Omnivores Dilemma Essay

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Omnivore's Dilemma

In recent years social historians have began to delve into more and more minute topics about the way humans interact within their social and natural world, and most especially how certain everyday objects and actions have had a grand affect upon the way society and culture changes. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan uses the tools of both history and anthropology to uncover that it is that concerns humans on a daily basis -- eating -- and why that seemingly innocent choice has ramifications far beyond any single meal. What then, is the omnivore's dilemma? Briefly, humans, being omnivorous, can eat a number of things -- meat, grain, vegetables, many plants and animals, and numerous things nature has to offer. Deciding what to eat becomes a challenge in that cuisine is a part of physical culture, geographic area, societal pressures, and individual availability -- yet inevitably causes continual anxiety (p.3). This anxiety, though, has a profound effect upon the natural world since the decisions that are now made within the modern world have dramatic effects upon the ecology of the planet, and indeed, the potential continuation of the species. To do this, Pollan reviews three principle food chains: Industrial, Organic, and Hunter/Gather and looks at the historical, economic, and sociological consequences of each chain.

Michael Pollan is a regularly contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, is active in the national lecture circuit, and is Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written four additional books, all dealing with gardening, plants, and food as it relates to contemporary culture. Most recently, Pollan has become interested in the practices of the meat industry, and trends in the larger fields of American agribusiness. He is active in global conservation issues, and received the Reuters World Conservation Union Global Award and James Beard Foundation Award for best magazine series in 2003 (Levine, 2001).

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Overall, The Omnivore's Dilemma is a broad overview of the four basic paradigms that human societies have found to most efficiently deal with the issue of food production: the large scale industrial system, the big 'organic' operation, the local, self-sufficient farm, and the old-fashioned hunter-gatherer society. Rather than taking a simple historical approach, however, Pollan uses each of these categories to look at the ways in which plants photosynthesize calories through different growing stages and ultimately, into the human food chain. It is the tension, though, between the way nature works best and the manner in which humans want to tweak the process that becomes rather illogical and has massive consequences to the relationships between humans and their environment.

Clearly, though, America, and the developing world, have become more an more urbanized. The need for food to be shipped in daily outstrips most humans' desire to be both reasonable and ethnical in food production, and the epidemic of obesity in the First World is clearly unsurpassed. From a public policy issue, though, are we prepared to change the way we live, work, commute, and shop before we must? Pollan describes a system out of control, and backs this system up with facts that are both morally and intellectually disturbing. This has actually caused a rather harsh conundrum -- what Pollan calls The American Paradox.

Essentially, most of what modern Americans consume is not food -- it is a mixture of parts of molecules redesigned to be food. We also rarely consume it fresh, or in a way that is conducive to digestion. Instead, we eat in the car, in front of the television, or alone. The Western diet has food that is really replaced by nutrients, lauded for so-called health claims, but….....

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