Book 7: "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation"

Remy from Ratatouille reminds me a lot of Michael Pollan in his new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

Is it immature of me to compare one of the most widely praised food journalist/anthropologists of all time to an animated, cooking, talking mouse? Maybe so, but that's the image I kept coming back to while reading Michael Pollan's latest (06/12/2013--currently at #11 on the NY Times Bestseller List). 

Compared to the two previous Pollan books I've read, this one is by far the most "rich." It's full of vivid imagery, person epithets and substantive descriptions of food that made my mouth water on more than one occasion. He's more metaphorical, more nostalgic, more passionate, but somehow a little less convincing in the process. Reading about food is far less interesting than participating in the process, but Cooked comes as close as one can get to complete inundation of the senses. 

Which brings me back to the image of Remy, the diminutive hero of the 2007 Disney-Pixar production. Remy was adrift in Paris, a soul driven by a passion for food, contained in the body of a creature we all deem despicable and consequently bar from our houses and especially the kitchen, the paragon of cleanliness. From his perspective, the world of food was fantastical and magical. His discerning taste was conveyed via shimmering, multicolored  orbs, tiny fireworks and music that sought to capture the guttural feelings we ourselves might associate each item of food he put in his mouth. It was the spectacular imagery that substituted for words and put us in the head of a rat. What Remy lacked, Pollan definitely employed, that is, an expansive vocabulary that he applied as liberally as salt (you'll understand that reference if you read the book). In the absence of visual effects, the words definitely more than suffice.

At the same time, the words were often the root of my boredom. His investigation of the four elements of cooking: fire, liquid, earth and air, and the chronological anthropological timeline he associates with that journey of discovery is a clever, highbrow concept that drew me in. However, stanzas that could have been reduced through more stringent distillation, were passed through, maybe for their sheer elegance and eloquence. You could argue that 400+ pages is an inadequate allowance for a subject as broad and, as he proved, historically significant, as cooking, yet personally I could have done away with a bit of the flowery language, and instead appreciated more time dedicated to cross-cultural comparisons or even a broader examination of Americana cuisine. Or maybe even a few new facts would have done the trick. There was enough redundancy with The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food (and I'm sure The Botany of Desire and Food Rules, although I have yet to read them) that I could not help but feel a little cheated. For an author who has been recognized for lifting the blinders from his fans (upper, upper-middle class I'm sure), he definitely seemed to assume that a fair amount of review was needed. 

As in the previous Pollan works I've read, the book is divided into neat sections. Unlike The Omnivore's Dilemma, the sections of the book are unevenly entertaining. The section "Air," devoted to fermentation by yeasts, is particularly tedious, especially as Pollan discusses (at great length) the process of breadmaking. (I found the chemistry and microbiology intriguiging, but to say that bread undergoes any kind of transformation that I'd want to watch, much less imagine and contemplate, is a gross overexaggeration.) There's always a bit of nostalgia required on the part of the reader to grasp what Pollan is trying to achieve by writing books about the merits of real food. And I have just enough nostalgia to respect methods of preparation preceding the microwave era. His personal epithets and honest self evaluations have always struck me as balanced in the context of his fact finding. The drama of bread making apprentices, lost secret-recipe starter, "meridians of universal energy" and bacteria fucking were all palatable and amusing, but when he proceeded to compare loaf formation to erotica, I just about had had enough.

Whereas grilling has always been associated with a spike in adrenaline, bread making has always been the opposite. Pollan himself is aware that making bread is not so much achieved through the mastery of humans over raw ingredients (ie. grilling) as it is a symbiosis between wheat and the bacterium/yeast that give (literally) rise to it. Grilling requires one's full attention, or at least awareness, whereas bread dough can be kneaded and left alone without consequence. Of course that's the same feeling I had while reading "Air"--I too wished to wander away from the book and come back to enjoy the fully transformed product. In fact, But reading about freshly baked bread is never as fulfilling as tasting it, which made the end of his homemade bread experiment that much more painful to push past. 

After the doldrummery of aeration, I was doubtful that the book would redeem itself with a discussion about fermentation ("Earth"). Fermentation, said many ways by Pollan throughout the section, is our relationship with death. In addition to taking place underground or in inhospitable environments, fermentation has been linked to bacteria, decay, rotting and the human sense of disgust, which is not so much an evolutionary acquisition as a cultural one (Freud of course attributes disgust with our subconscious attraction to it). Fermentation is everywhere and it is experienced by all living organims ("Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution.") For all the ways that fermentation appears to be a dank subject to explore, it also offers a unique opportunity for human-nature symbiosis wherein we are the facilitators to a plethora of processes beyond our complete control, but from which we attain key markers of culture (ie. cheese, alcoholic beverages, specialized fermented products such as kimchee). Anthropologists have suggested that for all the emphasis on hunting and gathering, it was fermentation that formed us into civilizations and cultures capable of dealing with the inhospitable conditions of nature. At its core, fermentation is the most rudimentary form of food processing, and under the bright fluorescent lights of the modern food industry, maybe the most forgotten. 

Of the section on fermentation, I was most pleased with Pollan's somewhat thorough investigation of the underground movement he calls the "post-Pasteurian world." i have known for years now that microbes are important for balancing our internal systems. To strive for a world free of bacterium would be to doom humans to death, and for most of modern civilization, the movement has been from the animalistic conditions of nature to potent antibacterial solutions and an obsession with cleanliness. Only those who can embrace the complexity of nature will acknowledge the benefits of probiotics and the health benefits of gut wall bacterial cultivation. In addition to helping curb weight gain, gut wall bacteria can help reverse the effects of the Western diet and probably play a part in the most evil of all ailments: inflammation. The pushing out of fermentation techniques in favor of industrialized processing is yet another example of the West's obsession with creating man-made perfection from a system that was perfect to begin with. 

From the years(!) he spent researching and living the elements fire, water, air and earth, Pollan wasn't singularly more impacted by any one of his experiences, although he has managed to incorporate them into his daily life. He ended the book as he always does, with plenty of sap, but what he effectively communicated in the heart of my stomach, is that cooking represents much more than the ingredients involved or the sense of transformation. Cooking, like our decisions about what to eat, involve supply chains and a close investigation of where our food comes from. Neither connection is new to me after having read two previous works, but the weight of anthropology, culture and emotion were much more strongly felt in this book. Pollan admits that advancements in food processing and specialization has eliminated much of the economic advantages to cooking at home. He also tells us, and proves effectively by the end of the book, that there's more to life than the economy. We have to remember our families and culture, which are inescapably intertwined with food and cooking. Yes, there are health-related reasons for cooking your own food, but the benefits are most directly felt through the relationships we have with one another during the process. Maybe social benefits are less tangibly measured, but we feel it in the strength of our family and communal ties, our awareness of our place in global cuisine and the links we maintain with our evolutionary past. 

A book that sustains, rises, stumbles and ultimately leaves a pleasant taste. Rating: 4.5/5

The fruits of my labor: look how many pretty tabs I used! (And check out the Logitech iPad Mini Ultrathin Keyboard Cover I'm using to type this blogpost!)

Book 6: "Outliers: The Story of Success"

Are you an outlier?

The 6th book on my summer reading list was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a departure from previous books I've read because it's less rooted in the experience of a single person and more a collection of selected moments across time, based in very different parts of the world, that support the author's belief that success is more than effort. By covering such a diverse range of stories in four dimensions, Gladwell seems to covers all his bases--proving that his theory is more than just an anomaly limited to selective instances. Of course, the central question I was left wondering is whether or not the theory was proved as effectively as it might have been in a lengthier book with deeper analysis. Alas, the book is a "#1 National Bestseller," and there are specific reasons why that is. 

I first heard about the book from my boss. She said that her husband loves self-help books and usually shares them with her, even though she usually falls asleep reading them. This one, she said, was easy to read and very interesting. While browsing in B&N, I saw the book in the "New in Paperback" section, and the back cover of the book was what really sold me (when is that not the case? That's the point of book marketing, duh). This is the captivating first line of the back cover: "In understanding successful people, we have come to focus far too much on their intelligence and ambition and personality traits. Instead, Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful--their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing." That, in a nutshell, is what Gladwell believes and seeks to prove over 285 pages. 

I suppose the best audience for a book of this kind is a that with a complete openness to formulas of success. Unfortunately, I'm not that kind of person. My ideas about the world are pretty black and white, and it's hard for me not to quickly categorize things into previously formed impressions. In this instance, I've become a firm believer in hard work. First off, you're either born with socioeconomic advantages or you're not. Those who do have a "step up" in the world have an almost innate advantage in progress towards achievement. That part of Gladwell's theory I do agree with. But then, the rest of the theory is about finding even more ways in which some people are born better than others and, to me, that's discouraging. In response, I simply refuse to believe that cultural histories (being born Asian or Jewish, or not being born in an ethnic group that Gladwell deems significant in a particular moment in time) plays significant enough a part to fate anyone towards success. I also don't believe that being born in a particular month in the year can make you better at Canadian hockey, or give you a leg up in school. Yes, being bigger physically or having a more developed brain at the time of sorting (into ability-based leagues, or classes in school) might be a slight advantage, but that one event is not enough to change a life, I think. Getting set back academically or ability-wise in sports are determined by more than just the flawed judgements of coaches or admissions officers, a lot of it has to do with a plethora of other factors. Although accumulating the right indicators of success might be Gladwell's cumulative conclusion at the end of the book, I don't believe that one must have positive outcomes in all the factors of success, and I rank hard work above all else. 

Part of my rationale for refusing to buy into all of that is based in personal experience. I'm born in April, which would be a disadvantage in both private school admissions and in tennis, according to Gladwell. At Punahou, the calendar year period for boys starts around July (although some guys in my graduating class were born as early as June), which puts me in the fourth quarter of the admissions year. Despite that "disadvantage," I got in, graduated with honors and bypassed many of the peers who had the advantage of being born 9 months before me. To Gladwell, I would probably have been the weirdo on the hockey roster who was born in November. An outlier, of the opposite sort that somehow slipped through the cracks. When I played junior tennis, I was also the recipient of a disadvantaged birth month. Age division qualification for the prestigious Level 1 junior tournaments begin in September. If you're born in September, you're eligible for the zone teams (top five players in 12s-, 14s-, 16s- and 18s- and under age divisions) representing the region you live in. Starting to play tennis at age 9 (late for top players), and being born in April was not supposed to be a recipe for success. In fact, I struggled quite a bit in the first couple of years playing tournaments. It wasn't until I was 17 that I finally qualified for the Boys 18s National Team Championship and Boys National Tennis Championship  in Kalamazoo, and ended the year ranked #1 in the Hawaii-Pacific Region for the first time. The top players in the rankings were months older than I was, often times over a year older, but somehow I got to the top. Was it because I was born to a middle class family? Maybe, if you're delusional enough to believe that lessons translate to rankings, but that isn't the case. What does make the difference, both in performing well academically and in sports? I think it's hard work. 

"Doesn't that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual's control?" When asked that question, Gladwell (in the "Reading Group Guide" at the end of the book) replied, "I don't mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with." He more or less dodges answering the question any further, but attempts to end the response on a high note that knowing about all of the factors of success can allow more people to be successful. Maybe that is true if applied exclusively to individuals, but how will that stop people from looking at what they don't have and giving up? One of the points I hope to make here is that no one needs to feel as though the odds are against them. Everyone has odds to overcome, and it is true that some people have more than others, but no one needs a National Bestseller to tell them. True, the book is meant to inspire--to prove to people that success is a complicated formula involving a number of factors. To me, it was illuminating, thought-provoking and certainly interesting, but it didn't feel particularly inspirational to me.  For some people, reading the book will show them that some aspects are success are out of their hands, but look at it from the reverse perspective and it's a daunting, maybe even more impossible task to achieve the success of idols like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. That if you're not born at the right time, and someone doesn't give you access to a (then) rare computer, you'll never lead an industry. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, has already been proven to be genetic, and you can't help what kind of family you're born in to. If you already believe in fate, does "the sky is the limit" mean anything at all? If the answer is no, then an outlier you will never be. I refuse to limit myself by societal precursors and close-minded, narrow definitions of success. Neither should anyone else. 

America has always been called the "land of opportunity," yet everyone is so keen to throw in the towel and blame the income gap, or this and that about their lives--precursors, as Gladwell would label them--for why they don't make it big. We know that "hard work trumps talent if talent doesn't work hard enough," and I truly believe "talent" can be substituted for "intelligence" in all areas of life. I'm not going to go into a lengthy discussion about success or measures of intelligence because they're both contentious, relative terms that maybe could have been explored in a longer, more philosophical book. What I do believe is simple: that the sky is the limit and hard work can overcome everything (except maybe extreme prejudice). 

There are a couple of things I like about this book. Power distance. First, I really enjoyed the chapter about pilots and the ways in which cross-culture differences contributed to plane crashes. Countries with a great amount of emphasis on seniority create barriers to communication in situations where directness may be necessary at times. Being able to apply cultural knowledge to business is interesting to me because I've been guilty of underwriting the role of humanities or social science knowledge beyond academia. 

"Achievement is talent plus preparation." Secondly, I also enjoyed the chapter called "The 10,000 Hours Rule." If you read the book, you might realize that you've heard the idea behind this chapter before. When the book first came out, Gladwell created quite a stir by suggesting that the magic number of hours one needs to become proficient at any hobby, skill or subject is 10,000, roughly 10 years. It's a novel idea that can probably be explored (like almost every other topic in the book) at much greater length, but what Gladwell wrote here is a decent soundbite and will probably be one of the tidbits you walk away with.

Who is Daisy? I also liked the final chapter, which was an example of outliers near and dear to Gladwell's heart. In terms of writing style and emotional depth, the last chapter was about near perfect in that it supported the author's central theme, while paying tribute to his lineage and the shoulders he's stood on to get where he is today. 

Other tidbits I enjoyed had to do with the differences in parental involvement in low income versus middle class kids education; the elements of a satisfying job (autonomy, complexity, connection); support for longer school days and years; and the rice paddy legacy of Asian kids in America and how it makes them better at math. 

What I'm saying is that, depending on where you stand, you're either bound to be inspired or bound to be disappointed after reading the book. One thing I would expect from a book like this (besides more similarly compiled books by authors who want to cash in) is a discussion about how society can make changes, or maybe even apply these kinds of statistics in real-time situations. Maybe instead of looking back and noticing patterns after the fact, we can catch these key differences earlier and intervene in beneficial ways. The only way that can happen is if Gladwell's results are backed up and can be investigated across multiple platforms. 

Update: I just talked to my boss today (the one who recommended the book) and she agrees: Outliers is a one-time, easy read, but it's not exactly the manual for success in life. One point she brought up that I hadn't thought about before is that kids (referring to Gladwell's statistical findings in sports and education) vary widely not only in their cognitive but also their social maturity (between genders and by year of birth). Both, as well as any of the many other indicators of maturation, may differentiate kids from one another, and those differences affect their success in school and extracurriculars like sports, music, etc. Her son is late born and she and her husband decided to hold him back another year. Cognitively, he's on-point and capable of doing kindergarten work, but socially he's not ready to move up a year. Rather than subject him to comparisons from his teachers, they've chosen to give him time to even out. Too often, we associate continual advancement as the only acceptable form of progress, but when you consider multiple definitions of success, the picture isn't so clear. Simple solutions like separating kids into two groups (Jan-June, July-Dec) or keeping them in school longer might not be best, and maybe we have to evaluate kids on multiple levels besides just cognition or physicality. Perhaps the real solution is being able to personalize school curriculum so that kids can strengthen areas they are weaker in, while leading in areas they are strong in. An interesting point that I hadn't considered.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Book 5: "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto"

Organic food: it's for everyone, not just yuppies!

Whereas the last Pollan book I read, The Ominvore's Dilemma, raised awareness about where our food comes from, In Defense of Food, simply answers the query about what to eat.  Another difference between this book and the one I read two books ago is that this one is less experiential. Pollan gathered his research and wrote the book all from home, whereas The Omnivore's Dilemma, required him to go out in the field and experience. The result is a shorter book (about 200 pages)  and also a more straight-forward guidebook on eating. 

Guess what I'm doing right now? That's right, I'm eating lunch. I packed home lunch, which is really cold leftovers from last night's dinner. My mother made a fantastic, savory whole roast chicken, along with toss salad and chow mein noodles. On first glance, last night's dinner (and today's lunch) sounds pretty healthy--she buys most of her ingredients from Whole Foods, so I'm confident that the chicken was free-range and vegan, and the veggies in the chow mein and salad were organic--but if there's one thing I've learned from reading Michael Pollan's work it's that food always has a hidden story and that it is always worse for you than you think. 

Why do I keep reading books about food? As I've mentioned earlier, my family is all about health. We were raised, from a very early age, to take care of ourselves not only physically through exercise (playing competitive tennis with practice 5-6 times per week and tournaments on weekends made physical activity a given) but also through ingestion. Although we got all the shots required by our schools, we primarily relied on naturopathic "medicine" (more like supplements) when we got sick. My mother was the instigator of all of the emphasis on good health and nutrition. She went beyond the FDA guidelines and, through her own reading (she knew most of what I read in Michael Pollan's book), served us meals with both taste and wholesome quality. In doing so, she unknowingly participated in what Pollan calls "culture." She helped me understand what he meant when he suggested that we stop eating out, stop listening to dietary guidelines and stop encouraging the mainstream food industry by putting our dollars where our beliefs were. Before Whole Foods set up shop in Hawaii, she got the majority of our produce and pre-prepared food from Down to Earth, which was the rare "healthful" store back when we were growing up. As you can see, our foundation in food was exceptionally advanced. My mother and the way she brought me up is really the reason I decided to buy all of Pollan's food books. Yes, me reading about food is a little redundant and it's like an army recruiter trying to convince enrolled soldiers to join, but I still found much value in this book (as well as The Omnivore's Dilemma). Since eating and living healthy is the kind of lifestyle I enjoy pursuing (thanks, mom!), food books are perfect for furthering myself in my pursuit of enduring good health. 

At the same time, for someone who purports to have such a good health foundation, I am remarkably ignorant when it comes to food, food preparation and nutrients. Of course one of the points Pollan made in this book is that it is all but impossible for the layperson to keep up and interpret the constant flow of nutritional fads and information coming out (hence the closed doors of nutritionalism), but with more self-education, I believe I will be able to understand the why behind the way we eat and live. Reading more food books is my way of helping myself become a more educated version of who I am. 

Terms

• Nutritional Industrial Complex: 1) What matters most is not the food but the 'nutrient'; 2) Because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; 3) The purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health; comprised of scientists, the government, and food marketers.
• Orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy.
• American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthy. "Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder not yet recognized by the DSM-IV, but some psychologists have recently suggested that it's time it was. They're seeing more and more patients suffering from 'an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.'"
• Macronutrients: William Prout's three principle constituents of food; protein, fat, carbohydrates
• Vitamines: circa 1912, "vita-" for life and "-amines" for organic compounds organized around nitrogen
• Nutritionism: "We should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements--the assumption being that this is all we need to understand"; "not the same thing as nutrition--it is not a scientific subject but an ideology (ideologies are ways organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions;" "Foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts."
• Americanization (of food): "To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history."
• Zero-sum relationship: "If you eat a lot of one thing, you're probably not eating a lot of something else."
• Metabolic syndrome "syndrome x": "large amounts of refined carbohydrates in the diet combined with a sedentary lifestyle had disordered the intricate (and still imperfectly understood) system by which the insulin hormone regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats in the body." "The diseases of civilization."
• Western diet: lots of processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Favorite Quotes

• "The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy."
• "Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place."
• "We are entering a postindustrial era of food; for the first time in a generation, it is possible to leave behind the Western diet without having also to leave behind civilization."
• Senator George McGovern: "Speak no more of foods, only nutrients."
• "When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear."
• "The typical whole food has much more trouble [than processed foods] competing under the rules of nutritionism."
• Rebuttal to the lipid hypothesis: "The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the diet will reduce risk is slim to nil. As for the dangers of dietary cholesterol, the review found 'a weak and nonsignificant positive association between dietary cholesterol and risk of coronary heart disease.'"
• Why trans fat is bad: "'A higher intake of trans fat can contribute to increased risk of CHD through multiple mechanisms'; to wit, it raises bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol; it increases triglycerides, a risk factor for CHD; it promotes inflammation and possible thrombogenesis (clotting) and may promote insulin resistance." 
• American Medical Association: "There is a potential for harmful effects for a radical long-term dietary change as would occur through adoption of the proposed national goal [to advocate a diet low in fat and cholesterol]" 
• "Nutritionism might be the best thing ever to happen to the food industry...solves the problem of the fixed stomach (demand for food has in the past been fairly inelastic)."
• "Nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it."
• Harvey Levenstein: "The sheer abundance of food in America has bred 'a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run, rather than to dine and savor.'"
• Harvey Levenstein on the American attitude towards food: "That taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition which will prevent illness and encourage longevity." 
• Marion Nestle: "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science, is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle."
• "That's the great thing about eating foods as compared with nutrients: You don't need to fathom a carrot's complexity in order to reap its benefits."
• "People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, yet their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take--most of which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement takers tend to be better educated, more affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater than usual interest in personal health--confounders that probably account for their superior health."
• "Far more powerful predictor of heart disease than either diet or exercise is social class."
• "The uncomfortable fact is that the entire field of nutritional science rests on a foundation of ignorance and lies about the most basic question of nutrition: What are people eating?"
• "I was beginning to realize just how much suspension of belief it takes to be a nutrition scientist."
• "We have known for a century now that there is a complex of so-called Western diseases--including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and a specific set of diet-related cancers--that begin almost invariably to appear soon after a people abandons its traditional diet and way of life."
• "Native populations were eating a diet substantially higher in vitamins A and D than that of modern Americans...processing of foods typically robs them of nutrients, vitamins especially...calories are much easier to transport...than nutrients which are liable to deteriorate or attract the attention of bacteria, insects, and rodents...modern civilization had sacrificed much of the quality of its food in the interests of quantity and shelf life."
• Sir Albert Howard: "The industrialization of agriculture would eventually take its toll on our health."
• Weston Price: "We were breaking the rules of nature at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods."
• "By breaking the links among local soils, local foods and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain." 
• "The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them."
• "Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice--reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds--can lead to problems."

"-Isms"

• "The best ethical and environmental choices also happen to be the best choices for our health."
• "'Overnutrition' is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than undernutrition."
• Western diet --> Western diseases = obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases
• "Most of the damage to our food and health caused by the industrialization of our eating can be reversed."
• Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know."
• Dietary Goals (idiotic) contributor: "The question to be asked is not why we should change our diet, but why not?"
• 1977: the year our diets went from being led by culture to being led by the FDA
• "If a product is healthy by design and official sanction, then eating lots of it must be healthy too."
• "Scientists study what scientists can see."
• "Common denominator of good health...was to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients."
• "I'll feed you if you spread around my genes."
• "Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web."
• "Ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients or chemicals."
• "Contrary to the nutrition label, not all carbohydrates are created equal."
• "To escape the Western diet and the ideology of nutritionism, we have only to stop eating and thinking that way."
• "Simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature."

Food Rules

• "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
• Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
2. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
3. Avoid food products that make health claims.
4. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
5. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
• As for supermarket organic produce, it too is likely to have come from far away--from the organic farms of California or, increasingly, China.
• A wall of ignorance intervenes between consumers and producers, and that wall fosters a certain carelessness on both sides.
• Shake the hand that feeds you.
• Our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values--values like quality and health. 

1. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
• Antioxidants like vitamin C harmlessly absorb and stabilize [free] radicals before they can do their mischief.
• [They] do something else for us as well. They stimulate the liver to produce the enzymes necessary to break down the antioxidant itself, enzymes that, once produced, go on to break down other compounds as well, including whatever toxins happen to resemble the antioxidant. In this way, antioxidants help detoxify dangerous chemicals, including carcinogens, and the ore kinds of antioxidants in the diet, the more kinds of toxins the body can disarm. This is one reason why it's important to eat as many different kinds of plants as possible. They all have different antioxidants and so help the body eliminate different kinds of toxins. (It stands to reason the more toxins there are in the environment, the more plants you should be eating.
• Natural selection tends to dispense with anything superfluous that is metabolically expensive to produce. 
• We know that vegetarians are less susceptible to most of the Western diseases, and as a consequence live longer than the rest of us. (Though near vegetarians--so called flexitarians--are just as healthy as vegetarians.)
• Unlike plants, which we can't live without, we don't need to eat meat--with the exception of vitamin B12, every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else. 
• Eating too much industrial meat exposes us to more saturated fat, omega-6 fatty acids, growth hormone and carcinogens than we probably want in our diet. 
2. You are what what you eat eats too. 
• A diet of grass means much healthier fats (more omega-3s, linoleic acid, or CLA; fewer omega-6s and saturated fat) in their meat, milk and eggas, as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.
3. If you have the space, buy a freezer.
4. Eat like an omnivore.
• The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.
5. Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
• Appreciably higher levels of antioxidants, flavonoids, vitamins and other nutrients in several of the organic crops...look for food that is both organic and local. 
6. Eat wild foods when you can.
• Wild game generally has less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids than domesticated animals
7. Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
8. Eat more like the French or the Italians or the Japanese or the Indians or the Greeks
• Biocultural: eating is deeply rooted in nature--in human biology on one side and in the natural world on the other. The specific combinations of foods in a cuisine and the ways they are prepared constitute a deep reservoir of accumulated wisdom about diet and health and place.
• The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious stable food; it contains a whole assortment of "anti nutrients"--compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins in the soy itself.
9. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
10. Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
• The inability to pin down the key nutrient matters much more to the scientist (and the food industry) than it does to us "free-living" eaters in the real world.
11. Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• People who drink moderately and regularly live longer and suffer considerably less heart disease than teetotalers. 

1. Pay more, eat less.
• Calorie restriction has repeatedly been shown to slow aging and prolong lifespan in animals, and some researchers believe it is the strongest link between a change in the diet and the prevention of cancer. Overeating promotes cell division and promotes it most dramatically in cancer cells; cutting down on calories slows cell division. It also stifles the production of free radicals, curbs inflammation and reduces the risk of most of the Western diseases.
• The people of Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: eat until you are 80 percent full.
• Spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. We spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society...the portion spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared. 
2. Eat meals.
3. Do all your eating at a table.
4. Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
5. Try not to eat alone.
6. Consult your gut. 
• Serve smaller portions on smaller plates.
• Leave detritus on the table. 
• Use glasses that are more vertical than horizontal.
• Leave healthy foods in view, unhealthy ones out of view.
• Leave serving bowls in the kitchen rather than on the table to discourage second helpings. 
7. Eat slowly. 
• To eat slowly, in the Slow Food sense, is to eat with a fuller knowledge of all that is involved in bringing food out of the earth and to the table. 
• Wendell Berry: "Eating with the fullest pleasure--pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance--is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend."
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. 

Changes brought by the Modern diet:

• From whole foods to refined
• Shift toward increasingly refined foods: prestige, extends shelf life, easier to digest.
• A great deal of modern industrial food can be seen as an extension and intensification of this practice as food processors find ways to deliver glucose ever more swiftly and efficiently.
• Refined flour is the first fast food.
• "This analysis suggests that something else in the whole grain protects against death." 
• "A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts."
• Sugar as it is ordinarily found in nature gives us a slow release form of energy accompanied by minerals and all sorts of crucial micronutrients we can get nowhere else.
• From complexity to simplicity
• Chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants.
• "Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it."
• The actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking.
• From quality to quantity
• USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s
• "The result is the nutritional equivalent of inflation, such that we have to eat more to get the same amounts of various essential nutrients." Caused by "changes in the way we grow food and changes in the kinds of foods we grow."
• "When you breed for one thing, you invariably sacrifice another."
• "You don't need to spend much time in an American supermarket to figure out that this is a food system organized around the objective of selling large quantities of calories as cheaply as possible."
• "A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished."
• Bruce Ames: "Our high calorie, low nutrient diet is responsible for many chronic diseases, including cancer...deficiency of vitamins C, E, B12, B6, niacin, folic acid, iron or zinc appears to mimic radiation by causing single- and double-strand DNA breaks, oxidative lesions, or both--precursors to cancer." 
• A body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them.
• From leaves to seeds
• Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing. visual acuity, and the calming of inflammation; spoil more readily; increase permeability of cell's membrane and its rate of metabolism; strong correlation between falling omega-3s and rising rates of depression, suicide and homicide...attention deficit disorder as well.
• Omega-6s are involved in fat storage, the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. 
• Historically low levels of omega-3s bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, including heart disease and diabetes. 
• The Japanese, who consume large amounts of omega-3s, have markedly low rates of cardiovascular disease in spite of their high rates of smoking and high blood pressure.
• Inflammation is now believed to play an important role in cardiovascular disease as well as in a range of other disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's.
• Merely adding omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless we also reduce the high levels of omega-6s that have entered the Western diet with the advent of processed foods, seed oils, and foods from animals raised on grain.
• The root of all these biochemical changes is a single ecological change. The shift from leaves to seeds affects more than the levels of omega-3s and omega-6 in the body. It also helps account for the flood of refined carbohydrates in the modern diet and the drought of so many micronutrients and the surfeit of total calories. 
• From food culture to food science
• The Western diet is systematically and deliberately undermining traditional food cultures everywhere.
• Relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.
• Apparently it is much easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

Corrupted

• American Heart Association their crime is hypocrisy. They administer non-healthful foods their seal of approval (to companies willing to pay a "small" fee), deceiving millions into buying products detrimental to health, while shamelessly declaring that health is their sole interest. 
• US Government their crime is abuse of power. They promote monoculture, put the interests of big corporations before those of its constituents, push quantity over quality, and enact idiotic dietary guidelines
• Food and Drug Association their crime is cowardice. They continually cave to lobbyists, allow ambiguity in packaging, conceal the truths behind the industrial food industry, corrupt the meaning of "organic"
• The Food Industry their crime is deception. Their clever marketing is aimed at exploiting the ignorance of the public and exacerbating nutritionalism, which continually seeks to slaughter the innocence of good, whole foods. The over processed products they put out is literally killing us. 
• John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher: fathers of food faddism; Battle Creek sanitarium (hourly yogurt enemas, electrical stimulation and 'massive vibration,' nothing but grapes), "Fletcherizing"

Of all the guidelines Pollan set forth in this book, the one I anticipate having the most trouble following is "Not too much." I've spent a lot of time eating only when my stomach would start growling. It's a lot harder than you'd think to eat on a schedule. First of all, I'm not a morning person at all, so it makes it hard to wake up and prepare breakfast. I'm not confident in my ability to prepare food, in general, so it's hard for me to make food even the night before. Secondly, I'm usually always on the go and my schedule can be unpredictable, so it's hard to set aside time to eat meals. When I do eat meals, they're usually when I can't take it any longer. By that point, I'm grouchy and still in a hurry. I wolf down my food and sometimes eat seconds before I realize I'm full (it takes 20 minutes for signals of satiety to reach your brain). The end result is less meals per day than is recommended and more food consumed at each meal. 

I think what that tells me is that I need to stop making excuses for my eating habits. It's hard, as Pollan admits, to live as an American but ignore the American diet. I have less problem rejecting bad food than I do being completely diligent in preparing meals and eating on time. It's not like I go to convenience stores to buy pre-packaged food, but I eat at chain restaurants like California Pizza Kitchen and Macaroni Grill too often (the danger with eating at those places is, of course, hidden sodium and fat that you'd be able to avoid if you made those dishes yourself). If I could start cooking more often--even once a week would be helpful--I'd feel a lot more confident in my diet and health. 

Hey! How convenient. The next Pollan book I'll be reading is Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Hehe.

Rating: 5/5 stars

Book 4: "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls"

This is what you'll find if you do Google Image search for "diabetic owl." I agree, Mr. Owl...the book wasn't the greatest collection of essays ever compiled.

David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, etc. was rated positively by nearly every review I could find. Entertainment Weekly gave it a B+, Amazon.com (and goodreads.com and Barnes & Noble) reviewers are averaging 4/5 stars, while David Carr and Janet Maslin from the The New York Times: Books haven't rated the book but, based on their review, seem to be in the B range. It is because of those solid ratings that I decided to pick it up on my first run through Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago. It was fresh out of a Matson shipping container and given top-shelf billing next to And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (also on my summer book list).  

At first glance, one cannot deny that the book is inviting. The cover art is whimsical, and no doubt the familiarity of the author's name alone carries enough weight for some to splurge on the hardcover version. In the end (halfway through the book, to be more precise), I could not help but regret putting down $18 for material I later found out is mostly recycled, nor could I identify with the person Sedaris portrayed himself to be, that is, shallow, sarcastic, cowardly and at times, mean.

Rather than waste my time flipping through pulling quotes, I'd rather let the reviews listed above show you what to expect:

Thom Geier: Entertainment Weekly

"After two decades of raiding his journals for essay fodder, though, the well of humiliation may be, if not dry, then verging on merely moist. There's a lot more filler here, with pieces underscoring that Sedaris' days as a struggling artist are far behind him: riffs about his vacation homes in France and England and his reluctance to pose for photos on increasingly well-attended book tours."

Janet Maslin: The New York Times

"His best-seller-dom has more to do with his entertaining public persona and better, earlier work than with the wit or subject matter on the page."

"This book’s longer pieces, like one on the elaborate consequences of Mr. Sedaris’s losing his passport, are its draggiest. "

"Why is this book called “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls”? Not for any good reason. It includes a creepily unfunny piece that links taxidermy with Valentine’s Day, but that doesn’t count for much. All the title is really about is attracting attention. In his workmanlike way, Mr. Sedaris is still pretty good at that."

David Carr: The New York Times

"But as the experiences related in the book become less common — he has lived in rural England, London and France in between perpetual book tours to promote his very popular collections of essays — I found myself listening with less joy and acuity. Not because of the fabulousness of his life — it is and it isn’t depending on his state — but because the emotional resonance of personal autobiography often gives way to social satire on politics, travel and literary folkways."

"I listened most closely when Sedaris was not bringing the funny...the laughs are ones of recognition. He grew up in a way that left marks, and listening to him rip the bandage off an ancient wound is a singular, thrilling experience."

"I am straight and am also hardly impulse averse, yet the disgust with the self’s failure of nerve and that sudden evaporation of possibility that follows rings dead-bang true. We are, he often suggests, perpetual children, stumbling past opportunity and then frantically looking for it elsewhere through the eyes of regret. On another train trip in this essay, this one in the United States after a breakup, he deliberately mistakes proximity for intimacy during a long night of drinking with a man named Johnny."

I tend to agree with the average tone of the critics above. Sedaris threw me off-guard because there is hardly anything relatable in the essays he presented. A few times I felt transported, but I never got any closer than a "close proximity" away from each experience. Perhaps I joined the Sedaris party too late, or maybe never having heard him read aloud live leaves me at a disadvantage, but in any case, I never really connected with him, and there wasn't anything in the material that will bring me back. In other words, 10 years from now, when I rediscover the book crammed in the back of my bookcase, I'll read the title, smell the pages and put it away, probably for a more memorable classic, or at least something consistently entertaining.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Book 3: "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

The ferocious face of a hungry omnivore.

Of the three books I purchased on my first trip to Barnes & Noble, I was most intimidated by Michael Pollan's  "The Omnivore's Dilemma." These are a few of the thoughts that ran through my head: "What awful truths am I going to discover about the food industry? Will I become a puritanical farmer or farmer's market vegan? What if the book is really academic and boring and I can't finish it? 411 pages is going to take me days to read!" As it turns out, I had nothing to fear in The Omnivore's Dilemma and, in fact, I'm planning to read a few of his other books: In Defense of Food, Cooked and The Botany of Desire.

A little background on why I chose the book. My family is above average in food education. I was brought up in a family that might not have had a label for the omnivore's dilemma, but certainly lived out the consciousness of people who cannot turn away in ignorance. My cells grew to maturity on a steady diet of "Down to Earth" (local grocery store) and Whole Foods food, which means mostly organic and/or simple, unprocessed food. In addition, I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for over 14 years. Besides a macroscopic awareness, we've also been students of the microscopic perspective, evaluating food on it's inherent nutritional value. The credit for this core familial belief goes to my mother who drew all these conclusions long before all the exposes, documentaries and news specials. She has really helped to shape my view of food, and I don't eat a single meal without understanding or at least considering the implications of what I'm about to ingest. 

The Omnivore's Dilemma is divided into three parts titled "Industrial," "Pastoral" and "Personal." Industrial is about the part of the American food industry supported by corn. It's the largest section, and probably the most hotly debated yet mysterious part of our national agriculture. In this section, Pollan discusses the processes and implications of a food system based on corn. He touches upon all of the most controversial myths/truths of the cycle, including GMO, monoculture, livestock production, government subsidies and obesity, among other topics. 

Important Questions:

• "What should we eat for dinner?"
• "What are the moral and psychological implications of killing, preparing and eating a wild animal?"

Terms:

• The omnivore's dilemma: "When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you." 
• Industrial food: "Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain." 
• Hypoxic: dead zone resulting from nitrogenous waste
• CAFO: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation
• "Fixed stomach" = inelastic demand
• 2 chemicals in McDonald's chicken nuggets: dimethylpolysiloxene (suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen and reproductive effector, flammable); tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) (antioxidant derived from petroleum, form of butane, "ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse; ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.")

Revelations:

• "Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility."
• "Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead."
• "A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities."
• "The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn."
• "Corn's dual identity, as food and commodity, has allowed many of the peasant communities that have embraced it to make the leap from a subsistence to a market economy...Corn is the protocapitalist plant."
• "Had maize failed to find favor among the conquerers, it would have risked extinction."
• "It takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food."
• "These days the price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar beneath the true cost of growing it, a boon for everyone but the corn farmer."
• "This is a system designed to keep production high and prices low. In fact, it's designed to drive prices even lower, since handing farmers deficiency payments (as compared to the previous system of providing loans to support prices) encourages them to produce as much corn as they possibly can, and then dump it all on the market no matter what the price--a practice that inevitably pushes prices even lower." 
• What cows are fed: corn plus, "liquified fat [which on today's menu is beef tallow, trucked in from one of the nearby slaughterhouses] and protein supplements [a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea]," "liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen," "antibiotics--Rumensin and Tylosin," "alfalfa hay and silage (for roughage)." 
• "...feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. Rendered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow's protein requirement...eating the flesh of one's own species carries special risks of infection...we make them trade their instincts for antibiotics."
• "The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat...the rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to ruminants. Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces and discarded bits of feed) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish and pig meal."
• "Most of the health problems that afflict feedlot cattle can be traced either directly or indirectly to their diet...bloat...acidosis...the diet would eventually blow out their livers...Most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed." 
• "Feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream."
• "[The cattle industry's] preferred solution for dealing with bacterial contamination is irradiation--essentially, to sterilize the manure getting into the meat."
• "One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food."
• "Processed food has become largely a supply-driven business."
• "Corn accounts for most of the surplus calories we're growing and most of the surplus calories we're eating." 
• "Researchers have found that people presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise."
• "Natural selection predisposed us to the taste f sugar and fat because sugars and fats offer the most energy...food systems can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods."
• "One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie."
• "Every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten."

Favorite Quotes:

• "...forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principle reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat."
• "Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds."
• "Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us." 
• "The double edge to our manipulation of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but the same knowledge."
• Thoreau: "Men have become the tools of their tools."
• "This is the corn without qualities. Quantity is really the only thing that counts."
• "I had to remind myself that this is not ordinary dirt dust...this is fecal dust."
• "There's money to be made in food, unless you're trying to grow it."
• "The problem is, a value-added product made from a cheap commodity can itself become a commodity, so cheap and abundant are the raw materials."
• "The food industry has gazed upon nature and found it wanting--and has gotten to work improving it."
• "According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic."
• "When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat."
• "Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals...that perhaps is what the industrial food chain does best: obscure the histories of the foods it produces by processing them to such an extent that they appear as pure products of culture rather than nature--things made from plants and animals."

I know it seems as though I copied the whole section down with all those quotes,  but I did that out of pure horrification. By now, we've had plenty of chances to educate ourselves as to what goes on in the industrial food system through movies (probably the most easy media form to process), such as Food, Inc. and Supersize Me, there wasn't too much new material here that I hadn't heard before. To revisit the inner workings of meat processing plants was stomach-turning. I wanted to become a vegetarian immediately. Participating in industrial food opens oneself up to all the ethical and environmental conflicts that come with supporting the ever-hungry machine that is big food. I appreciate that Pollan did not go for shock value--his insights and fact-finding was presented tastefully and logically as the flow of the book required, rather than in support of a previously determined conclusion. (In fact, I'm sure he could have gone even further to deter people from fossil fuel food.) I suppose what the reader will take away depends on his or her perspective. Some people will be unfazed by the first-hand accounts, whereas others will be so disgusted as to turn away from corn-support industry forever. Rating: 5/5

The second part of the book, "Pastoral," was an account of Pollan's time on Polyface Farm owned by Joel Salatin, the self-labeled "grass farmer" and star of the documentary "Fresh." Salatin practices the most sustainable form of agriculture, which he calls "beyond organic" because the processes on his farm are mostly nature-driven and are surprisingly devoid of human input. 

Important Question:

• "So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?"

Terms:

• "biophilia": inclination towards grass
• "Naylor Farm": industrial, annual species, monoculture, fossil energy, global market, specialized, mechanical, imported fertility, myriad inputs
• "Polyface Farm": pastoral, perennial species, polyculture, solar energy, local market, diversified, biological, local fertility, chicken feed
• organic: "to imply that nature rather than the machine should support the proper model for agriculture"..."organic on the label conjures up a rich narrative, even if it is the consumer who fills in most of the details"..."has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique  and an alternative"..."the ideal is so exacting--a sustainable system modeled on nature that requires not only no synthetic chemicals but also no purchased inputs of any kind."
• "People's Park": birthplace of the organic movement, "marked the 'greening' of the counter-culture, the pastoral turn that would lead to the commune movement in the countryside, to food co-ops and 'guerilla capitalism,' and, eventually, to the rise of the organic agriculture and businesses like Whole Foods
• Humus: "what's left of organic matter after it has been broken down by the billions of big and small organisms that inhabit a spoonful of earth"
• OFPA: Organic Food and Production Act
• "Supermarket Pastoral"
• "Management-intensive grazing": rotational grazing, "relies more heavily on the farmer's brain than on capital"
• Efficiency: either "economies of scale that can be achieved by the application of technology and standardization" or "the one found in natural systems, with their coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops."
• Holon: "an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part."
• Relationship marketing: "the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye."
• Industrial production: "lowers the cost of product by substituting capital--new technologies and fossil-fuel energy--for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploring the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow even bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does."
• Artisanal production: "the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producer of a commodity...only works so long as it doesn't attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect." 
• "The iron law of competitive advantage dictates that if another country can grow something more efficiently...we will no longer grow it here." 

Revelations:

• "Hunter-gatherers deliberately promoted the welfare of the grasses in order to attract and fatten the animals they depended upon. Hunters would periodically set fire to the savanna to keep it free of trees and nourish the soil." 
• "...farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself."
• "Whole Foods offers what Marx terms 'a landscape of reconciliation' between the realms of nature and culture'...in recent years [Whole Foods] has adopted the grocery industry's standard regional distribution system, which makes supporting small farms impractical."
• Companies now on my bad list: Earthbound Farm, Grimmway Farms, Horizon, Aurora, Cascadian Farms
• "The free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old--for fear they'll catch something outside--and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later."
• "Acting on the ecological premise that everything's connected to everything else, the early organic movement sought to establish not just an alternative mode of production (the chemical-free farms), but an alternative system of distribution (the anticapitalist co-ops), and even an alternative mode of consumption (the 'countercuisine')." 
• "The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else."
• "Small farms are actually more productive than big farms."
• "The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis."
• "Remarkably little research has been done to assess the effects of regular exposure to the levels of organophosphate pesticide or growth hormone."
• "...atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. Exposure to vanishingly small amounts (0.1 parts per billion) of this herbicide has been shown to turn normal male frogs into hermaphrodites."
• "...in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential."
• "Organic and otherwise sustainably grown fruits and vegetables contained significantly higher levels of both ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and a wide range of polyphenols."
• "Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability and economies of scale." 
• "Growing corn helps drive the very industrial complex that drives it."
• "To measure the efficiency of such a complex system you need to count not only all the products it produces (meat, chicken, eggs) but also all the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, parasitics and fertilizers."
• "Regulation is the single biggest impediment to building a viable local food chain."
• "The typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there."
• "Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water--of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap."
• Dr. Weston Price "traveled all over the world researching the diets of the healthiest, longest-lived populations, and found certain common denominators in their diets. They ate lots of meat and fats from wild or pastured animals; unpasteurized dairy products; unprocessed whole grains; and foods preserved by fermentation."
• "All those pastoral values--globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth." 
• "...changes in composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of the civilization--cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.--that have long been linked to modern eating habits...the problem with eating red meat...may owe less to the animal in question than to the animal's diet." 

Favorite Quotes:

• "Salatin's audacious bet is that feeding ourselves from nature need not be a zero-sum proposition, one in which if there is more for us at the end of the season then there must be less for nature--less topsoil, less fertility, less life."
• "...the impossibility of taking a 'decidedly Eastern, connected, holistic product, and selling it through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system.'"
• "We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate."
• About Whole Foods food: "It's the evocative prose as much as anything else that makes this food really special, elevating an egg or chicken breast or bag of arugula from the realm of ordinary protein and carbohydrates into a much headier experience, one with complex aesthetic, emotional and even political dimensions."
• "...the organic label itself...is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or inclination to follow their food back to the farm."
• "...to the extent that the organic movement was conceived as a critique of industrial values, surely there comes a point where the process of industrialization will cost organic its soul."
• "Brown foods were less adulterated by industry, of course, but just as important, eating them allowed you to express your solidarity with the world's brown people."
• "When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of mystery...gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine."
• Sir Albert Howard: "Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women."
• "...a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets."
• "...the system is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is anathema in organic. But that's the challenge--to change the system more than it changes you."
• "Seldom if ever stepped upon, the chicken-house lawn is scrupulously maintained nonetheless, to honor an ideal no one wants to admit has by now become something of a joke, an empty pastoral conceit."
• "If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it extracted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain."
• "The trouble began when [the industrial organic food chain] encountered the expectations of the supermarket. As in so many other realms, nature's logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism." 
• "Ranching is a very simple business. The really hard part is keeping it simple."
• "Grass farming done well depends almost entirely on a wealth of nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite: on the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines."
• "This farm is more like an organism than a machine."
• "...a large part of the appeal of industrial farming is its panoply of labor- and thought-saving devices...with scarcely a thought from the farmer."
• "[Health] is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system."
• "'One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.'"
• "In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while, it is no longer morally troubling."
• "Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring--to the carelessness of both producers and consumers."
• "The Roman writer Livy once warned that when a society's chefs come to be regarded as consequential figures it is sure sign that society is well down the road to decadence." 
• "Food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes and biodiversity." 
• "We live...in an era of 'sentimental economics,' since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time."
• "Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture--new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones...a genuinely local agriculture will tend to be more sustainable agriculture." 
• "It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."
• "As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplace, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket."
• "The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked--nature into culture."

At one point, I wondered how Pollan had decided to order the sections of the book. Working chronologically, he could have talked about the hunter-gatherer method before the farmed organic method and finally modern industrial farming. Instead, I think he ordered the book by the resulting feelings that one would get after participating in each system. Knowing what I know now, I will feel a lot worse emotionally (maybe even physically, what with all the fecal matter in the contaminated food) eating a cheap hamburger versus eating a sustainably farmed piece of meat versus a meal I had gathered myself. But perhaps that wasn't Pollan's rationale at all. In any case, the second section of the book was much more uplifting and offered a hopeful look at what the world could be if our country (especially the government) were to completely change it's perspective. It's most striking that we're still eating food grown using methods we know are clearly detrimental when it has been proven that more sustainable methods would yield higher quality and quantity. This section cast a light on who Whole Foods really is and what they truly stand for. Sadly, I'm beginning to believe that Whole Foods is not as for the customers' health as I had previously believed. When I finished this chapter, I felt inspired to live on or start a commune like Polyface Farm. The people who participate in sustainable agriculture sacrifice many of the comforts of modernity--cell phones, cable television, profits--for their beliefs. To draw from Joel Stein's book, it seems as though they've chosen truth over peace. Sustainable agriculture is a throwback to the era of early agriculturists who immediately followed the hunter-gatherers. Before civilizations expanded rapidly and food became a convoluted market (that doesn't follow rules of supply and demand), people lived within their means with an eye for the future rather than profits. It's a system that I believe to be much better for all parties involved, except Wall Street. I wasn't a huge fan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but I now believe that the pursuit of profit margins, along with the previously identified government subsidy culprit, is what has ruined the food industry. Rating: 5/5 stars 

The final section of the book is about the author's journey to live as a hunter-gatherer. One of the points that Pollan made at the start of the book is that the two foods for which the preferred method of acquisition is still hunting/gathering are fish and mushrooms. In order to seek firsthand the consequences of answering the question, "What are the moral and psychological implications of killing, preparing and eating a wild animal?" he decided to hunt for wild boar. In addition, the meal would have to adhere to the following guidelines:

1. "Everything on the menu must have been hunted, gathered or grown by me."
2. "The menu should feature at least one representative of each edible kingdom: animal, vegetables and fungus, as well as an edible mineral (the salt)."
3. "Everything served must be in season and fresh. The meal would reflect not only the places that supplied its ingredients, but a particular moment in time."
4. "No money may be spent on the meal, though already purchased items in the pantry could be deployed as needed."
5. "The guest list is limited to those people who helped me i my foraging and their significant others."
6. "I would cook the meal myself."

Terms:

• Neophobia: "a sensible fear of ingesting anything new"
• Neophilia: "a risky but necessary openness to new tastes"
• Biocultural: "food must be 'not only good to eat, but also good to think.'"
• Disgust: "the fear of incorporating offending substances into one's body," Steven Pinker: "Disgust is intuitive microbiology."
• "The Cognitive Niche": "[Various tools humans have developed to overcome the defenses of other species] represent biological adaptations, so-called because they constitute evolutionary developments rather than cultural inventions that somehow stand apart from natural selection."
• Ketosis: "the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates."
• Jeremy Bentham: "Argument from marginal cases": "There are humans--infants, the severely retarded, the demented--whose mental function does not rise to the level of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration."
• Speciesist": discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he's not human
• Mushroom hunter terms: "Seeing is boleting." "mushroom frustration," "mushroom virginity," "cluster fuck," "screen saver."

Revelations:

• "Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren't)."
• "Our teeth are omnicompetent."
• "There does seem to be an evolutionary trade-off between big brains and big guts...as it evolved towards its present, highly circumscribed concept of lunch, its underemployed brain actually shrank...the price of this dietary flexibility is much more complex and metabolically expensive brain circuitry. 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. There's just too much information involved in food selection to encode every potential food and poison in the genes. So instead of genes to write our menus omnivores evolved a complicated set of sensory and mental tools to help us sort everything out."
• "Taste in humans gets complicated...The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature...(The adult human brain accounts for 2 percept of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate)...Our sense of taste's second big bias predisposes us against bitter flavors."
• "By making these foods more digestible, cooking plants and animal flesh vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans, and some anthropologists believe this boon accounts for the dramatic increase in the size of the hominid brain about 1.9 million years ago."
• "We seem bent on reinventing the American way of eating every generation, in great paroxysms of neophilia and neophobia. That might explain why Americans have been such easy marks for food fads and diets of every description."
• "[The French] eat small portions and don't go back for seconds; they don't snack; they seldom eat alone; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs."
• "Perhaps because we have no such culture of food in America almost every question about eating is up for grabs."
• "The more anxious we are about eating, the more valuable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert's advice. Food marketing in particular thrives on dietary instability and so tends to exacerbate it."
• "The proper measure of their suffering...is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts."
• "Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense."
• "This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language, and y virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we can draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals obviously experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a handful of animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread."
• "To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines--'production units'--incapable of feeling pain."
• "To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship--to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development."
• "A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals' animality, too."
• "The surest way to achieve the extinction of the species would be to grant chickens a right to life."
• "Ancient man regarded animals much more as a modern ecologist would than an animal philosopher--as a species, that is, rather than a collection of individuals."
• "Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations."
• "To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us."
• "Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat...If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone."
• "It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature--rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls--then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do."
• "What's wrong with eating animals is the practice not the principle. What this suggests to me is that people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don't suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless--for animal welfare, in other words, rather than rights."
• "The industrialization--and brutalization--of animals in America is a relatively new, enviable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do."
• "Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to navigate the omnivore's dilemma."
• "Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain parts and products of animals, these things disgust us because they confront us with the reality of our own animal nature. So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too."
• "Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing that the sheer force of human will can somehow overcome it, 'The preoccupation with what should be estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.'"
• "[T]he omnivore's dilemma often comes down to a question of identification."
• Andrew Weil: "It's difficult to reconcile the extraordinary energies of these organisms with the fact that they contain relatively little of the kind of energy that scientists usually measure: calories."

Cool Thoughts from Peter Singers:

• "Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact."
• "If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?"
• "Equal consideration of interest is not the same as equal treatment."
• "If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the steer's interest into account or accept that I'm a speciesist."
• "What happens when the choice is between 'a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being?'"
• "We have a strong interest in convincing ourselves that our concern for other animals does not require us to stop eating them."
• "No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering."
• "It must be admitted that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it."
• Utilitarian: "concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering."

Favorite Quotes:

• "[The hunter-gatherer food chain's] chief value for us at this point is not so much economic or practical as it is didactic. Like other important forms of play, it promises to teach us something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives. Foraging for wild plants and animals is, after all, the way the human species has fed itself for 99 percent of its time on earth; this is precisely the food chain natural selection designed us for."
• "I realized that this had been the ultimate destination...to look as far into the food chain that support us as I could look, and recover the fundamental biological realities that the complexities of modern industrialized eating keep from our view."
• Aldo Leopold: "We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry."
• Woody Allen in Love and Death: "Nature is like an enormous restaurant."
• "The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own."
• Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "Since 'everything that is edible is at the mercy of his vast appetite, the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection in man, making man the only gourmand in the whole of nature.'"
• Paul Rozin: "Cuisines embody some of a culture's accumulated wisdom about food...help negotiate the tension between the omnivore's neophilia and neophobia."
• John Harvey Kellogg: "that taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition that will prevent illness and encourage longevity."
• We Americans are amazed to learn that some of the cultures that set their culinary course by the lights of habit and pleasure rather than nutritional science and marketing are actually healthier than we are--that is, suffer a lower incidence of diet-related health troubles."
• Daniel Bell: "[C]apitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, erode[s] the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization."
• "Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore's dilemma."
• "...cultural confusion on the subject of animals. For at the same time many of us seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to other species, in our factory farms we're inflicting more suffering on more animals than in any other time in history...the disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality."
• Benjamin Franklin: "The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you do."
• "The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon."
• "Even if we reject the hard utilitarianism of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny."
• "What troubles me most about  my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience."
• "The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten--of predation--but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity--of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.)"
• "A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism--the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society."
• "The industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever."
• "Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals to themselves for thousands of years."
• "If there's any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right to look."
• "Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve."
• Ortega y Gasset: "Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal."
• Ortega: "[The hunter] does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite."
• Ortega: "Humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely."
• "...manifest joy...This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting--to some, disgusting: that it encourages; or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing."
• "...'creaturely character'...What shames at least some of us about hunting is the same thing that shames us about every other reminder of our origins: that is, the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature."
• "[Respect] just happens to be the direction from which we came--to that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence, and never ate them except with gratitude."
• "Sun-soil-oak-pig-human: There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life on earth for a million years made visible in a single frame, one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what is."
• "Oh, it can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but in the end it isn't really the work that produces the food you're after, this effort for that result, for there's no sure correlation between effort and result. And no deserving of this: I felt none of the sense of achievement you feel at the end of a season in the garden, when all your work has paid off in the bounty of the harvest. No, this felt more like something for nothing, a wondrous and unaccountable gift." 
• "Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter--this quantity of sacrificed life--just before the body takes its first destructive bite."
• Cooking: "...all these unprepossessing parts of things combined into what promised to be greater and more delectable wholes...destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to create from them a new order."
• "Most of the meal owed its presence on our table to usufruct, which was a fact of nature long before it became an axiom of law."

One thing that occurred to me while I was reading the final section of the book is just how hard it would be for America, much less Hawaii, to go back to sustainable agriculture. Back in the day, the ancient Hawaiians were self-sustaining. They had multiple farming systems in place not only on land but also in the ocean. It was only when Western influences infiltrated the islands that they abandoned their way of life. Presently, there are only smaller, scattered farms spread over the main islands, and I'm pretty sure none of them would be self-sufficient (with sources of protein, starch, etc.) in the way that Polyface Farm is in the face of the food equivalent of a blackout. Oahu, the island I live on, has become more and more densely populated. The local movement to prevent the outward expansion of townhouses and hotels is represented by the slogan "Keep the country, country." The price of food keeps going up here and now I know why: fuel prices, which not only adds to the cost of producing food but the cost of transporting it across oceans. I'm fairly certain that there isn't enough land on Oahu to support all the people currently living on it should our food supply from the mainland be cut off. Anyone who has ever visited can see that "Honolulu" is half the island alone. Everyone knows, but rarely acknowledges, our dependency on others to survive. Hawaii barely produces anything--tourism is our number one industry by far, so we're pretty much at the mercy of the industrial food market. It's scarier, I think, to live on an island with such a predicament. Were something like what happened in the NBC technological apocalypse show, Revolution, to happen we'd be screwed. In the end, although Pollan proposed many important questions, the one I formulated myself, and the state I live in, will go unanswered (for now). 

Closing quotes:

• "The two meals stand at the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating--of the different ways we have to engage the world that sustains us. The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasure of the other on an equally perfect ignorance. The diversity of the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry, especially its ability to tease a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape: a monoculture of corn, The cost of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future." 
• "Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers--outliers of a real life." 
• "Imagine for a moment if we once again knew: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."

What I appreciate most about this book, and the final viewpoint that Pollan expresses, is that he leaves it up to the reader to decide how best to answer the question of the omnivore's dilemma. In fact, his final conclusion leads the reader towards ambiguity, yet it also reflects the truth that neither McDonalds nor hunter-gatherer methods of food acquisition are realistic models. Instead, the solution to our national food woes are somewhere in between industrialization and a complete reversion to the early days of modern Homo sapiens. 

While the picture of our food industry is quite troubling and depressing, I also see hope. In showing us the differences between the industrial, organic and hunter-gatherer methods, Pollan (maybe) inadvertently portrayed food as a market economy. What I now believe is that we all have a choice in deciding what we put into our mouths. Not only what, but where our food comes from. The same capitalist economy that brought on the horrors of processed food has also given us a chance to put our money where our convictions are. We can choose to partake in any of the multiple commercial food chains, or we can simply go off the grid and set about living sustainably without the restrictions that money implies. For many people, navigating the complicated and murky waters of the history of their food is a daunting and impossible task. Armed with a book like The Omnivore's Dilemma, however, readers know that much more about the food industry and have a small glimpse into the frustratingly veiled food industry. Reading the book is a choice, which also happens to be the core principle of the book's material. In the end, what I found most beautiful (and convenient) about the book is that it accepts that it's readers bought the book with prior knowledge and preformed ideas. It has broad appeal (basically its target demographic is anyone who eats), yet it doesn't set about trying to change anyone's mind or way of life. You'll take away what you want to take away, and you may or may not challenge your preexisting philosophies, but you'll definitely consider each agricultural method, which, may be the ultimate objective of the omnivore's dilemma.

Final rating: 5/5 stars