The introduction to Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" brings up some good points while outlining the structure of the book. Pollan intends to expound upon America's national eating disorder. Why is a country that is so worried about eating right so overweight, while countries like France eat seemingly unabashedly and yet be so thin? The author points to the lack of a national culinary culture (I'm not sure what the means but I'm sure he'll explain later).
It all comes down to the omnivore's dilemma: being able to eat anything introduces many problems when the industrialization of the food industry provides a dizzying variety. Throughout the book, Pollan will explore industrial agriculture, pastoral post-industrial organic and modern hunter-gathering. Two main theme will pop up: the contradiction between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry and how eating establishes a link to nature that industrial agriculture obscures. The latter seems to be a yuppie fetishizing of organic foods, but we'll see.
Chapter 1: The study of industrial agriculture must begin with corn. While the food industry has systematically obscured exactly what certain foods are, everything is derived from corn. Corn syrup, corn-fed animals, various corn by-products and even the food packaging...everything is corn. In fact, being a C4 plant (an adaptation that allows more carbon fixation), it is possible to determine through carbon isotopes that Americans are mostly made up of corn carbon.
Carbon proved very valuable in the establishment of America. Appropriating it from Native Americans, settlers depended on corn for food, alcohol, fuel, fiber, animal fed and it could be easily stored and ground into flour. It's unique genetic diversity allowed it be adapt to almost all microclimates in the US.
As much as the early US depended on corn, corn eternally depends on humans. Its unique husk adaptation is convenient for humans, but proves infertile in the wild (a catastrophic sex transmutation that is a boon to human industry). The unique pollination of corn (the large distance between male tassel and female cob) allow for easy human manipulation of genetics to the point were corn has evolved a resistance to synthetic chemicals and petrochemical fertilizers that humans uses as well as growing characteristics better suited for industrial agriculture. Perhaps the final feature that cements corn as the ultimate capitalist plant is the advent of seeds derived from the F1 generation of inbred strains. This allows the genetic manipulations developed my a corporation to persist for only one growing season, forcing farmers to continuously by seeds from big companies.
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