To be honest, I did not enjoy reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, for it was extremely dry in the way it presented fact after fact. There came a point in reading this text in where I had to force myself to go back to paragraphs over and over again because the only things my brain was catching were the words corn, nitrogen, and government. Admittedly, The Omnivore’s Dilemma— in my opinion— was a mind-numbing read that could be condensed to half its size. Despite my critical perspective, however, all texts offer something insightful, and so I pushed through to discover the the pressing issues associated with the question "What should we eat?":
As Americans, we become so obsessed with being health conscious that we lose all ability to make sophisticated choices about nutrition. Certainly, a small percentage pretends to analyze labels and tries to avoid fast food, yet we do not avoid the “American Paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily” (3). Pollan continues this line of thinking by discussing three aids in making food choices: memory, taste buds, and culture (4), as well as “three principle food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer” (7). He points out the growing concern for the government’s and technologies’ push to alter the natural process of making food by creating monocultures, adding chemicals, and replacing the sun. All of this, nevertheless, was simply background knowledge serving as the introduction for the beef of Pollan’s argument that corn can either serve as a friend or a foe to farmers. He illustrates this assertion through the testimonies of a farmer in Iowa named George Naylor, who prefers nature over technology, yet who is not blind to pressures other farmers faced when giving into government demands. Certainly, farmers are in need of a “higher yield” (37) in order to earn a high enough profit to support a family and the costs it takes to keep a farm running. So what happened to other crops? Well, with the invention of the tractor, and the overabundance of corn that can be grown over and over again, there grew a lack of necessity for rotating crops and animals at the farm level. Having said this, corn is also a much easier crop to produce in that it only requires “riding tractors and spraying” with the possibility of “spending the winter in Florida” (40), which is a stark contrast to the typical mindset that views faming as hard labor. Another point Pollan made was the shift from a dependence on the sun to a dependence on fossil fuels. This eventually led to a decrease in diversity on farms as well since things no longer required cultivation but cost. In the later pages of this article, Pollan switches his attention to two influential men in the production of corn- Fritz Haber and Earl “Rusty” Butz. The first mentioned realized the necessity of combining nitrogen and hydrogen atoms to yield life, and it is with this realization that he won a Nobel Prize for the synthesis of ammonia. The second mentioned was a secretary of agriculture who altered the New Deal that was in effect to a more promising deal of direct pay to farmers (52). Despite the potential that was seen at the beginning of this shift, there was a major pitfall in this plan where farmers were stuck with the pay cut. Finally, The Omnivore’s Dilemma comes full circle with the recurrence of George Naylor’s story in which he presents the Naylor Curve and a prime example of “’Thoreau’s line: Men have become the tools of their tools”’ (56).
As Americans, we become so obsessed with being health conscious that we lose all ability to make sophisticated choices about nutrition. Certainly, a small percentage pretends to analyze labels and tries to avoid fast food, yet we do not avoid the “American Paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily” (3). Pollan continues this line of thinking by discussing three aids in making food choices: memory, taste buds, and culture (4), as well as “three principle food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer” (7). He points out the growing concern for the government’s and technologies’ push to alter the natural process of making food by creating monocultures, adding chemicals, and replacing the sun. All of this, nevertheless, was simply background knowledge serving as the introduction for the beef of Pollan’s argument that corn can either serve as a friend or a foe to farmers. He illustrates this assertion through the testimonies of a farmer in Iowa named George Naylor, who prefers nature over technology, yet who is not blind to pressures other farmers faced when giving into government demands. Certainly, farmers are in need of a “higher yield” (37) in order to earn a high enough profit to support a family and the costs it takes to keep a farm running. So what happened to other crops? Well, with the invention of the tractor, and the overabundance of corn that can be grown over and over again, there grew a lack of necessity for rotating crops and animals at the farm level. Having said this, corn is also a much easier crop to produce in that it only requires “riding tractors and spraying” with the possibility of “spending the winter in Florida” (40), which is a stark contrast to the typical mindset that views faming as hard labor. Another point Pollan made was the shift from a dependence on the sun to a dependence on fossil fuels. This eventually led to a decrease in diversity on farms as well since things no longer required cultivation but cost. In the later pages of this article, Pollan switches his attention to two influential men in the production of corn- Fritz Haber and Earl “Rusty” Butz. The first mentioned realized the necessity of combining nitrogen and hydrogen atoms to yield life, and it is with this realization that he won a Nobel Prize for the synthesis of ammonia. The second mentioned was a secretary of agriculture who altered the New Deal that was in effect to a more promising deal of direct pay to farmers (52). Despite the potential that was seen at the beginning of this shift, there was a major pitfall in this plan where farmers were stuck with the pay cut. Finally, The Omnivore’s Dilemma comes full circle with the recurrence of George Naylor’s story in which he presents the Naylor Curve and a prime example of “’Thoreau’s line: Men have become the tools of their tools”’ (56).