Engl135

OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: PASTORAL GRASS

Michael Pollan is a noted author, journalist, and a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Pollan has written articles for New York Times Magazine with topics ranging from food safety to gardening to nutrition. In his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he analyzes the three modern food chains that feed America. In the second part titled “Pastoral: Grass”, Pollan tries to understand the meaning of the word “organic” in which he follows his meal from the source to the dinner table and along the way reveals interesting facts about the entire process of manufacturing and distribution of organic food. Pollan details his observations after his week long experience with both “big organic” farms like Cascadian Farm and “small organic” producers like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. Although my level of interest on the topic has been less than casual in the past, I was determined to read this section with an open mind and put aside my own reservations about what is considered “organic”.

In part two Pollan compares the distinction between small organic and big organic. On one side of the spectrum we have Polyface Farm owned by Salatin who is a big advocate of sustainable or “beyond organic” farming and only sells to local customers from the surrounding communities. On the other side, Pollan visits Gene Kahn, a founder of Cascadian Farm which started off small like Polyface, now a General Mills subsidiary dealing with larger supermarket corporations such as Whole Foods.

What I liked about this section was Pollan was extremely detailed in presenting his observations. He paints a vivid picture of the differences between the way Salatin and Kahn view the whole notion of a ‘cooperative community’. Salatin considers himself not as cattle rancher or chicken farmer, but a grass farmer. One who views grass ass the “foundation of an intricate food chain” (p.126) that provides the sustainability of his polyculture. On the...