Reflection Part One on The Omnivore's Dilemma

The first book we are reading in my Food Politics class is The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

I have been meaning to get a copy of this book for years, so having it be required reading was the perfect reason to finally break down and buy it. I love owning books like this, because it means I can underline to my heart's content, without worrying about having to resell it. Anyway, our assignment for class is to write a reflection on each part of the book as we read it. Here is my first one:

I am going to start off by saying that I love this book. This is my second time reading it, the first time being about four and a half years ago, at the end of 2007. I know it sounds cliché, but this book really did change my life. It opened my eyes to the American food system and made me realize that I needed to change the way I was eating. This was significant for me, because up to that point I thought that I was doing fairly well in terms of eating healthily and being respectful to nature. I wasn’t. True, I didn’t eat fast food, and hardly ate any meat, but I wasn’t eating consciously. I didn’t have a connection to my food, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the labels. This book changed all that. I moved up to Seattle not long after I finished it, and I can honestly say that because of it I joined a co-op and started shopping at my local farmers market. I became aware of my food in ways that I hadn’t been before. This book was also a jumping off point for me in terms of reading other books on food – Food Rules by Marion Nestle, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Slow Food Nation by Carlo Petrini are all books I recommend.
So here I am, almost five years later, re-reading this book as a completely changed eater. It’s been a good experience so far. One of the things that has struck me is that no matter how many times I read certain facts they still amaze me. For example, I have now read many books/articles dealing with factory farms. I know how awful they are, on multiple levels. Still, when I read that “[m]ost of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed” (p.78) I was struck dumb. I had completely forgotten this fact, and it took me a few minutes to fully process it. Honestly, I feel like just this one little fact has huge implications for Americans. And this book is chock full of facts like that. If someone like me, a fairly conscientious eater, doesn’t know how huge of a problem antibiotics in CAFOs are, what does that tell you about the average American who is just going to the store and buying packages of hamburgers?
It’s also been interesting to read this book through the lens of someone who is working on hunger issues. I am working part-time at a food bank, and one of the things I’ve realized is that the fact that hunger exists in the world today has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of food in the world. Early on in the book, when Pollan goes to see where corn is grown he meets a farmer named Billy, who has fallen under the spell of Big Agriculture. He is trying to produce more and more corn every year. Pollan states “Two hundred and twenty bushels of corn is an astounding accomplishment, yet it didn’t do Billy nearly as much good as it did those companies” (p.56). Reading this it struck me just how screwed up our food system is. Here is a man who is producing massive amounts of food, but he’s going broke doing it.  In addition, there are still tons of hungry people in America (not to mention the rest of the world). So obviously it’s not that there isn’t enough food being grown/produced in the world, it’s what is being done with it that’s the problem. We, as Americans, need a different way of thinking about food, and this book does just that. I’m excited to keep reading.