The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 1

Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder Pg. 1: What Should We Have For Dinner? How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu? Foods have been so complicated in ingredients and nutrition, that nobody knows where the food has originated from. I have never thought of where the food came from. I always thought that everything that didn't come natural was processed. An example from the book has to lose bread as a part of a meal for dinner. Pg. 5: Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us The various types of food in America gives Americans the problem of choosing what to eat. I have felt the same way. There is so many choices, and the hard part is choosing what I wanted to eat at the time. An example from the book is people having anxiety choosing what to eat. Industry then takes those anxieties to better assuage them with new products. Pg. 10:By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding ourselves those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented. Changing our eating habits will harm us, due to what we are doing to our food like changing the eating habits of animals. I have seen warnings like these before, but I never knew why it would harm us. An example in the book is the salmon being re engineered to tolerate corn. Pg. 10: Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species- plants, animals and fungi- with which we have co-evolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined. Species of plants and animals are evolving to gratify human desires so that both humans and plants and animals can prosper together. I have never known that this was happening until I read this page of the book. An example is the corn. The corn has coevolved with us to the point where it adapts traits that are desirable to us. Industrial Corn- One: The Plant- Corns Conquest Pg. 17: Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain that beings with a particular plant growing in a specific patch of soil (or, more seldom, stretch of sea) somewhere on earth. Every single item in supermarkets originally came from a plant. I did not know that

everything edible came from plants; I didn't bother to think about it in the first place. An example is from the book is the rib-eye steak that came from a steer born in South Dakota. This steer was fattened in a Kansas feedlot on grain grown in Iowa. Pg. 18: There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. Make a collage- showing the items that are made of corn in the average American supermarket. More than 25% of food in our supermarkets have corn as an ingredient in them. I had no idea that corn was an ingredient to so many foods in the supermarket. An example in the book is frozen yogurt, soup, syrups, hot sauces and even the vitamins. Pg. 19: Why are Mexicans (descendants of the Mayans) referred to as the corn people? They were dependent on corn for almost nine thousand years. Pg. 21: What is the C-4 trick by plants? The C-4 trick is something recruits carbon from photosynthesis to limit the loss of water in the plant. Pg. 22: What does the higher ratio of Carbon 13 (isotope) to Carbon 12 in a persons body tell us? The higher ratio of Carbon 13 to Carbon 12 in a person's body tells us the amount of corn that has been in the diet. Pg. 22: How much wheat flour do we eat compared to corn flour? (Americans) We eat 114 pounds of wheat flour compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Rise of Zea Mays Pg. 23: Explain why some people regard agriculture as a brilliant evolutionary strategy on the part of plants and animals? People regard agriculture as a brilliant evolutionary strategy because it was a way to advance the interests of plants and animals. By evolving desirable traits, these plants and animals also evolved Pg. 24: What was the biotic army that the white man brought to the new world? The biotic army the white man brought to the new world was an army that displaced native plants and animals that allied with Indians. Pg. 25: Explain how corn won over the wheat people because of its versatility. Corn won over wheat people because of versatility because it was able to do many things. It supplied ready-to-eat vegetables, a storable grain, a source of fiber, animal feed, beer, and furniture such as rugs. It was also easy to transport and was virtually indestructible. Married to Man Pg. 26: Why is corn considered to be married to man?

Man depends on corn, but at the same corn depends on man. Without humans, corn would've been extinct. Corn Sex Pg. 30: For to prosper in the industrial food chain to the extent it has, corn has to acquire several improbable new tricks- What did corn have to do? The corn had to adapt to humans and machines, it learned by growing upright, stiffstalked and uniform as a soldier. It had to develop an appetite for fossil fuels and tolerance for synthetic chemicals.