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??
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No, it doesn't. And interestingly enough, the USDA has gone out of its way to assure consumers that there is no measurable difference between "organic" and non-organic foods--which, in practice, I wonder if this is true.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that this chapter was a bit of a challenge, with all the information thrown at you about what is organic and what isn't; where our food is grown or raised and the places it goes afterwards, or even what the animals have to go through to just be consumed in the end as well. What are we eating when there really is no difference between organic and non-organic and all of our food comes from the same place?
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