Before starting chapter 3, I thought it might be better to just do a
quick note-to-self what I had read from chapter 1 and chapter 2.
I had been watching Kdramas and
Chinese dramas until it reached the point I could not stand both the
dramas and myself anymore. Then, I asked my daughter if she could recommend me any
book to read and here it is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.
Well, after finishing Introduction “Our National Eating Disorder”,
I kind of felt yeah yeah, I know, I know, and I was not sure if the book would
interest me. Anyway, I did not want to
give up on a book recommended by my daughter.
So, here I am reading the 421-page and 20-chapter book.
I Industrial
Corn Chapter 1 - 7
Chapter 1 – The Plant – Corn’s Conquest
Corns are native to Central America. Corns won over the
wheat because 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. Human intervened with corns’ pollination. Early in the twentieth
century, American corn breeders figured out how to bring corn reproduction
under firm control and to protect the seed from copiers. Farmers had to buy new
seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce
themselves, they now depended on a corporation.
(I asked my daughter why the author only targeted corns. She said I should continue reading and I would
understand. OK. OK, reading now.)
Chapter 2 – The Farm
The Naylor farm began in 1919 when George Naylor’s grandfather
bought the farm in Iowa. Through decades, the seeds had been genetically modified
to yield more bushels per acre and with the discovery of fix nitrogen by Fritz
Harber, the Nobel Prize winner in 1920, the basis of soil fertility shifted
from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel
which was used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce nitrogen-based fertilizers. In 2005, the average cost to grow one bushel
of Iowa corns was about $2.50 but it was only sold for $1.45. Why the farmers still grew more and more corns? Based on Naylor, to subsidize the loss, so,
farmers did everything they could to make more bushels of corns per acre, and
if they gave up on their lands, then, other farmers would come in to still grow
corns anyway. They grew 2 things; corns and soybeans. They just could not
switch to grow anything else.
Chapter 3 – The Elevator
Naylor hauled his corn each
October to the grain elevator in Farnhamville, Iowa. The elevator is warehouse filled by
conveyor belt and emptied by spigot. Cargill and ADM companies guide corn’s
path at every step of the
way: They provide the pesticide and fertilizer to the farmers; operate most of America’s grain
elevators; broker and ship most of the exports; perform the wet and dry
milling; feed the livestock and then
slaughter the corn fattened animals; distill the ethanol; and manufacture the high-fructose corn
syrup and the numberless other fractions derived from number 2 field corn (a
type of commodity corn). They do
not have to pay much per bushel as the loss is normally covered by the government
subsidy which represents roughly a quarter of $19 billion U.S. taxpayers spend
each year on payment to farmers.
Chapter 4 – The Feedlot - Making Meat (54,000 kernels)
The biggest portion of a
bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 54,000 kernels)
goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America’s 100
millions beef cattle. Those animals never used to eat corn at all. Even farmed salmon now were bred to tolerate
grain. CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) was the product of
government policy; gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn.
In 1950s, cows were 2 to 3 years old at slaughter. Now, we get there a 14 to 16
months.
Cattle, by nature, eat
grass but we force them to eat corns and when it is at the point they cannot
tolerate it, then, they get sick and when they are sick, we give them
antibiotics. “We are what we eat” but we
are also what we eat eats too.
Chapter 5 – The Processing
Plant – Making Complex foods (18,000 kernels)
“First we separate the
corn into its botanical parts-embryo, endosperm, fiber-and then, into its
chemical parts.” These fractionated
biomass control agents-the sugars and starches, the alcohols and acids, the
emulsifiers and stabilizers and viscosity-then, become the mixes in processed
food. Processing plants like General Mills try to make more complex food each
year to make people eat more and pay more for their products. They make us to
believe the blend of their complex food is really heart healthy food. We become
industrial eater and deviate more and more from whole food.
Chapter 6 – The Consumer
– A Republic of Fat
1980 was the year corn
first became an ingredient in Coca-cola. Since 1985, an American’s annual consumption
of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has gone from 45 pounds to 66 pounds. In
fact, our consumption of all added sugars-cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey,
maple syrup, whatever-has climbed from 128 pounds to 158 pounds per person.
Chapter 7 – The Meal –
Fast Food
This is how the
laboratory measured our meal: soda (100% corn), milk shake (78%), salad
dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries
(23%). We have become the race of corn eaters.
II Pastoral
Grass Chapter 8 - 14
Chapter 8 – All Flesh
is Grass
Polyface Farm in Swoope,
Virginia, Joel Salatin called himself “I’m a grass farmer.” He raises chicken,
beef, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries on
one hundred acres of pasture patchworked info another 450 acres of forest.
|
Naylor Farm
|
Polyface Farm
|
|
Industrial
Annual Species
Monoculture
Fossil energy
Global market
Specialized
Mechanical
Imported Fertility
Myriad inputs
|
Pastoral
Perennial species
Polyculture
Solar energy
Local market
Diversified
Biological
Local fertility
Chicken feed
|
Chapter 9 – Big Organic
Small Planet Foods, formerly
Cascadian Farm, and Earthbound Farm, successfully converted conventional farms
into industrial organic farms. Compost and animal manures are used instead of NPK
fertilizers. Time, space, frequent tilling and hand pulling are used to control
weeds. To control pests, every six or
seven strips of lettuce is punctuated with a strip of flowers; sweet alyssum,
which attracts the lacewings and syrphid flies that eat the aphids that an
molest lettuces.
Rosie, the organic
free-range chicken, are actually free-range? They are called organic because they do not receive
antibiotics and they are fed by certified organic feed. Twenty thousand birds are kept inside the
same shed for about 5 weeks until the shed opens 2 doors, one at each end of
the shed after the 5 weeks to allow the birds to come outside for about 2 weeks
before being slaughtered. As they get
used to their 5 weeks habit already, so, most of them rarely come outside to
enjoy their last 2-week vacation.
Organic industrial
meals are not cheap but as consumers, we probably feel better with less
pesticides coming in our bodies. Though, carbon footprint produced by organic
industry is not necessarily lower than conventional farming considering bulky
loads of compost across the countryside and weeding the fields, a particularly
energy-intensive process involving extra irrigation and extra cultivation. The
need to transport produces; Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina,
blackberries trucked up from Mexico, a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from
the moment it was picked in Arizona, also contributes to carbon footprint.
Chapter 10 – GRASS – Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Pasture
One of the principles of
modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible, farmers should
rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured every day by
photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum.
Grass farmers should
not violate the law of the second bite. Never let your cows to take a second
bite of a grass before it has had a chance to fully recover. This prevents the
land from degrading.
The more croplands turn
into pastures, the less carbon footprint in the atmosphere. But why in the world did Americans ever take
ruminants off the grass, put them in sheds and feed them with corns? The answer
is grass is not a commodity. Grass cannot easily be accumulated, traded,
transported, or stored for very long.
Grass cannot be broken down into its constituent molecules and
reassembled as value-added processed foods.
Chapter 11 – The Animals
– Practicing Complexity
At Polyface Farm, the
existence of 450-acre of woodland is as important as the 100-acre open grass
itself. The tree provide firewood to keep the farmers warm in the winter, the
woodchips are used to make compost from chicken, or rabbit or cow waste.
On the grass land, the main reason Polyface Farm is completely self-sufficient
in nitrogen is that a chicken, defecating copiously, pays a visit to every
square foot of it at several points during the season. Chickens also dine on
insects that would otherwise bother the cows. They also pick insect larvae and
parasites out of the animal’s droppings.
Turkeys eat the bugs,
mow the grass, and fertilize the trees and vines in the orchard. The pigs are treated as pigs rather than as a stressful
protein machine.
Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships
found in nature – the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and
interdependence.
Chapter 12 –
SLAUGHTER – In a Glass Abattoir
Polyface Farm slaughters
chicken and sells it at the shop next to the processing shed. The customers pick their chicken out of the
tank and bag it themselves. Having
customers bag their own chickens preserves the fiction that they are not buying
a processed food product. Polyface chicken
costs $2.05 a pound, compared to $1.29 at the local supermarket.
Polyface regards chicken
guts as a form of biological wealth-nitrogen the farm can return to the land by
locking it down with carbon harvested from the woodlot. When spring comes, the cakey black compost
will be ready to spread onto the pastures and turn back into grass.
Chapter 13 – THE
MARKET – Greetings from the Non-Barcode People
Nation had
distinguished between industrial and artisanal enterprises.
Industrial farmers are selling commodities. Producer must sell more cheaply and
grow bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does. Both producers and consumers are careless. Cheapness
and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. Consumers
do not know the other end of their food chain.
Artisanal production focuses
on local markets, relies on reputation and word of mouth and lastly, as much as
possible, on free solar energy rather than costly fossil fuels.
Consumers should
relearn to eat seasonally and chefs should cook seasonal food. Polyface Farm sells their produces to local
restaurants. Chefs has done so much to educate the public about the virtue of
local agriculture, the pleasures of eating by the season, and the superior qualities
of exceptionally fresh food grown with care and without chemicals.
Chaper 14 – THE MEAL
– Grass Fed
As long as one egg
looks like another, chicken like chicken, beef beef, the substitution of
quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers. Pastured eggs
represent more omega-3s, beta-carotene and vitamin E than industrial eggs. So, paying $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs are
much better deal than paying $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs.
When chickens get to
live like chickens, they will taste like chickens, too.
III Personal – The Forest
Chapter 15 – The Forager
Angelo, not only
skilled in the arts of hunting and gathering (and butchering), but also well
versed in the flora, fauna, and fungi of Northern California. He has the
passions of foraging, hunting, cooking, pickling, curing salamis, sausage, and
making wine in the fall. Fungi can be deadly poisonous. We need someone like Angelo
to go hunt with. Even the yellow funnel-shaped chanterelle being found can
actually be false chanterelle.
Chapter 16 – The Omnivore’s
Dilemma
The set of rules for
preparing food we call a cuisine, for example, specifies combinations of foods
and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma.
The dangers of eating raw fish are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a
potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines
in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties.
The French,
wine-swilling cheese eaters, eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but
they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules. They eat small
portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone;
and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French
culture of food successfully negotiates the omnivore’s dilemma, allowing the
French to enjoy their meals without ruining their health.
Chapter 17 – The Ethics
of Eating Animals
People who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they
eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless. Maybe when we eat animals, we should eat them
with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.
Chapter 18 – Hunting
– The Meat
Hunting offers human’s last best chance to escape history and return to the
state of nature.
“When one is hunting,
the air has another, more exquisite feel as it glides over the skin or enters
the lungs, the rocks acquire a more expressive physiognomy, and the vegetation
becomes loaded with meaning. But all this is due to the fact that the hunter,
while he advances or waits crouching, feels tied through the earth to the
animal he pursues, whether the animal is in view, hidden, or absent.”
Chapter 19 – Gathering
– The Fungi
Andrew Weil points out, “mushrooms have little to do with the sun.” The emerge at
night and wither in the light of day. Their energies are of an entirely
different order from those of plants, and their energies are prodigious and
strange. Their energies derive from the moon rather than the sun.
Mushroom like morels,
they are trying to escape the dying forest, they also play a role in its
renewal. The slightly sulfurous, meaty order of morels attracts flies, which
lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom’s hollow stalk. Larvae emerge and feed
on the flesh of the morels; birds then return to the forest to feed on the
larvae, in the process dropping seeds the sprout on the forest floor. Mushrooms
are hinges in nature, now turning toward death, now toward new life.
Chapter 20 – The
Perfect Meal
A perfect meal is a meal
that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it. Stock does not
come from a can, it comes from the bones of animals. The yeast that leavens our
bread comes not from a packet but from the air we breathe. When we cook a meal,
it is more ritual than realistic because it dwells on such things, reminding us
how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields,
the oceans as much as the meadows.
The End
