everything together. The Mayans were "the corn people," and Mexicans might get 40% of their calories from corn, but at least they know that they are getting it from tortillas. We in America are getting processed corn, and it is hard to see it in a Big Mac or even a coke bottle. If we are what we eat, then scientists can see that we Americans are mostly corn.

Gems

"There are some forty-thousand items in the average supermarket and more then a quarter of them now contain corn."
"Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn." Scientists can tell where the carbon atoms in our bones come from, and "we North Americans look like corn chips with legs."
“Corn won over the wheat people vecause of its verasatility, prized especially in new settlements far from civilization. This one plant supplied settlers with a ready-to-eat vegetable and a storable grain, a source of fiber and animal feed, a heating fuel and an intoxicant.”

Thoughts and Questions

Michael Pollen makes the case that corn my just be smarter than we are in the sense that we lost control over its evolution into such an omnipresent position in our lives.. It seems as though every generation competes for new uses of the stuff because today it is the main source of sweetener and good for glue and making floors and all kinds of containers, and ethanol. It is a killer crop. How can we stop the monster especially with just a few industrial giant companies making a fortune from it?

Chapter 2 The Farm

Precis

George Naylor’s farm in Iowa grows corn that has to be processed to feed animals and to make corn syrup, ethanol, and all the other products industries have figured out to make money on corn. The processing industries make a ton of money, but the farmers get very little and would go broke without subsidies from the government. The government subsidizes farmers in order for the big food industries to make billions. Since the price of corn is os cheap, it seems as though George should switch to another crop. He can’t because the only buyer he has, the grain elevator, only wants corn and soybeans,, George’s only other crop. Soybeans are also used like corn for animal feed and processed foods.

Gems

“So the plague of cheap corn goes on, impoverishing farmers (both here and in the countries to which we export it), degrading the land, polluting the water, and bleeding the federal treasury, which now spens up to $5 billion a year subsidizing cheap corn. But though those subsidy checks go to the farmer (and represent nearly half of net farm income today), what the Treasury is really subsidizing are the buyers of all that cheap corn.

Thoughts and Questions

How can people get Congress to subsidize the farmers to grow pasture land again and get back good soil to grow real food that is good for us? Having more people buy local food from organic farms is good for their health and good for the farmers, but poorer people probably will not think they can afford it. There should also be pressure on big organic companies not to make their products more cheaply and adding ingredients like processed sugar.

Chapter 4 The Feedlot

Precis

In this hard-to-read chapter Michael Pollen describes the revolution in the meat industry, that is the way meat suddenly became affordable to almost all Americans. The development that stopped meat from being a luxury item was the start of the CAFO, which stans for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Instead of living on farms and ranches animals were being raised in factories. They still are. The idea is that cattle (also pigs and chickens) are crowded into a "factory farm" and fed corn even though grass is the food for which their digestive systems are designed. They are forced to eat corn because it is so easy and cheap to grow. Corn is fast food for cattle in the sense that it can make the animals reach "slaughter weight" much faster than a grass diet. Of course, it also seems necessary to add a lot of supplements of fat and protein and also drugs. The upside of a CAFO is plentiful cheap meat for everyone, but the downside is air and water pollution and toxic wastes, not to mention the unbelievable cruelty towards the animals. A corn diet can give cows "diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumentitis, liver disease...iosis, enterotoxemia, and feedlot polio." The cows are kept alive on antibiotics to keep their livers from getting infected, and they are used so much that there are know "new and antibiotic-superbugs."

Gems

“When 534 (the author’s steer) moved from ranch to feedlot, from grass to corn, he joined an industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel – and therefore defended by the U.S. military, another never-counted cost of cheap food. (One-fifth of America’s petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting out food.)

Thoughts and Questions

The cruelty to the individual animals described in this chapter, the repulsiveness of the conditions they are kept in (standing in deep manure), and the fact that they are slaughtered at the rate of 400 per hour absolutely make me feel like becoming a vegetarian. There should be a law against this kind of cruelty to animals.

Chapter 4 - The Feedlot

In this hard-to-read chapter Michael Pollen describes the revolution in the meat industry, that is the way meat suddenly became affordable to almost all Americans. The development that stopped meat from being a luxury item was the start of the CAFO, which stans for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Instead of living on farms and ranches animals were being raised in factories. They still are. The idea is that cattle (also pigs and chickens) are crowded into a "factory farm" and fed corn even though grass is the food for which their digestive systems are designed. They are forced to eat corn because it is so easy and cheap to grow. Corn is fast food for cattle in the sense that it can make the animals reach "slaughter weight" much faster than a grass diet. Of course, it also seems necessary to add a lot of supplements of fat and protein and also drugs. The upside of a CAFO is plentiful cheap meat for everyone, but the downside is air and water pollution and toxic wastes, not to mention the unbelievable cruelty towards the animals. A corn diet can give cows "diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumentitis, liver disease...iosis, enterotoxemia, and feedlot polio." The cows are kept alive on antibiotics to keep their livers from getting infected, and they are used so much that there are know "new and antibiotic-superbugs."

The cruelty to the individual animals described in this chapter, the repulsiveness of the conditions they are kept in (standing in deep manure), and the fact that they are slaughtered at the rate of 400 per hour absolutely make me feel like becoming a vegetarian.

Chapter 5 - The Processing Plant

Precis

According to Michael Pollen, in this country each one of us consumes a ton of corn every year. The amount we eat from sweet corn or rice corn in the form of recognizable corn (corn on the cob, muffins, tortillas, or chips) is less than a bushel per year per person. So the huge remaining amount of corn gets into our bodies through heavily processed food, including meat, soft drinks, snacks, and cereals. There are places called “wet mills” that break down corn kernels carbohydrate molecules (from the kind of corn we would not eat) into organic compounds, which are acids, sugars, starches, and alcohols. These become all the additives to food products that now have to be on package labels like glucose, corn syrup, ethanol, xanthum gum, MSG, etc. Pollan was not allowed to visit the two biggest wet mill companies in the U.S., but he did go to the Center for Crops Utilization Research at Iowa State University. He saw how corn germs are “squeezed” to make corn oil. Scientists now think that corn oil and other trans fats are worse for arteries than real butter. The liquid left over (the “slurry”) is dried to make corn starch that is turned into corn syrup, “the first cheap domestic substitute for cane sugar.” The same starch is also made into “adhesives, coatings, sizings, and plastics for industry.” What’s left of the swill is fermented and made into ethanol for use in gas tanks, and food and plastic processing.

Gems

“(Come to think of it, agribusiness has long since mastered this trick of turning petroleum into stead, though it still needs corn and cattle to do it.)

Thoughts and Questions

I just noticed there is corn syrup in the Haagen-Dazs Raspberry Sorbet I am eating right now. This chapter is the most depressing one yet. We learn that food companies have to keep processing food with more and more additives in order to convince us to spend more money for the added value the processing is supposedly giving us. In fact the fresher the food is the less money can be made from it. Because food is dependent on nature and human beings can only eat so much of it (1,500 lbs. of food per year), the only way for food companies to keep making more money is to keep adding stuff to the processing to get us to buy more new stuff. Farmers make some money on plain chicken, but processors make a mint on chicken nuggets. Research has even found a new corn starch that humans can eat any amount of because it goes right through us and is never digested. What a breakthrough.

Chapter 6 - A Republic of Fat

Precis

In the early 1900s, the U.S. was becoming an “Alcoholic Republic,” consuming whisky for breakfast, lunch, and dinner because it was so cheap. It was so cheap because it came from corn, and farmers were producing much too much corn. Today America has become the “Republic of Fat” because farmers are still producing too much corn, but this time their big corn product is high-fructose corn syrup HFCS). Because of supersizing (creating huge servings of corn-based products like soda), they are producing 17.5 billion pounds of it per year, and it is one of the biggest causes of the current obesity epidemic. The idea was that since people are embarrassed to have too many servings, producers would create bigger bottles and containers so that the first serving would be more like three servings.

Gems

“Since a soft drink’s main raw material – corn sweetener – was now so cheap, why not get people to pay just a few pennies more for a substantially bigger bottle? So began the transformation of the svelte eight-ounce Coke bottle into the chubby twenty-ouncer dispensed by most soda machines today.”
David Wallenstein was the man who invented supersizing and convinced Ray Kroc, McDonald’s founder, that people are embarrassed to ask for second servings. “Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Ma and jumbo fries…”Our hunter ancestors had to feast when they could and build up fat reserves to carry them through times of famine. The problem today is that “our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.”

Thoughts and Questions

You would think that out government would stop subsidizing farmers to grow corn in order to get to the rood cause of obesity (and also diabetes). Obviously, the farm lobbyists in Congress are doing a great job. Other members of Congress should fight for subsidizing healthy foods and help people who can’t afford it develop a taste for it.

Chapter 7 - The Meal

Precis

Thanks to a new McDonald’s food flyer, “A full Serving of Nutrition Facts,” it is possible to understand why chicken nuggets and hamburgers do not remind us of the animals they are associated with. There are 38 ingredients in a McNugget, including 13 coming from corn, some coming from an oil refinery or a chemical plant that help keep the nugget from spoiling and the starches inside from foaming during frying. One preservative called TBHQ is a form of lighter fluid, which in a larger quantity is fatal. A laboratory analysis of the corn in my family’s takeout meal found the following amount of corn: soda 100%, milk shake 78%, salad dressing 65%, chicken nuggets 56%, cheeseburger 52%, and French fries 23%. There is so much processed corn in fast food that like the koala bear who only eats euchalyptus Americans are becoming “corn’s koala.”

Gems

“Rather than being merely chicken fried in a pan,” a judge wrote in a lawsuit brought against McDonald’s by some obese teenagers, (McNuggets) “are a McFrankensteinian creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.”
“Indeed, this is the genius of the chicken nugget: It liberated chicken from the plate, making it as convenient, waste-free, and automobile-friendly as the precondimented hamburger. No doubt the food scientists at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, are right now hard at work on the one-handed salad.”

Thoughts and Questions

Because of the high price paid for the cheapish energy from McDonald’s fast food in the form of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, it seems strange that there isn’t more pressure on the food industry to ban the bad ingredients. Car companies didn’t want to install seat belts but the government forced them to do it. Industrial food is a huge waste of the energy from the sun the plants capture and that all people need to be healthy because food takes out most of the nutrients. The author says that “the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine.” It is also terrible that Americans export junk food like McDonald’s and also the problems of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Chapter 8 - All Flesh is Grass

Precis

Polyface Farm in Virginia is beautiful because the cows graze on the hillsides and not in some huge feed lot. It is amazingly productive because the farmer Joel Salatin follows nature’s rules. His cattle eat grass because that is what nature intended them to eat. After they graze, he brings chickens to the pasture because they eat grubs and fly larvae that are in the cowpats and get rid of parasites with their manure, totally eliminating the need for chemical parasiticides. The grass stays healthy and so does the soil, and the beef, eggs, and chicken, and also rabbit, and port are all delicious because of the quality of the grass.

Gems

“Polyface Farm stands about as far from this industrialized sort of agriculture as it is possible to get without leaving the planet.”Polyface farmer Joel Salatin: “Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians – we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians ever wanted – to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches…But the Western ind can’t bear an opt-out option. We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.”

Thoughts and Questions

Organic farming is also becoming industrialized according to Salatin. It makes sense that it would be because organic food products are being sold all over the country using huge amounts of fossil fuels. This means that they would probably have to be in plastic containers that wouldn’t be needed for products sold locally. Eventually preservatives might be used if the organic products were turning brown or beginning to rot. This is why green markets are great. The food is fresh and does not have to be put in foam containers and sprayed to keep it looking good.

Chapter 9 - Big Organic

Precis

Now that organic food is an $11 billion industry, it is not nearly as pure as all the literature about it says it is. Organic chickens are raised in a 20,000 chicken factory like places even if they are fed organic food. There are now organic TV dinners with processed preservatives in them like xanthan gum. Horizon organic cows eat organic feed but they live in close quarters and do not graze on grass. Industrial organic farms are not anything like a small organic farm that sells locally but at least they don’t use pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and antibiotics so they are better for the environment and better for us. The author’s Whole Food’s organic dinner was expensive but tasty except for the asparagus flown in from Argentina with its flavor of damp cardboard.

Gems

“I happen to believe the organic dinner I served my family is healthier than a meal of the same foods conventionally produced, but I’d be hard-pressed to prove it scientifically. What I could prove, with the help of a mass spectrometer, is that it contained little or no pesticide residue – the races of the carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors now routinely found in conventional produce and meat.”“So it happens that these organic blackberries perched on this mound of vanilla ice cream, having been grown in a complexly fertile soil and forced to fight their own fights against pests and disease, are in some quantifiable way more nutritious than conventional blackberries.” “They (organic chickens) get a few more square inches of living space per bird… since the little doors (to the outside space) remain shut until the birds are at least five weeks old and well settled in their habits, the chickens apparently see no reason to venture out…Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option.”

Thoughts and Questions

It was interesting to see that Cascadian Farm, a name you see all the time for organic foods, was bought out by General Mills. My mother doesn’t buy it anymore because of the ingredients. All the jam has sugar in it now instead of just pure fruit. Should there be a law against a company producing non-organic and organic food?

Chapter 10 Grass

Precis

Joel Salatin is the hero of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Unlike the vast majority of farmers he still grows grass. His grass or pasture is a complex “salad bar” for his animals, giving them a variety of tasty types of grasses that, unlike corn, they can digest without the need for antibiotics. He also practices management-intensive grazing, meaning he moves the cows to different pastures everyday so that the grass will keep growing and the soil underneath will stay rich. Chickens feed on the grass pastures after the cows and their excrement puts nitrogen into the soil, which helps it grow back for the cows without using any petroleum-based fertilizers. Pasture land has so much photosynthesis going on compared to industrial corn fields that it helps fight global warming by taking tons of carbon out of the air.

Gems

“When one off his cows moves into a new paddock, she doesn’t just see the color green; she doesn’t even see grass. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, this nice tuft of white clover, the emerald-green one over there with the heart-shaped leaves…”

“…if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road.”

Thoughts and Questions

Even though Joel Salatin does not support the industrial animal food and fertilizer companies not to mention the high-fructose corn syrup makers, shouldn’t Congress be demanding that there be more of a balance of pasture land with feed lots? Can’t there
be anti-industrial corn lobbyinsts who speak about corn’s responsibility for global warming and obesity?


Chapter 11 The Animals

Precis

On Polyface farm the animals are in perfect balance with nature. Joel Salatin moves his chicken to different parts of pasture in his Eggmobile. At each stop they eat the grubs and parasites in cowpats, which gives them protein that makes their eggs rich and delicious, and they fertilize the soil. His chickens are his most profitable product, but if he had any more of them he would upset the balance of nature. They would produce more nitrogen than the soil could use, and then the excess nitrogen would cause a pollution problem. When his rabbits are not grazing, he puts them in suspended cages so that their urine, which has too much ammonia, can create a rich soil full of earthworms for the chickens to eat.


Gems

Joel’s quotes:

“Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die.”

“One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

Thoughts and Questions

The cruelty of cutting off the tails of pigs in CAFOs to make their stump so sensitive that the pain makes them stop the younger pigs from chewing on them (because they are weened ten days after birth instead of 13 weeks on Joel’s farm) is unbelievable. The farmers don’t care about the pigs’ pain. They just don’t want to have to deal with infection. The fact that the pigs are so depressed standing in a metal structure with no “earth or straw or sunshine” that they wouldn’t care if their tails were chewed on should be enough to bring in the animal rights police.


Chapter 12 Slaughter in a Glass Abattoir

Precis

A few hundred chickens on Joel Salatin’s farm are killed in an open-air processing shed six times a month. They are put upside down into “killing cones” with a bottom opening for the chicken’s head. The executioner cuts the artery near the chicken’s windpipe, and the blood runs down a gutter into a bucket. The chicken’s body goes into spasms and it takes several minutes before the spasms stop. Michael Pollan is shown the technique and kills about a dozen chickens. Next they go in a spinning washing machine like device called a plucker that takes off the feathers. Then comes evisceration and the drop into a holding tank of ice water, where the customers can pick out the one or ones they want.

Gems

“In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.”

“You can’t regulate integrity.”

“WE do not allow the government to dictate what religion you can observe, so why should we allow them to dictate what kind of food you can buy.”

Thoughts and Questions

Joel Salatin hates government regulations because they keep him from being able to process other animals on the farm. The way the industrial feed lots treat animals is cruel and disgusting. They stand in their poop all day, and yet the government thinks that Joel’s open air slaughterhouse is unclean because it doesn’t have walls that can be washed down. There aren’t that many people who could be farmers as responsible as Joel, but the government be encouraging as many of them as possible because they respect nature and will preserve the land.

Chapter 13 The Market

Precis

Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm would never sell food to Whole Foods and would never feed his cows corn-based grain. Both are part of industrial agriculture which depends on huge consumption of fossil fuels, and both harm nature. Joel believes that food should serve local communities and that people should know who grows their food so that they can trust them. He says that even though his food might cost a little more than supermarket food, it is actually the cheapest food there is. This is because with his food “Society is not bearing the cost of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water – of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.” Junk food costs society a huge amount for health care and cleaning up the environment.

Gems

“Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

“Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world.”

Thoughts and Questions

The idea of having a bar code on food products in this country the way they do in Denmark that you could scan yourself in a market to see where the food comes from might shock people into wanting non-industrial food. If you expect to see a cow or a steer grazing in a pasture on your beef bar code, and instead you see them in a CAFO standing in a crowded factory on a pile of poop, it might revolt you so much that you would put that beef back. Buying more expensive food at a farmer’s market where you can see a picture of the pasture where the cow is grazing might seem worth it.

It’s also important to have local farmer’s markets because if there is ever a large-scale food disease epidemic or if something happens to hurt the industrial food system like an oil crisis, the country will still have a food source.


Chapter 14 The Meal

Precis

Michael Pollan decides to make a meal for friends in Virginia using all local products. He only cheats on the chocolate, which is not harvested in Virginia. He gets chickens he helped kill from Polyface Farm, and he feels pretty guilty about them. He puts them in a brine, which is a liquid with salt that cleans the meat and takes away the smell he remembers from the killing. The chicken ends up tasting amazingly good and so does the chocolate soufflé because it is made with the rich Polyface Farm eggs. He talks about how grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs have much less fat and especially the bad saturated fats than the same products from grain (corn) fed animals do and that they have “conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in them that might prevent cancer and obesity.

Gems

“One of the reasons we cook meat (besides making it tastier and easier to digest) is to civilize, or sublimate, what is at bottom a fairly brutal transaction between animals.”

Thoughts and Questions

If grass-fed meat and other grass-fed animal products had labels on them saying that there are studies that show they help prevent cancer and obesity, it might make a difference to the way people buy food.


Chapter 15 The Forager

Precis

Pollan decides he wants to make a meal with ingredients he had “hunted, gathered, and grown” himself so he can have a first hand experience with the food chain (“to see what it’d be like to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved). He could grow stuff because he was a gardener in California, but he had never hunted anything,
and he was not that confident he could tell which were the poisonous mushrooms out in the woods.

Gems

“…you have to have had a certain kind of dad in order to join the culture of hunting in America, and mine, one of the great indoorsmen, was emphatically not that dad. My father looked upon hunting as a human activity that had stopped making sense with the invention of the steakhouse.”

Thoughts and Questions

Would the pro-gun people like it if meat eaters all suddenly felt that they should kill an animal for food or would they be worried that this could lead to being against CAFO’s and be bad news for the oil industry?



Chapter 16 The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Precis

Unlike a koala bear who only eats eucalyptus leaves, rats and humans have a huge choice of things they can eat because of their teeth, jaws, and the stomach enzyme that can break down meat. It is a huge problem to figure out what is safe to eat and what is not. Our sense of taste and our sense of disgust guide us, but there is still a lot of anxiety about what to eat especially for Americans. In other countries where there is a tradition of a national cuisine, people know what they like and want to eat. In this country marketing food companies have an easy time telling a lot of Americans what to eat because we don’t have so much tradition about eating. The omnivore’s dilemma in America is about listening to advertising and having too many directions to go in like eating fast foods to save time and money or eating carbohydrates to lose weight.

Gems

“Pregnant women are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, probably an adaptation to protect the developing fetus against even the mild plant toxins found in foods like broccoli.”

“Meanwhile, the kids, and Dad, too, if he’s around, each fix something different for themselves, because Dan’s on a low-carb diet, the teenager’s become a vegetarian, and the eight-year-old is on a strict ration of pizza that the shrink says it’s best to indulge (lest she develop eating disorders later on in life).

Thoughts and Questions

In order to make money food companies are harming people’s health and the environment. Maybe the new health care program should make everyone see a nutritionist and give some rewards to people who eat food from farmers markets.

Chapter 17 The Ethics of Eating Animals

Precis

Is it morally all right to kill animals to eat their meat? Could eating meat soon be considered to be just as wrong as having slaves or treating women as second-class citizens? According to the animals’ rights activist Peter Singer, in just the way that humans should not exploit other humans because we all have the same interests in being treated fairly, we should not exploit animals either because animals want to avoid pain and suffering just the way people do. Animals in CAFOs suffer a lot. They are not treated with any dignity. In fact, they are treated like machines. They are pressed in tightly with no space to move and forced to take antibiotics because they are stuck standing in their poop. Even Singer has to admit than animals that live on pasture land the way they do on Polyface Farm are treated with dignity. If they die without suffering, then he says he can’t condemn the people who eat meat from a farm like this.

Gems

“Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig – an animal easily as intelligent as a dog – that becomes the Christmas ham.”

“No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat.”

Thoughts and Questions

The facts that animal herds have to be thinned or they would die for lack of food and that if everybody became a vegetarian, all the good land would have to be cultivated to produce enough food and animals would have no place to go, make it seem as though the Indians had it right. They ate buffalo but they ate it with great respect for the animal. Buying food from local farms that treat animals with respect could be the best move for animals and people.

Chapter 18 Hunting

Precis

This chapter starts out with the author as a surprisingly enthusiastic hunter on his first time out feeling in tune with nature. For his friend Angelo the hunt is all about food and in this case, since they are hunting pigs, about prosciutto. For the author hunting is a way of being more honest about where meat comes from and taking responsibility for
getting it. He misses his chance to shoot the first time because he forgets to pump his gun, and he blames the fancy picnic lunch they had for taking away his “hunter’s edge.” Then he finally does hit a big pig, who he guesses weighs as much as he does. He does not feel anything except excitement even after the pig is dead until the cleaning when he feels revolted and cannot imagine eating any part of the animal.

Gems

“This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting – to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing…”

“Here, I decided was one of the signal virtues of hunting: It puts large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of our respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I’m sure there are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take some doing.”

“And what was I so damned proud of, anyway? I’d killed a pig with a gun, big deal.”


Thoughts and Questions

The author realizes from a digital picture of himself taken after his successful shot that his “shit-eating grin” with the huge animal carcass below him was “obscene.” Seeing what happened objectively was the opposite feeling he had when he had just killed the pig. The picture was like pornography to him. If packages of meat had pictures of the animal being slaughtered especially in an industrial feed lot, maybe people would stop buying it..

Chapter 19 Gathering

Precis

Mushroom knowing people called mycophiles think that looking for mushrooms is more like hunting than harvesting because mushrooms seem deliberately to hide from you in places where you can easily get lost. Because mushrooms are so expensive, mushroom hunters do not want to let anyone else accompany them to their special spots. To find them you have to “get our eyes on.” There are also many mycophobes – people who hate mushrooms – because mushrooms can be deadly. This is the omnivore’s dilemma. It is not that easy to tell which ones are poisonous and which are not. There is a lot we don’t know about mushrooms because there root-like structure under the ground is too tiny to take out of the ground without having it fall apart. Fungi are indispensable to life on earth because they decompose all the organic matter to keep the carbon cycle going.

Gems

“In deciding whether or not to ingest a new food, the omnivore will happily follow the lead of a fellow omnivore who has eaten the same food and lived to talk about it. This is one advantage we have over the rat, which has no way of sharing with other rats the results of his digestive experiments with novel foodstuffs.”

“A single fungus recently found in Michigan covers an area of forty acres underground and is thought to be a few centuries old.”

Thoughts and Questions

Since oyster mushrooms can change the waste from petrochemicals into protein that is edible, can’t the spores be spread around the coast where there are oil spills? It seems as though we should be putting a lot of money into mushroom research because of their
power to get rid of our pollution.

Chapter 20 The Perfect Meal

Precis

The last chapter in the book is about the author’s preparation of his hunter-gatherer meal in which he has hunted, gathered, or grown all the ingredients. He included the animal (the California wild pig he shot), vegetable (fava beens and lettuce from his garden), and fungus (morels he foraged) food kingdoms and an edible mineral (salt). He spent no money on the meal and cooked it all by himself. Except for the pollution in the San Francisco Bay that prevented him from getting clean salt and the fact that the abalone he risked his life to get had to be eaten right away and wouldn’t make it to the dinner on time,he did well on goals. The meal took forever to make so it was not a practical idea to recommend. He did it to learn more about the whole food culture in this country. He learned how to collect yeast out of the air to make bread, that it is all right to eat meat if you honor the edible animal by preparing it with respect and appreciating its sacrifice to give you enjoyment and healthy food, and that it is possible to make a meal that does not hurt the world. His foods were healthy for his guests because no antibiotics and no oil and chemicals in fertilizers and pesticides were involved in their growing or in transportation.

Gems

“Abalone are gathered during unusually low tides by wading and diving among and beneath underwater boulders and feeling around blindly for their upside-down fottball-size shells with hands too numb to feel anything – except, that is, the barbed spines of sea urchins, which happen to occupy many of the same underwater crevices abalone.”

“For a quick lunch I’d picked up a takeaway plastic tray of sushi – japanies fast food – and, you know, it tasted just great. So how much better could I reasonably expect this dinner- this daylong (indeed, months-long) extravaganza, this extremely low food feast – to taste?”

“I knew and could picture the very oaks and pines that had nourished the pigs and the mushrooms that were nourishing us. And I knew the true cost of tis food, the precise sacrifice of time and energy and life it had entailed.”


Thoughts and Questions

If hunter-gatherer meals are not practical since we cannot all go out and shoot a wild animal everyday, and industrial organic farming ends up using a lot of petrochemicals in transportation and in processing sugar and feeds its cows organic grain instead of grass, and local organic farmers can only feed people in their area so they don’t have to use chemicals to preserve it or oil to transport it, then what is the answer to giving Americans healthy food? The big problem is that unhealthy food is cheap and tastes good to people. The government should start subsidizing organic food growers and stop supporting industrial corn growers. Then they could sell grass fed chicken and beef to healthy fast food places that could grill chicken and beef shish kebabs, the great ones that are sold during street fairs, using healthy oil for the grilling, and the prices wouldn’t have to be too high.