Book ´ The Omnivore's Dilemma ↠ 450 pages Download Õ Moneyexpresscard

> Book ´ The Omnivore's Dilemma ↠ 450 pages Download Õ Moneyexpresscard

Epub The Omnivore's Dilemma

Book ´ The Omnivore's Dilemma ↠ 450 pages Download Õ Moneyexpresscard ô What should we have for dinner For omnivore's like ourselves this simple uestion has always posed a dilemma When you can eat just about anything nature or the supermarket has to offer deciding what you should eat willWhat should we have for dinner For omnivore's like ourselves this simple uestion has always posed a dilemma When you can eat just about anything nature or the supermarket has to offer deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life Today buffeted by one food fad after another America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder The omnivore's dilemma has returned with a vengeance as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape What's at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children's health but the health of the environment that sustains life on earthThe Omnivore's Dilemma is a groundbreaking book in which one of America's most fascinating original and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous min I was resistant to reading this book because I’m not an omnivore and also I thought that Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire was brilliant and I suspected I would not feel as fond of this one which is certainly true He does write well but I didn’t find that this book had the elouence or elegance of the otherThe sub title of this book could read It’s Really Ok To Eat Dead Animals Really It Is Which I realize for most people it is But eating flesh foods and other foods made from animals such as dairy and eggs is simply what the vast majority of this book’s readers and the population as a whole do; it’s not an uniue argument But I loved the fungi chapter and the corn section The chapter on mushrooms I’m sure I enjoyed so much because a close friend of mine has told stories of her rural Indiana upbringing and of the very small l patch they have on their property So it was really fun for me to read about the foraginghunting of the mushrooms including local ls The author lives about 30 minutes drive from me and I recognized many of the locations in the book The corn section about the deliberate infusion of corn products into just about every processed food made me determined to cut way down on the processed foods that I often eat the one real way this book changed me not an insignificant oneA good part of this apparently beloved book seemed to me to be the author’s belabored argument that it’s perfectly fine to eat animals His treatise looked like his attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance his term although I was already thinking of it like that so that he could continue to eat in peace as an omnivore along with about 97% of the US population; being omnivorous is the dominant paradigm Anyway his waxing poetic over the glories of killing and eating animals did not sway me It’s interesting that Pollan continually rebuts his own arguments but I wasn’t convinced his uestioning was as honest as he wanted it to appear as it seemed to me he already knew the answers he wanted to arrive at about being omnivorous And I wouldn’t be surprised if he would agree with me about thatSome of his facts and figures were off When he talks about tens of millions of animals killed for food in the US for instance; actually the latest figures I’ve read are 11 billion every year not including fish Even the call to eat locally which I usually subscribe to is not to be so simplified One contradictory example I can think of this issue is not addressed in the book is the consuming of products chocolate coffee dried fruit nuts from the distant rainforest which in my opinion is much preferable to continuing to cut down rainforest trees and which the natives will allow if they can’t make their living from the rainforest in other waysI know my philosophy is shared by a relative few but the fast food meals the description which was intended to highlight the large amounts of corn products in all the foods while I found that surprising and unfortunate it was the cow and chicken parts of the meal that disturbed me the most And as far as the “idyllic” Polyface Farm I truly wonder what they could do 100% plant products grown

Text ☆ The Omnivore's Dilemma Ñ Michael Pollan

And animal species we depend on Each time Pollan sits down to a meal he deploys his uniue blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritanceThe surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple uestion posed by this book have profound political economic psychological and even mortal implications for all of us Ultimately this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems and Pollan contends that when it comes to food doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do Beautifully written and thrillingly argued The Omnivore's Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating For anyone who reads it dinner will never again look or taste uite the same jack He makes some good points but in the end it smacks of well off white man over simplifying an incredibly complex issue What the book has going for it is that it's a best seller especially to the faux liberal over educated set and it's at least making them THINK about where their food is coming from What I don't like though is that it lets them off the hook as far as accountability if they just go about buying the RIGHT kind of meat Well all of that free range humane meat goes to the same creepy slaughterhouses that the factory farmed animals go to so really from an ethical stand point it's no better Oh and the USDA Guidelines on what is considered free range are ridiculous 5 minutes ACCESS to the outdoors a day earns you free range classification Also the idea of getting all of your meat from nearby sustainable family farms who do their own slaughter and processing is really great in theory but then won't it become a class issue when only rich people can afford it Oh but I guess those are the same people reading this book so it's cool Oh and lots of his numbers were way offhe said we kill millions of animals a year for food in this country like BILLIONS I talked to a guy yesterday who worked in a chicken slaughtering line in a prison way back when and said that he was responsible for personally killing 8000 birds a day slicing their necks open ugh Oh another positive I did learn a lot about corn from the book and have pretty much backed away from anything made with it

Michael Pollan Ñ The Omnivore's Dilemma Reader

The Omnivore's DilemmaD to the seemingly straightforward uestion of what we should have for dinner The uestion has confronted us since man discovered fire but according to Michael Pollan the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire how we answer it today ath the dawn of the twenty first century may well determine our very survival as a species Should we eat a fast food hamburger Something organic Or perhaps something we hunt gather or grow ourselvesTo find out Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us industrial food organic or alternative food and food we forage ourselves from the source to a final meal and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food laboratories from feedlots and fast food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant I love food I really love food I believe it is one of the most fascinating cultural facts in our lives I particularly love food that is taken as meals and then the words that gather about meals – not least that most beautiful word ‘sharing’ Because food is never better than when it is shared as ours Recently I was delighted to learn the etymology of the word ‘companion’ That has become my favourite way to describe the people I’m fond of The word comes from Latin and means ‘with bread’ – that is someone you share bread with Isn’t that the most beautiful of metaphorsThen again there is food and then there is food – and this is a book about all of the various types of food available to us in this modern world of ours It is a book that has made me think about what I eat how I eat it and to uestion what can only be called the morality of food And then it also made me think of the psychology of food and the sociology of food in ways I really didn’t expectThe book reminded me of many other books It reminded me of Fast Food Nation but I think I enjoyed this which is really saying something It reminded me of Orion’s Legacy too and not just because of the hunting stuff towards the end This guy is so engaging and interesting And like any good meal there are general themes and flavours but also many tasty asides This book is structured around four meals Before bringing us to the table for each of these meals he explains how the food got to the table too The four meals are related to the various ways food is obtained in our modern world Naturally the first is industrial farming and the first meal is a McDonald’s hamburger eaten in a car that is being driven at 60 miles an hour Did you know that one in five meals eaten in America are eaten in a car Isn’t that the saddest statistic you have heard todayRecently I’ve been reading books about economics which have turned out to be very much in favour of free market economics Essentially they have told the story of how any interference in the operation of free markets is anathema and that the damnation thus brought about by this interference is found in the distortions that invariably cause harm to what they initially sought to protect The story of corn farming in the USA is a horribly vivid illustration of the effects of the interference in the operation of market forces leading to grotesue distortions which achieve the opposite of this interference’s original intent Industrial production of corn using fossil fuel fertilisers so that the corn can be either turned into sugar to create rivers of soft drinks or chaff to feed cows in ways nature never intended is than just morally uestionable The lives of these cows are an unspeakable torture made no less so by the fact we have short circuited their lives to a mere 14 months These animals don’t normally eat corn and the descriptions of their sufferings when they are forced to is both repulsive and infuriating If you don’t come away from reading this section thinking “Not in my name” I can only say you are totally lacking in compassion This is an industry that could hardly make itself less sustainable It is clear that it needs to be changed in fact it needs to be done away withWhat I liked most about this book was that it didn’t then say organic is best buy organic – which is what I thought was coming In fact he spends a lot of time talking about how ‘organic’ food isn’t necessarily ‘environmentally friendly’ food I am one of those dags oh Australian slang – it actually means the shit that gets caught in the wool around a sheep’s arse but has come to mean someone who is a bit ‘naff’ for my English friends and ‘dorky’ for my American ones who buys free range eggs not because I think they taste any better I’m sure they don’t but because I can’t bring myself to eat eggs from chickens that have been treated so appallingly When I didn’t think about it everything was fine – but once I did think about it I would rather pay the extra dollar or two so as to be able to enjoy the eggs and not feel like a Nazi prison guard Some of what he says here about ‘free range’ chickens is also disturbing and the phrase ‘false advertising’ comes to mindHowever his description of ‘pastoral food’ is a pure delight and possibly worth reading all on its own if you are in a hurry and don’t want to read the whole book You know if you are after the fast food version Sustainable thoughtful inspiring – this really is the heart of the ‘lesson’ of this book and was nearly enough to make me want to go off and start a farm It also contains what is for me the saddest line in the book – about the A grade students in the countryside being stolen from the farms and the D grade students being left behind to be exploited by the clever people from Wall Street and to donate lots of money to televangelists The sad fact is that I found this sad mostly because it confirms so many of my prejudices about those who live in rural areas – it is not hard to see why Marx proposed the mass industrialisation of agriculture It was the only way he could imagine of dragging these poor souls out of the horrendous world of ignorance and fear that clungs to them like the mud that sticks to their bootsI think many people may feel this book looses its way towards the end – particularly where he goes off to hunt and gather his own food to prepare his final meal That is what I thought as this part started At least until he got into his stride which as always did not take very long The stuff he has to say about mushrooms for instance is utterly fascinating I had no idea that we know so little about mushrooms In fact our ignorance of mushrooms seems uite staggering Pollan handles those on the ‘lunar’ end of the fungus world lunar in both the figurative and literal senses of the word with a deftness and wit that is a pure joy If you are thinking of picking the eyes out of this book then this section is another must readThere are very few pleasures in life that are human than preparing a meal for the people you love At least twice in this book he mentions Freud and sex and suggests that Freud could have better based his ideas on desire for food I suspect that today we are not nearly as stuffed up about sex as we are about food I learnt an awful lot from this book and had a really nice time with the author as he taught me these things – he is a very clever man and an engaging writer If I had lots time on my hands I would like to write an Australian version of this book about where our food comes from and the costs of the inputs into producing it I would also if I had lots and lots time like to spend some time learning how to find field mushrooms and to learn about what makes these remarkable creatures tick Did you know that fungi are closely related to animals than to plantsAnd the dilemma Well actually there are many many dilemmas – between industrial and sustainable food between eating new things and eating what you ‘know’ between conscious eating and wilful blindness This book didn’t make the writer a vegetarian and it didn’t make me one either – but I did come away from this book wanting to be aware of what I eat and what the choices I make when deciding what to eat meanIf you want to learn about the real eating disorder affecting the world – this really is a book for you