Precis: As slaughterhouses and CAFO's continue to become more transparent to the general public, eating meat has become a centre for controversy. People are now questioning the ethics involved in such production of meat, which ultimately results in more vegetarians. A core reason for these converts is that we now have a better understanding of the animals' capacity for pain and suffering, but what these people do not consider is the inevitable necessity for the domestication and slaughter for animals. This mutual relationship has actually supported both cultures and although a "vegan utopia" is ideal to some, it is simply impractical. The best that corporations can do is increase transparency in their processing plants- to reassure and comfort consumers that the treatment of their dinner was quite humane during their short life.
Gems:
-"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the life of the pig- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog- that becomes the Christmas ham."
-"Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of a different order."
-"That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall."
-"This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism- the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty."
Thoughts/insights:
-Although this chapter made a pretty strong case for giving up meat... I really don't see myself giving it up anytime soon, or anytime at all for that matter. Call me a speciesist, but I really must agree with the idea of it being a necessary evil. And a pleasurable one.
-Speaking of evils, I am wondering who or what represents the lead villain of this story. My lead suspect is capitalism as a whole, because it creates a dog-eat-dog environment where people who really shouldn't be cutting corners (such as the people in charge of what we ingest multiple times a day) do anyway for money. What good can money possibly be when you have Mad Cow?
Chapter 18: Hunting (The Meat)
Precis: Nothing could have possibly prepared me for my first outings as a beginner hunter. It took some tries and bouts of major concentration, but finally I managed to kill my first pig (or so I believe it was actually me who killed it). At first I felt like a champion, an overwhelming sense of pride that I had triumphed greatly, but as the food chain took its next steps- into the actual treatment and preparation, I felt horror and disgust of a higher degree than I ever had felt before. What at first felt like a great victory turned into a nightmare, and as I looked at myself posing with my "trophy" from the day's efforts I could not bring myself to accept that the hunter, with the glorious grin on his face could possibly be human, let alone me.
Gems:
-"...in many hunter-gatherer societies, the first portion of meat belongs not to the hunter who kills the animal but to the one to whom it first appeared. These pigs were mine."
-"Since the successful hunter often ends up with more meat than he or his family can eat before it spoils, it makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors. Chimps will do the same thing."
-"I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at once: This was disgusting."
-"I felt as though I had stumbled on some stranger's pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this."
-"Sun-soil-oak-pig-human: There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life on earth for a million years made visible in a single frame, one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what is."
Thoughts/insights:
-Because of Mr. Pollan's mental reaction of horror and disgust toward the hunt, I have to wonder if the human has partially lost their primal stomach for such a simple food chain that has provided us with life for almost all of our existance.
-Adding on to that, what exactly has happened that turned us all into such wusses? Why be so freaked out about the killing and treating of one pig when there's a concentration camp doing that to thousands of pigs every day? Why aren't people so freaked out about the food they find on the supermarket shelves?
-Oh yeah, because they don't see it first hand.
-And what an accomplishment! The entire food chain of hunter can actually fit on a single photograph. Image a photograph that could sum up the industrial food chain! What's that? That's impossible? Pshaww!!
Chapter 19: Gathering (The Fungi)
Precis: Hunting and Gathering, two terms that are often paired together could not be more different from each other. Foraging for mushrooms in the wild, as I found out in my expeditions for chanterelle, has become an exclusive skill that for the most part leaves people on their own (for fear of telling others their "secret spot"). After many tries, I finally came to learn that in fact the proof is in the pudding and it takes a special mindset and motivation to successfully gather such fungi, let alone ones that are nontoxic to humans. Mushrooms, as mysterious as they are, happen to be one of the very few things left that are collected almost entirely in the wild for mainstream produce.
Gems:
-"Without fungi to break things down, the earth would long ago have suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter created by plants; the dead would pile up without end, the carbon cycle would cease to function, and living things would run out of things to eat."
-""Mushroom frustration" is what you feel when everyone around you is seeing them and you're still blind- until, that is, you find your first, thereby breaking your "mushroom virginity.""
-"You can forage in the garden, in the way Adam and Eve presumably did, but there isn't much to it: no dilemmas, no hunting stories."
Thoughts/insights:
-Being someone who absolutely HATES mushrooms in my food, I can confidently say that this chapter did really make me want to give them another try (not)!
-I'm surprised at just how elitist people are when it comes to mushroom hunting. I'm pretty sure there are enough mushrooms around for everyone who wants to go hunting for them (a reasonably small amount of the earth's population).
-I really admire the idea that this kind of meal really gives something for nothing. But is it really nothing? What about the physical and mentally tasking activity it takes to harvest this much?
Chapter 20: The Perfect Meal
Precis: After hunting and gathering all of my various foods from the earth, it was finally time to compose a meal made entirely by me, entirely from ingredients I foraged as a celebration of the foods that nature provide us, omnivores with. It was more difficult than I ever could have anticipated, and I soon realized that such a meal is simply unrealistic as I was forced to cut corners on my own rules. What truly makes this the perfect meal above all others is not the taste, but the fact that the people who ate it had all collaborated in the orchestration of the meal in their own way, and everyone at the table could talk about where the meal came from and how the meal came to be from a first-person perspective. Impossible as it is to follow this food chain consistently for all of our meals, it truly sums up what we as human omnivores were meant to eat when mother nature placed us here, and it no doubt extinguishes the curse of the omnivore's dilemma.
Gems:
-"I suddenly felt perfectly okay about my pig- indeed, about the whole transaction between me and this animal that I'd killed two weeks earlier. Eating the pig, I understood, was the necessary closing act of that drama, and went some distance toward redeeming the whole play."
-"I went around the table and spoke of each person's contribution to my foraging education and to this meal that, though I had cooked most of it myself, was in the deepest sense of our collaboration."
-"The fact that just about all of those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about the food on that table could be told in the first person."
-"The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as much as the meadows. If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore's Thanksgiving."
Thoughts/insights:
-Enlightening. That's my one-word review for this book. Not only do I now know far more than I ever could have (or even should have), I can no longer look at food the same way, with the same comfort, or the same mindlessness that I have toward most things I take for granted. I thank you, Mr. Pollan, for enlightening me to the point where the Omnivore's Dilemma may no longer even be a problem!
-And on one comical note, I was laughing to death at his miserable attempts at gathering the abalone. What terribly funny conditions for hunting such a precious yet unusable (after a short amount of time) source of food.
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