Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Mmmm. Corn.

Anyone else reading/read Michael Pollan's newest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma? I'm currently partway through the first section--which follows corn from its petroleum-fertilized origins in Iowa to a feedlot, where it is fed to cattle, a species biologically suited to digesting grass. Not much is new in this particular account (I remember hearing Pollan on Fresh Air a while back, just after he had done some initial research on feedlots), but it's good reading. Pollan's tone is nice, too: instead of righteous outrage, his is a kind of botanical fascination with the way corn has managed to insinuate itself so fully into our diets.

Most people already seem to understand (or maybe my perspective is skewed?) that much of the energy in the American diet, instead of coming from the sun, through grass and grains, comes from oil, in the form of fertilizers, etc., but this doesn't seem to bother folks. Maybe most people don't get this? Maybe this fact is understood, ironically, as just a metaphor for our other dependence on oil?

How mindfully do you eat? How difficult is it to eat mindfully in the contemporary U.S.?

3 comments:

MT said...

I drink an 8 oz glass of 40 weight every morning. I consider it my patriotic duty.

barba de chiva said...

Sweet. Quaker State, I assume?

MT said...

You take me for some kind of corporate fascist? Of course, I buy it from an organic collective in Venezuela. The ordovician is free range in Venezuela too.