`The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is by far one of the best books I have read to date on the topic of food, diet, and the evolution of industry as it relates to our health and culture. I highly recommend reading it and passing along a version specifically tailored for young readers along to someone you care about.
The book is packed with insight and I have compiled some of my reading notes here for quick reference and in the hope of sparking your interest in the book.
pg.67
Already in their short history CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) have produced more than their share of environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens.
pg.68
The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
pg.76
Lone of the most troubling things about factory farms is how cavalierly they flout these evolutionary rules, forcing animals to overcome deeply ingrained aversions. We make them trade their instinct for antibiotics.
pg. 78
Most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed, a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged (except in agriculture), is leading directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
pg. 79
Feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that wind up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
pg. 82
(Cheap Food) doesn't take into account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E.coli O157:H7. It doesn't take into account the cost to taxpayers of the farm subsidies that keep Poky's raw materials cheap. And it certainly does not take into account all the many environmental costs incurred by cheap corn.
pg. 83
One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.
pg. 93
Nutrients, vitamins, and minerals are lost in the processing of food.
pg. 94
Food industries call this problem (that consumers can only eat but so much) "fixed stomach." Economists call it "inelastic demand."
pg. 95
Of a dollar spent on a whole food such as eggs, $.40 finds its way back to the farmer. By comparison, industrial farmers will see only $.04 of every dollar spent on corn sweeteners; ADM and Coca-Cola and General Mills capture most of the rest.
pg. 99
When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach; whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate - the utterly elastic! - industrial eater.
pg. 102
Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese.
Because of all the health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The problem is not limited to America: The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from over nutrition - a billion - had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition - 800 million.
You hear plenty of explanations for humanity's expanding waistline, all of them plausible. Changes in lifestyle (we're more sedentary; we eat out more). Affluence (more people can afford a high-fat Western diet). Poverty (healthier whole foods cost more). Technology (fewer of us use are bodies to work). Clever marketing (supersized portions; advertising to children). Changes in diet (more fats; more carbohydrates; more processed foods).
pg. 103
Considering that human animal did not taste this particular food until 1980, for HFCS to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diets stands as a notable achievement on the part of the corn-refining industry.
pg. 104
HFCS was a few cents cheaper than sugar (thanks in part to tariffs on imported sugarcane secured by the corn refiners) and consumers didn't seem to notice the substitution.
pg. 108
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
pg. 110
These days, 19% of American meals are eaten in the car.
pg. 111
The generic fast-food flavor is one un-erasable smells and tastes of childhood - which makes it a kind of comfort food.
pg. 113
According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and a reproductive effector; it's also flammable.
TBHQ ( a form of butane derived from petroleum) is sprayed directly on Chicken McNuggets to "help preserve freshness." TBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse. Ingesting 5 grams of it can kill.
pg. 119
Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated Homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly - has colonized more acres and bodies - than Zea mays, the grass that domesticated its domesticator. You have to wonder why we Americans don't worship this plant as fervently as the Aztecs; like they once did, we make extraordinary sacrifices to it.
pg. 132
We're going to have to re-fight the Battle of 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."
pg. 200
The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply does not take account of that meal's true cost - to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charges directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the animals themselves.
pg. 215
(on complexity)
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 the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, parasiticides, and fertilizers.
He takes advantages of each species' natural proclivities in a way that benefits not only that animals but other species as well.
pg. 243
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. (blind accounting)
pg. 245
Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way for not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring - to the carelessness of both producers and consumers. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds.
pg. 254
Reversing the damage done to local economies and the land by the juggernaut of world trade would take nothing less than "a revolt of local small producers and local consumers against the global industrialism of the corporation."
pg. 260
We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse - we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. - Joel Salatin
pg. 318
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.
pg. 410
(On hunted/gathered food vs. industrial fast/convenient food)
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 pleasures 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.
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