“The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature.
The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are
safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own” (P 287). Obviously, Pollan’s book, The
Omnivore’s Dilemma, mainly talk about the curse of the omnivore, which is about the
food of today’s American.
Be honest, there was not too much motivation for me to read this book, except it was
required to complete for Core III class. However, after reading the chapter one, especially,
the part about the chicken nugget, which is actually made of corn, I found that read this is
enjoyable. “A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains
consists of corn, and the modified corn starch glues the thing together, the corn flour in the
batter that coats it, and corn oil fried it”(P 18). I can never image that chicken nugget equal
to corns because in an advertisement of the McDonald’s chicken nuggets, it says that
chicken nuggets contain: the meat of chicken breast, the meat of the chicken legs, and a
little bit of chicken skin, mixing all of them. So to me chicken nugget is the chicken, but
after reading Pollan’s book the chicken nugget becomes the corn nugget.
I am not a big fan of the chicken nugget or any other American fast food. Also, in my
opinion, organic food is not too much different from the industrial food, except the price.
According to the definition of the organic: “A word chosen to imply that nature rather than
the machine should supply the proper model for agriculture” (P 131). After the journey of
the organic food industry, Pollan found the organic should be called the “industrial
organic”. The organic farms still feeds corn to the cow. They call themselves organic just
because they fit the requirements of the government, who own the word. Basically, the
organic food is the industrial food with the government’s permission, and there is no
evidence to show that eating the organic food is much healthier than eating the industrial
food. Because of the reasons above, I will purchase the non-organic food instead of the
organic food.
The food from the “Polyface” Farm is the idealism choose. From the book I know,
“Polyface Farm raises chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, plus tomatoes, sweet
