We meet to discuss Omnivore's Dilemma this Tuesday evening at 6PM in the ASAP lounge!
I haven't quite finished the book, so I don't want to go searching for book reviews yet, but I do want to mention Michael Pollan's website. Some of the sections of the Omnivore's Dilemma have also been published in the New York Times Magazine, such as this one, about Pollan becoming a hunter/gatherer.
If anyone wants to add links to reviews or other writings for us to check out, feel free.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
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Is there a Nobel price for Journalism?
When some kids tend to read early in their life, it is often that one book becomes many, rooting this idealism that the young brings with them into the road to adulthood.
For the adults, however, books rarely become discoveries. We tend to cherry pick books that read about a passion we already have, we seek the confirmation of our ideas. Often, we fall onto something new and exiting. Some great new ideas that sprang out of nowhere, or from someone who spent years browsing into huge libraries in order to finally come up with stupendous theories about life and the way we live it. Unfortunately, these authors are usually biased, and it is so often that an educated reader needs to trash a third or more of the political contents of a book; if he or she, wants to fully savor and meditate the ideas behind the main thesis.
Then, all of the sudden, a book arrives and manages to shake us up like we have never felt so shaken before: A book that comes with an immense surprise by revealing many things we would have never guessed in a lifetime; a book all about each one of us, about what we are made of, what we eat, how we eat. A book which describes something so meshed into our lives (our food), a book that reads about a passion exercised by so many including myself (cooking), and finally, a book so humble, so easy to read yet tremendously insightful. The "Omnivore Dilemma" of Michael Pollan is a pure masterpiece, and, if I may say so, a book to devour.
Michael Pollan may be a bit of a scientist but he is a heck of a journalist. And it is a wonderful thing: The reading is as limpid as a glass of Evian, yet rich as a bucket of soymilk. The Book is set in three parts, each like a glorious chapter about the main three different cosmographies of the world of food: the industrial food, the organic food, and what feeds the hunter-gatherers. If Michael Pollan delivers the world of industrial food and its horror stories, he does it without a trace hysteria. His style is calm, very academic for a journalist. Well, if Michael Pollan teaches Journalism at Berkeley, he better be good! And he is indeed an epitome of what's best in journalism: he just reports, simply and without exaggeration. Mr. Pollan understands that the horror of engineered food stands on its own without the help of dramatization. To tell its huge drama, the voice of science with a journalistic accent will just suffice to fright the heck out of any reader.
And don't get fooled by the title: Don't go thinking that Michael Pollan is some sort of Dr. Phil with a flower in his hair and hay in his mouth who's just pulled another pamphlet to make Oprah look good for the cover of her magazine. The book is not about healthy recipes. The "Omnivore Dilemma" is indeed a political book of the highest degree. It is a biological "j' accuse!", a powerful dissent against the dictatorship of the "corporotocracy" and the cult of greed: the big oil/corporate food processors/pharmaceutical industry dictatorship over our nutrition for their sole enrichment.
The intents and logic of their science and industries are indeed tremendously despotic: For the name of quick profits, these corporations aggressively changed the way plants are now grown - from the sun energy to fossil fuel -. They "re-engineered" cows in order for them to "graze" on corn for most of their lives. But since cows are not made to eat such food, they are constantly medicated. Chicken and hogs go into the same treatment.
Pollan notes that corporations have engineered our food supplies in such ways, that today's customers, after centuries of basking comfortably into their own food cultures are now hit again by this `omnivore's dilemma': a condition that defines the everyday adventure of omnivores, especially the human kind, seeking to find edible foods that can trusted while struggling to recognize the food that won't kill them in a short or a painful long term. No wonder this sounds so despotic: Michael Pollan reminds us that the very science of growing plants -and especially corn- out of fossil fuel is a creation of the military that needed to get rid of their vast surplus of chemical weapons.
If, in the "Omnivore's Dilemma" corporate greed is the evil Empire, corn is its “Darth Vador”. It is the sword brandished by these corporations to slaughter the cows, the hogs and the hens that will finished, artificially or naturally flavored, into our plates. Its agriculture is based exclusively on oil: fossil fuel that keeps poisoning heavily our rivers and atmosphere while intensive corn farming and feeding are eradicating pastures and grasses from our landscapes, abolishing our chance in the fight against Global warming. According to Michael Pollan, if grasses and pastures were to flourish instead on the same amount of acres raped by the corn industry, they would absorb the equivalent of carbon emitted by 4 millions cars!
If american agriculture is a mess of subsidy checks to farmers who hate what they grow, but are economically trapped into hubris government agricultural programs written by corporate lobbyists,then Michael Pollan reports alongside the tear jerking beauty of grass farming. Its natural mechanism makes cattle so happy, bulls act just like "big cats" around human presence. The beauty of its natural cycles, and the human, natural and financial profit that this kind of farming generates, makes you wonder why this has not become the norm. What in the hell changed America from the pastoral dream of Thomas Jefferson? It's a question that Michael Pollan seemed to have figured so brilliantly:
"The Government writes no subsidy checks to grass farmers. Grass farmers, who buy little in the way of pesticides and fertilizers, do little to support agribusiness or the pharmaceutical industry or big oil. A surplus of grass does nothing for a nation's power or its balance of payments. Grass is not a commodity. What grass farmers grow can't easily be accumulated, traded, transported, or stored, at least for very long. [...] Unlike grain, grass can't be broken down into its constituent molecules and reassembled as value-added processed foods; meat, milk, and fiber is all about you can make out of grass, and the only way to do that is with living organism, not a machine.
Grass farming with skill involves so many variables, and so much local knowledge, that it is difficult to systematize. As faithful as the logic of biology as a carefully grazed pasture is, it meshes poorly with the logic of industry, which has no use for anything it cannot bent to its wheels and bottom line. And, at least for the time being, it is the logic of industry that rules."
Not a must read. A vital read.
By the way, I wrote the original review for Michael Pollan's book here(April. last year):
This was a really great book to read, both for its literary style and content.
I would encourage those who have not read it, to at least give the first chapter a try.
I believe you can download a few pages from Michael Pollan's site itself.
I am sure a lot of you guys, Kirstie, Ondrej, Stefan, Christine for example, would have a lot to say about the topic since you guys love good cuisine so much.
I live the omnivore's dilemma everyday... everytime I go to the supermarket or as simple as getting the food for asap...I cannot help but to read the back of the label and rapidly travel in my mind to the possible origins of the propylene glycol ingredient written on the back of my yoghurt container.
-Astrid
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