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Another audiobook; even speeded up, I find these hard to enjoy as much as reading. Still, Rivkid 2.0 demands a lot of walking, so it’s better than nothing. Anyway, the medium clearly affects my reaction, which was mixed. Pollan organizes the book, which is basically about the absence of many ethical ways to eat in the modern US, into four meals – industrial (McDonald’s), industrial organic (Whole Foods), pastoral (a Virginia farm that isn’t strictly organic but is almost entirely self-sustaining), and hunter-gatherer (food he and his friends mainly retrieved from the wild themselves). There’s a lot of repetition, as if Pollan doesn’t trust us to remember earlier chapters.
The first two sections are the strongest and most informative parts of the book. Pollan persuasively argues that deeply misguided policies have led us to become “corn chips on legs” – various manipulations of the market have made corn and its coconspirator soy so cheap that they’re used in everything, even as farmers become ever poorer and more marginalized. Corn is a commodity fed to cattle (who should be eating grass, and whose flesh is unhealthy for us if it’s corn-fed), split into fractions and highly processed (contributing to obesity as well as our vast consumption of fossil fuels), and produced in monocultures that require increasing amounts of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer. Corn is cheap only in dollars; the environment, our food security, our health, and our land suffer for it. Industrial organic solves only a few of the problems created by the industrial model of food production, since it still involves monocultures, factory farming, and transporting food 1500 miles cross-country in trucks. Though Pollan clearly thinks industrial organic is only a few steps better than regular industrial, he also sets forth the tradeoffs in terms of accessibility and cost – it’s much easier to get and sell industrial organic food than pastoral food as the world is set up now.
Pastoral production is the ideal, and idyll, of the book, but unfortunately Pollan doesn’t offer much of an affirmative program for giving more people access to it – the hero-farmer of the book just wishes New York City would disappear. As a result of this book, I’m going to try to buy more locally produced foods, even if they aren’t organic, but I wanted much more information about what individuals and policymakers should be doing to stop borrowing from the future to feed our faces today.
The first two sections are the strongest and most informative parts of the book. Pollan persuasively argues that deeply misguided policies have led us to become “corn chips on legs” – various manipulations of the market have made corn and its coconspirator soy so cheap that they’re used in everything, even as farmers become ever poorer and more marginalized. Corn is a commodity fed to cattle (who should be eating grass, and whose flesh is unhealthy for us if it’s corn-fed), split into fractions and highly processed (contributing to obesity as well as our vast consumption of fossil fuels), and produced in monocultures that require increasing amounts of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer. Corn is cheap only in dollars; the environment, our food security, our health, and our land suffer for it. Industrial organic solves only a few of the problems created by the industrial model of food production, since it still involves monocultures, factory farming, and transporting food 1500 miles cross-country in trucks. Though Pollan clearly thinks industrial organic is only a few steps better than regular industrial, he also sets forth the tradeoffs in terms of accessibility and cost – it’s much easier to get and sell industrial organic food than pastoral food as the world is set up now.
Pastoral production is the ideal, and idyll, of the book, but unfortunately Pollan doesn’t offer much of an affirmative program for giving more people access to it – the hero-farmer of the book just wishes New York City would disappear. As a result of this book, I’m going to try to buy more locally produced foods, even if they aren’t organic, but I wanted much more information about what individuals and policymakers should be doing to stop borrowing from the future to feed our faces today.
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I also liked that the book didn't put me off anything, as I worried it might. He went into the belly of the production beast, but didn't come out saying he'd never eat McDonald's/Whole Foods/meat again, or making you feel that way. Although, it's been perhaps five years since I've eaten McDonald's... maybe this book particularly appealed to me because it validated some of my own predispositions, and made me feel even better about buying local milk and produce.
For resources for local eating, I recommend LocalHarvest.Org (http://www.localharvest.org/), which lets you search my location and type of resource you want: farms, farmer's markets, restaurants, grocery stores, CSAs, etc. The info isn't always complete, but there's usually at least contact info for someone who can provide it. (It also lets you order things from across the country, which kind of defeats the purpose of local in my mind, but anyway.)
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the hero-farmer of the book just wishes New York City would disappear
Which crap, because what makes civilization *is* cities. But it would be nice if the local area could support the city more fully. I think you'd have to change the economy from the ground up to really reform things, though.
Have you heard about the 100 Mile Diet (http://www.100milediet.org/)? It isn't the easiest thing to manage, and I think it works best if you are a part of a couple with at least one member having a lot of time to do things like baking and canning.
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Hope all is well.
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