Post #5: Chapter 16

Out of all of the readings we have done in this book, I found chapter 16 one to be one of the most boring and hard to understand sections. I appreciated the part that discussed the various kinds of eaters, and the specialized ways that omnivores have learned how to eat over many years. As mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, rats use their digestive tracts as a laboratory, by nibbling on a tiny piece of new food, and depending on how their body reacts to it, they save it in their memory as either edible or not. Humans do this in a certain way, trying new foods to decide if they like them or not, but as far as tasting something to see if it's edible, humans usually just buy stuff from the store that they know is okay.
The part that talks about the various sensory and mental tools omnivores use to sort foods that we can eat and are healthy, from the foods that are not edible to us, or that we shouldn't be eating. We can obviously use our taste buds the majority of the time to tell us if the milk we are drinking is expired or the apple we just took a bite of is rotten. Our taste buds are so important because if we suddenly taste something bitter, we almost automatically know that we should be taking caution of what might be in that bite of food. Without taste we could go on eating things that on the outside looked fine, but inside were lethal doses of toxins that could hurt our bodies and immune systems. The practice of cooking and heating food has also helped give humans more ways of knowing what is okay to eat and what is not. However, it has made the decision of what to eat for dinner a lot harder.

Post #4: Chapter 8

"All Flesh Is Grass" is a chapter with an interesting view on the importance of grass on our food chain and the agricultural system. It is also looks at the complex cycle of polyface farming where animals work together to, almost in a sense, run the farm on their owns. It is grass, and these animal's abilities to keep it fertile and fresh, that keeps these farms so effective and productive. The cows spend their day grazing on the grass, while the chickens come in to do the main job of picking out parasites, applying nitrogen to the soil, and providing a few thousand fresh eggs. Without this natural occuring cycle, farmlands would become infertile and dried up because of agriculture and farming. We are provided with much of our fresh vegetables, fruits, breads, meat, and dairy because of the hard-working animals.
Towards the end of the chapter another very intriguing issue is brought up and discussed. Industrial farm or polyface farm? What is better for the environment and our health? What is "industrial organic" and should it be considered an industrial farm or a polyface farm? All these questions spring up in your mind as you finish up this chapter. A very good quote from Salatin stated "There are a whole lot more variables in making the right decision than does the chicken feed have chemicals or not. Like what sort of habitat is going to allow that chicken to exress its physiological distinctiveness? A ten-thousand bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass everyday? Now which chicken shall we call "organic"? I'm afraid you'll have to ask the government, because now they own the word". Just because something says that it's organic, does not mean that the conditions were better, cleaner, or more sustainable. The government has specific guidelines it follows to ensure something is "organic" but some of the most important things that should be checked, like the animal's habitat, it's cleanliness, or the amount of pesticide runoff into streams, are not being taken into consideration. Which to me, is a big deal when it comes to the food I'm eating on a daily basis.

Post 3: Chpts.12 & 13

Personally, my favorite part of this week's reading was the paragraph in chapter 12 about the USDA's regulations and rules. I found it kind of funny, but rather ridiculous that there are certain things that are strictly required, and others that are actually of importance, are simply looked over. One of their requirements is that every processing facility have a bathroom exclusively for a USDA inspector to use. However there are no set rules or levels for pathogens or bacteria in meat. If there were strict levels, then that would require the USDA to actually have to keep track of every single farm and the cleanliness of it, and start recalling meat from all over the country.
This shows me that our government and corporations are lazy and selfish. They don't care about the quality of food that society is eating or our health and well-being. I guarantee that there are numerous diseases and bacteria in much of the food that we consume on a regular basis, and it wouldn't take much effort to control it. Yet, the only things that these people care about are making profit and money off of whatever and whoever they can. They don't want to take the extra time and money to regulate what kinds of horrible things are going into what we eat. Obviously it shows how much they care, that they can require a special bathroom for themselves at each facility, but not make a strict limit on what goes into our food. I don't know about you, but it makes me really mad, and really grossed out.

Post #2: Chapter 9

Personally, I found the reading in chapter 9 quite challenging because there were many concepts and ideas that were hard to grasp, and a lot of information to take in. The one main part that really grabbed my attention right off the bat was "Supermarket Pastoral" or mainly what I thought of it as, understanding supermarket literacy. What Pollan was doing, was looking past the basic foods and advertisements on the shelves of the grocery and seeing it as a more complex system, with many hidden attributes. It is already very hard to understand what is in your food, and where your ingredients are coming from, but like Pollan mentions, with lines like "certified organic", "humanely raised" or "free range", it's only getter tougher.
"Wordy labels" as he calls them in the chapter, are commonly found on almost any product you shop for in a store like Whole Foods, or Safeway these days. However, just because the chicken says "humanely raised" or the lettuce says "all organic" is really that much healthier for you? No, it is the government and big corporations working together to trick society into thinking they are eating healthier, "real" food. In actuality all it's doing is putting a huge dent into your bank account and may even be worse for you then the food in the "non-organic" package. When Pollan dug deaper into his research, what did he find? He found that the "free range" chicken was in a shed with 20 thousand others, and only allowed outside for two weeks before they were slaughtered. In addition, the organic milk comes from cows that never eat a blade of pastoral grass a day in their life and are "tethered to milk machines three times a day". Does this sound "organic" and "humanely raised" to you??