Chapters 18, 19, and 20

In these Chapters Pollan explores the most natural way of acquiring food to eat. He goes out to hunt for a pig in the woods and then picks mushrooms out in the Forrest and acquires each part of the meal with people who know whats safe to eat and what is not. His doing this represents the way man survived before industrialization. Throughout his experiences in collecting the food he feels the satisfying feelings of hunting and gathering and the euphoric feeling of hunting that pollan describes as a marijuana like high. The main point of this being the opposite extreme of the fast food meal. After enjoying the hard earned meal he compares it to the one that he and his family ate for "14 bucks for the three of us that was consumed in ten minutes at sixty-five miles per hour"(Pollan 410). This statement shows the extreme industrialization that our country has grown through and compares it to the roots of human survival which was hunting and gathering.

Looking back at the book it shows you what industrialization has done to our food and how it is bad for the animals and the farms there on. However at the end of all of this it is this that has allowed America to adequately feed the large majority of our citizens and at the same time, the convenience of being able to eat that meal in ten minutes at 60 miles per hour.

chapters 16 & 17

In this reading Pollan talks to us about how the slaughterhouses try and hide the killing of their animals. He goes on to talk about how it has become easier as Americans to eat animals without thinking about it because it is delivered to us as meat and we never have to see the animal. After this He talks about a meal he shares with Peter Singer an animal rights advocate and his experience during that meal. Singers argument is that as Americans we are taught to believe that all people are created equal, and that is meant metaphorically and that it should extend to animals.

Although Singer says that animals should share rights with humans I believe that it is inevitable for people to kill and eat animals. The basic circle of life is that bigger animals eat smaller animals which eventually die and in turn provide fertilizer or food for the smaller animals. To try and stop eating animals would be trying to change basic human nature and would be counter productive toward the evolution which has lead our species to be the dominant life form on the planet. Killing and eating animals is only natural and if you observe the natural order of things in nature then you see time and time again that animals kill and eat each other to survive.

Chapters 8, 10, 11

In chapter 8 of "The Omnivores Dilemma" pollan describes his experience on the Polyface farm and compares it to the Naylor farm. In this comparison he goes over the differences in the two farms, such as the sources of energy the type of crop along with each farms intended market. While doing so he reveals to us that there are many similarities between farms that are organic and farms that aren't organic. He then goes on to say "Polyface Farm is technically not an organic farm"(131). Upon reading about how the Polyface farm is almost self reliable and uses different animals along with their waste product to produce a small scale ecosystem of his own I was shocked upon reading that it isn't an organic farm when the farmer himself says "it is exactly the model God used in building nature"(215). His farm is what I would have pictured as an organic farm before reading this book, and this leads me to the conclusion that organic farming was a marketing scam created to steal our money. When people expect that their food is grown naturally when buying a product they expect a farm similar to the Polyface farm. The fact that farms like that can't even label themselves as such is ridiculous and has convinced me even further that buying organic products is a waste of my time.