HW 7c

Omnivore’s Dilemma By Michael Pollan

Chapter 11:

Joel Salatin does no work on his farm because he lets the animals do all the work for him. They create the healthier farm by fertilizing, feeding, and other process that help the farm. The animals nurturer other animals, and in turn, nurturing themselves. 

Gems:
“In nature you’ll always find birds following herbivores...The egret perched on the rhino’s nose, the pheasants and turkeys trailing after the bison – that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate,” (p. 211)

"The idea is to not slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species "fully express their physiological distinctiveness."” (p.215)

Thoughts:

This is how I always imagined a farm working because this is how children’s books make farms out to be. But why would they lie. The truth is they never did because the books, stories and songs have been around for years and will never change. The industrial food market has turned the childhood memories of a great farm in America to dust. But with the will of Joel Salatin these childhood stories are real to me and can be real for many kids.


Chapter 12: 

Joel Salatin slaughters his animals himself to insure a guarantee to his consumers that the life cycle of the chicken was on his very farm. He does not want them shipped out to let someone else to slaughter his work.

Gems:
"In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling." (p.233)

The problem with current food-safety regulations, in Joel’s view, is that they are one-size-fits-all rules designed to regulate giant slaughterhouses that are mindlessly applied to small farms...” (p. 229)

Thoughts: 
This is a very nice peace of mind. But how do you find farms like Joel Salatin? The farms are not advertised or talked about and I don’t know how reliable the Internet is. There should be a way to know legitimate famers that do this.

Chapter 13: Effort to eat real organic food or "non-barcode" food is what makes farms like Joel Salatin appealing. People are willing to pay high prices for quality food because diseases are common with industrial foods.

Gems:
"Already the desire on the part of consumers to put something different into their bodies has created an $11 billion market in organic food. That marketplace was built by consumers and farmers working informally together outside the system, with exactly no help from the government." (p.257)

“Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn’t attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect,” (p.249)

Thoughts: 
My family doesn’t put the effort in, to eat non-barcode food because my dad has been living for 63 years and he has been eating the same food for all that time so he thinks that he should not have to pay the extra money and go far just to get “fresher” meat. As well my point from before; Where do you go?


Chapter 14: 

The chicken I had gathered had a higher nutritional standard, omega-3s, vitamin E and heath values that only could be gained by eating chickens raised on grass.

Gems:
“The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of the civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked – nature into culture,” (p.264)

“Both literally and metaphorically, a saltwater bath cleanses meat, which perhaps explains why the kosher laws- one culture's way of coming to terms with the killing and eating of animals- insist on the salting of meat." (p.264)

Thoughts: 
The health benefits in our society don’t out way the need for low prices. So we look to other food that is made cheaper but to a lot of people tastes them same. This is an example of my life reading this will not change what I eat that much, if any.

Chapter 15: 

The hunter/gatherer method is not an aliquot method to survive in our modern society because humans out number their wild prey. The idea of killing you own food makes me want to go back to another food chain. 

Gems:
“Foraging for wild plants and animals is, after all, the way human species has fed itself for 99 percent of its time on earth; this is precisely the food chain natural selection designed us for." (p.280)

“By contrast the hunter, at least as I imagined him, is alone in the woods with his conscience,” (p.281)

Thoughts:
The hunter/gatherer method is a method that has not been possible in our society for many years now because of the domestication of all our main sources of food. It was a good method back in the day because it gave every one a chance to eat. (no money was involved) Now people starve and they is no other way of getting food than buying it.


Chapter 16:

Humans endure the omnivore's dilemma everyday with the stress of what to eat? But America has a made guidelines to make the choices simpler. 

Gems:
"What began as set of simple sensory responses to food (sweet, bitter, disgusting) we've elaborated into more complicated canons of taste that afford us aesthetic pleasures undreamed of by the koala or cow." (p.295)

“For the omnivore a tremendous amount of mental wiring must be devoted to sensory and cognitive tools for figuring out which of all these questionable nutrients it is safe to eat,” (p.291)

Thoughts:
I don’t believe that figuring out what to eat is a dilemma more like a luxury because there are millions of people in this world that don’t have a choose of what to eat. They only have very limited resources. I did not agree with what he was saying.