Reymateu Johnson Writing 231 Reading Response #3 November 20, 2014 Reading Response #3 In Omnivores Dilemma: Corn Conquest, Michael Pollan states that most of the industrial food we eat, basically all processed food we find in our supermarkets, can be traced back to corn. Seems and odd concept but scientifically it’s true. The C-4 trick helps explain the corn plant’s success in this competition: Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn. I found the information in this essay quite interesting. I was surprised to learn that my body had been fundamentally altered by the prevalence of corn.
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a book about food. In Part I: Industrial/ Corn (pp. 17-65) Chapter 1, 2, and 3 of this book, Pollan explores all aspects, sources and history about corn. However, in the following three paragraphs we will discuss the strengths of the subject, weaknesses of the subject, and the weighing the strengths of the subject against its weaknesses. Pollan begins with an exploration of the food-production system from which the vast majority of American meals are derived.
They’re designed by evolution to eat grass. And the only reason we feed them corn is because corn is really cheap and corn makes them fat quickly … The industrial food system is always looking for greater efficiency. But each new step in efficiency leads to problems. If you take feedlot cattle off their corn diet, give them grass or five days, they will shed eighty percent of the E. coli in their gut” (Foodincmovie). There have been many cases where children have died just by eating food that has been processed by the food
The change is undeniable. Thomas Capehart from the USDA speaks clearly of this change in a research article released in 2009 when he wrote, “The United States is world’s largest producer and exporter of corn” (Capehart, 2009). However, he speaks predominantly of manufacturing types of corn like Dent. So what about sweet corn? In the United States, sweet corn has become a staple of small town, old time American culture, connecting consumers to local America, rather than the globalized country.
Left of the stretching expanse of military-straight railway, and right of it. For the past hour and a half he only saw three harvesters, collecting crop that was planted slightly earlier than the rest. He saw three bright blue or red or green machines towering above the shoulder high stalks, swallowing up the ripened corn and leaving behind the unbuttered, burnt toast. They were tumours on the landscape. But so were the fields of perfectly straight corn rows and so was his military straight scar.
David Suzuki’s “Food Connections,” compares the different ways food is produced, consumed and contributes to understand the unique perspectives people have towards food. The author develops his concepts by comparing traditional third world countries, and industrial markets in the western cultures. He describes how people have forgotten how food not only “nourishes us” (307), but, connects and bonds us to the Earth. David uses our sense of smell, taste and imagination to generate a picture of a traditional third world market today. The use of this technique is intentional, and immediately captures the reader’s attention.
I’m sure that the Maya people did hunt and eat meat for their proteins and whatnot, but the fact remains that the first time we see any sort of crops is more than halfway through the movie when Jaguar Paw is running away from the soldiers in the “bad” city. Here we also see an inaccuracy as pointed out by Professor Russell and that is that the corn is all in very straight rows. Furthermore, we learned that all three of the staple crops were grown in the same spots for important reasons; here we just see corn. Something else that struck me as odd when watching the movie and was also mentioned in Stone’s “Orcs in Loincloths” was the geography. Throughout Apocalypto we see a very
Kim Ratz (2005) calculated that out of the 10,000 items that consumers find in a typical grocery store, “At least 2,500 items use corn in some form during the production or processing.” The solution would be to start replacing corn products such as High Fructose Corn Syrup with with less damaging sweeteners. One alternative is Lucuma Powder. According to Navitasnaturals.com (2011), Lucuma Powder has been certified as raw, kosher, gluten-free, vegan, and 100% organic. It also actually has healthy benefits such as naturally occurring beta-carotene, niacin, and iron. And it's actually very low in sugars.
The trend of the locavore Many people have heard the terms carnivore, herbivore and omnivore but what is a locavore? In 2007 locavore was added to the Oxford American Dictionary, describing a person who eats food that is locally grown. In this essay three causes for the trend of the locavore movement will be discussed, the realization of energy used to produce food and transport it, the health benefits and how eating locally puts money back into the buyers own community. The most important cause of the locavore movement would have to be the realization people came to of how much energy is wasted with the mass production and transportation of food. In 2005 Jessica Prentice a San Francisco chef coined the term “locavore.’ A locavore is someone who only eats food that is grown locally.
Unfortunately, this phase of uncontrolled expansion put Scott in a weakened financial position and the company officials were preparing to review the results of all the changes and debating if plans and financial policies needed to be changed. Scott began its operations in 1868 by selling the first clean, weed-free grass seeds on a small local market in Ohio. Later, the company started selling over a wider geographic area by distributing its orders through mail. Due to its wide spread success the company started advertising extensively and added a free magazine about general lawn care to all its orders and established early on a well-recognized brand name for its products. The company continued growing and started selling lawn fertilizer, a wide range of chemical weed and garden pest control and distributing its products through small retail stores and garden centers.