The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollen

Three Most Interesting Points:

1.     The author details how the shift from “Small Organic”, the movements started in the late 60’s by hippies, promoting communal growth of food and shying away from industrialization, to “Big Organic”, the, ironically, industrialization of the very same movement. He describes the dissonance between the two as one that consumers rarely ever realize when they’re going through a store like Whole Foods, sucked in by what he deems to be “Supermarket Pastoral” (the labels and promises on the food and packaging, promising “free-range”, “organic” … etc food).

2.     Pollen describes the Whole Foods experience as trying to have the “best of both worlds”: convenient modernization while returning to some simpler, almost utopian, roots. The author then goes on to explain that, because everything is so interconnected in terms of scale, an industrial-sized distributor cannot feasibly buy all their produce from the idyllic small farms. It brings to mind a story I stumbled upon a while ago: a man claiming to be a time traveler from the near future describing their utopian society.

The man’s name was John Titor, and he claims that, in his world’s timeline, an idyllic and wholesome picture replaces that of corporate America. Here’s his description of 2036:

        “Life is centered around the family and then the community. I can not [sic] imagine living even a few hundred miles away from my parents.

There is no large industrial complex creating masses of useless food and recreational items. Food and livestock is [sic] grown and sold locally. People spend much more time reading and talking together face to face. Religion is taken seriously and everyone can multiple and divide in the [sic] heads.” 

Unfortunately, that pretty picture is immediately preceded by:

       “In 2036, I live in central Florida with my family and I'm currently stationed at an Army base in Tampa . A world war in 2015 killed nearly three billion people. The people that survived grew closer together.”

     2036 on his world line sounds fantastic. It sounds like what the organic movement is aiming for. Unfortunately, I can’t help but think that both parts of Titor’s predictions must come true for such a drastic change. We’re certainly not much better off with Gene Kahn.

To put it another way, the world will always be imperfect, and the dissonance that evokes within me … well, Jason Pargin explained it better than I did. He puts it in the perspective of a Christian, but religious or not, the sentiment is understandable.

            "You can only call a thing bad if you compare it to something else that is better, right? We only have the one universe, and yet we are constantly comparing it to another world free of cruelty and evil and declaring that our own comes up short.
       A young girl dies in a car accident on her way to her wedding. A five year-old kid chokes on a new toy and dies. We don't just mourn the loss of pleasure we feel from their company. We say it isn't fair. We act like some rule has been violated, even though we've never lived in a place that obeys such rules. Why? A creature born in the darkness and living its life in the darkness doesn't say "it's dark in here!" How could it have any such concept? It knows nothing else.
      Christians think we have the capacity to see it as cruel because we have an internal awareness, on a spiritual level, that this is not what the world was supposed to be …[Your] soul was born from another world and was made to live in that world, not this one. That, they say, is why we never feel completely comfortable in our own skins, because our spirits are never truly at home there.”

     This is all to say that I simply cannot wait to see utopia, but reality pelts me with frustration in every direction. It sucks that a utopia can only be reached through death. It really, really does.

3.     The image he paints of the chicken house is haunting and disturbing: the smell described, the fact that the chickens were all squished together in an “undulating white carpet” … ugh. And this quote: “Whether we stay with organic for the long haul depends on profitability” makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

Question: Whatever happened to living up to ideals? Why must there be such a huge discrepancy between what is and what should be?


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“It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.” - Feed by M.T. Anderson