In the first part of his essay, the Omnivore's Dilemma,
Michael Pollan displays thoroughly the many steps food covers, from
its production to its consumption.
The consumers, because of all these transformative processes, cannot
clearly identity the produce they are eating: A piece of meat at the
supermarket does not have anything to do any more with the animal
that grew stuck among many other fellows in a farm. How can we be fully
conscious while eating, when what we eat doesn't look like food any
more ? A tighter producer-consumer link would on the contrary support
and encourage such a mindfulness in our consumers' heads.
Beyond that alarming fact, there is worse. While the system of
overproduction of corn is working well economically speaking, its
consequences over the producers, the consumers and the nature are
catastrophic.
Based on scientific datas, historical facts and economics strategy
plans, Michael Pollan proved this terrible -although strange-
statement: corn is killing Americans.
On the page 34, he writes that “American farmers like Naylor are
the most productive humans who have ever lived”, “feeding some
129 Americans.” In spite of that, they're going “broke”, as
Pollan explains.
To simplify the complex mechanism of self-destruction farmers have
been pushed to pursue, we could say that governmental farm policies,
for the sake of the country's economical stability, encouraged the
monoculture and overproduction of corn, creating both a decrease of
the corn's price, synonym of the impoverishment of farmers, and an
increase of obesity and alcoholism, a result of the very cheap price
of corn-based produces and alcohols.
More over, the single use of corn in the fields of the MidWest
destroyed the biodiversity and created ecological problems such as
the water pollution due to the massive use of fertilizer and the
exhaustion of the soil resources, among other things.
The question we can ask is: Who benefits from that overproduction of
corn, except the corn itself ? Because it seems that neither
producers nor consumers, the principal concerned parties in that
vicious game, do.
Pollan notes that “in 2000 the number of people suffering from
overnutrition -a billion- had officially surpassed the number
suffering from malnutrition -800 million.” He adds, a few lines
below, “when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it
and get fat.” (p. 102).
It is remarkable to see that such a global health issue, not only
isn't taken into consideration by the government, but is maintained
for the sake of economics, through farm policies.
We can wonder: What can we do against that ? If the problem cannot be
solved at an individual scale, to boycott processed food, most of
which comes from corn industry, would be a starting point. To refuse
to eat something we ignore the origin and transport until our plates
is another idea. To read The Omnivore's Dilemma is a
requirement.
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