The Omnivore's Dilemma

1) "You would think that competition among individuals would threaten the tranquillity of such a crowded metropolis, yet the modern field of corn forms a most orderly mob. This is because every plant in it, being an F-1 hybrid, is genetically identical to every other. Since no individual plant has inherited any competitive edge over any other, precious resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are shared equitably. There are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants."

2) "I was curious to know what feedlot beef would taste like now, if I could taste the corn or even, since taste is as much a matter of what's in the head as it is about molecules dancing on the tongue, some hint of the petroleum. '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."

3) "Tail docking is the USDA's recommended solution to the porcine 'vice' of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most---but not quite all---of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it's not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency."

4) "I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding his head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken's neck. I worried about not cutting hard enough, which would have prolonged the bird's suffering, but needn't have: The blade was sharp and sliced easily through the white feathers covering the bird's neck, which promptly blossomed a brilliant red. Before I could let go of the bird's suddenly limp head my hand was painted in a gush of warm blood. Somehow, an errant droplet spattered the lens of my glasses, leaving a tiny, fogged red blot in my field of vision for the rest of the morning."

5) "The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever. (It is no accident that the nonunion workers in these factories receive little more consideration than the animals in their care.) Here in these wretched places life itself is redefined---as "protein production"---and with it "suffering." That venerable word becomes "stress," an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution such as clipping the beaks of chickens or docking the tails of pigs or, in the industry's latest initiative, simply engineering the "stress gene" out of pigs and chickens. It all sounds very much like our worst nightmares of confinement and torture, and it is that, but it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath those grim sheet-metal roofs into the brief, pitiless life of a production unit in the days before the suffering gene was found."

Bravo! This is the kind of book from Pollan that I wanted to see after reading [b:The Botany of Desire|13839|The Botany of Desire A Plant's-Eye View of the World|Michael Pollan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166573832s/13839.jpg|908398]. Researched and well-edited, but refreshingly introspective and well-balanced with real life experience. Pollan journeys into the heart of conscious food preparation and eating and brings his insight to fruition in an extremely thoughtful manner, by tracing 4 different meals to their source and explicating the process of how they came to his table. On the way, he teaches us of the irony behind the industrial use of the term "organic", reminds us of the horrors of agribusiness, chides vegetarians for their philosophical naivete, and gently guides us into appreciation of what it is to be grateful for and be fully aware of what we put into our bodies.

Pollan, as in The Botany of Desire, loves to embark on tangential dreamy intellectual meanderings, but this time around, he harnesses his gaze and keeps it focused on elaborating the intention behind his writing. His writing itself can be clever and utilizes deft turns of phrase and word placement, but without being overly wordy and self-conscious.

His (subtle) indictment of industrial agriculture is well-grounded in a thoughtful and researched omnivorous exploration of the alternatives. Eat on, conscious omnivores.

I was loaned this by my friend, Jasmine, who thought I'd enjoy it/should read it and I have to say that her prediction was spot-on.

If you've ever wonder about the state of our industrial food system today (what's wrong with Agribusiness, mass distribution of heavily-processed food, the apparent necessity of such a system given our ever-expanding national and world population, how we got to this point), this is the book to read. Pollan covers everything from the co-evolution of corn and modern agricultural practices to the conditions of large feedlot operations to "grass farmers" to the benefits and limitations of foraging and hunting to the definition of "organic" in our present-day food economy.

This book is a sweeping tour de force that encompasses a LOT in its 300 or so pages. Some have accused Pollan of misrepresenting possible "solutions" to problems he addresses here, but I think he does a good job of qualifying each assertion he makes with the necessary disclaimers and cautionary factoids (and if those seem tossed off, it's simply because so many other sources address the issue and he's short on space). Is that giving him the benefit of the doubt? Maybe. But I think he makes a lot of good points, regardless.

This book left me with a lot of really helpful, and interesting information, a better understanding of the events leading up to our current food situation, and some questions that would be answered in Pollan's next book...