Omnivore's Dilemma Summary

In the book, “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan, Pollan writes about the mad-made problems associated with our food chain that compromise the quality of the food we eat. The journey was from the industrial farms of Iowa and feedlots in Kansas to organic farms and slaughter houses in Virginia to finally, the supermarkets in which we all shop at. Pollan not only traced the ecological path of food from cultivation to consumption but also the evolutionary path of our diet over the years. His points show how we as humans have so many dietary options but so little information about what we should eat and where our food comes from.

The three things I learned about nutrition from this book are: 1) corn is everywhere. From high fructose corn syrup to even the

milk we drink.

Corn helps the cows, chicken, and other animals grow faster and produce more milk, etc. as well. Instead of animals being out free in their natural environment, they are more indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. 2) All life is based on nitrogen. It forms the building blocks of organic materials and genetic information. But most of the earth's 80% nitrogen is unusable, unless it is “fixed” by combining it with hydrogen atoms. In 1909, Fritz Haber figured out how to make synthetic, usable nitrogen, which geographer Vaclav Smil calls the most important invention of the twentieth century. Without it, the human population would eventually have starved. Creating so much extra nitrogen has disrupted the natural cycle of nitrogen production. The nitrogen that isn't used by the corn evaporates into the atmosphere, which creates acid rain and speeds up global warming. The excess runoff of nitrogen-rich water makes the algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico,

which smothers the fish and narrows the range of biodiversity. 3) The carbohydrates in a kernel of corn can become a number of things: sugars, alcohols, acids, and starches. Some of these substances will end up in food, while others will become industrial materials such as plastics, adhesives, and gels. Pollan calls this the processing process. The processing process is a lot like digestion: the complex food is broken down into simple sugars that will build other structures. What is different about this synthetic process is that it takes ten calories of fossil fuels to create one calorie of processed food. And we have become very adept at consuming all of this processed food.
I didn’t find much in this book that contradicted with the philosophy of this class. It talks about how drinking lots of soda and eating things with high fructose corn syrup is extra calories creating and epidemic of obesity, which is true with the philosophy of this class. It also was mentioned about cows that are fed more a corn based grains, rather than grass fed, has lower omega 3 fatty acids and is higher in saturated fats.
I enjoyed this book and it was interesting learning what we should have for dinner and how the technologies in making food cause dilemmas. It was interesting to know how varieties of foods can create such problems.