Perhaps at no time in history have we been more interested in where our food comes from and how it ends up in our grocery stores, on our tables and eventually in our bodies. The Omnivores Dilemma is the most recent work by Michael Pollan who attempts to educate his readers at several different levels (he publishes an abridged, young reader and regular version of the book) about not only how to make healthy food choices, but what makes organic food different as well as many other factors currently part of the larger food industry.
The book begins by showing how much, we in the United States, use corn as a food source. Aside from eating a corn per week on average per person, we also use corn to feed large numbers of animals which are then slaughtered for their meat. Many of these animals, such as cows have not traditionally subsisted on corn, but on grass instead. Changing their diet so dramatically has caused farmers to need to make other changes in the ways they care for their livestock, such as using broad spectrum antibiotics to keep the animals healthy. Aside from that we've all heard the dangers of high fructose corn syrup which has found its way into virtually every artificial beverage currently sold in this country.
Lastly, as it is with any book about these types of topics I'm most interested in the authors suggestions for improvement in my diet since I think most people realize that the food industry is largely broken and more consumed with profits than keeping people healthy. To start Pollan suggests eating real food by suggesting we only eat things that our great, great grandmothers would recognize. To that end, lightly processed cereal should be fine, but one of those cereal bars with the fake milk stuff on top probably isn't a great idea. Secondly, we should be buying mostly food which can spoil. It worked for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, so I don't see a reason to change now. Lastly, eat as many meals as possible with friends and family around a table. Food has always been a group experience and we tend to enjoy our food more in this type of setting which allows us to eat less.
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