Pollan
tells readers that the shortest food chain is the least wasteful food chain. It
involves hunting, gathering, and growing ingredients for food. Today, the food
that comes to our table is extremely complicated because its ingredients travel
a long time, and they are from everywhere. It isn’t reliable to depend on
flowery descriptions of “organic” foods that are not really organic due to its
unsustainability. Aldo Leopold in A Sand
County Almanac. from The Omnivore’s
Dilemma says that “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth
relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We
fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry” (281). It
tells how it is important for humans to gain knowledge of their food
ingredients and nature that makes ingredients available for cooking.
Pollan
covers heavily on self-sustainable style of eating which is based on his
experiences. It is a powerful narrative as he interests readers to continue
reading his work instead of making them bored with all the statistics and
scientific facts. We often worry too much about being healthy and eating healthy
foods, but if we don’t know how the basic food chain works in the nature, we
would be an unfruitful, passive, and dumb eater. We can’t be stupidly
captivated by food industry’s advice and advertisement of what we should eat or
should not eat because food industry wants you to be ignorant of foods and
detached you from land and nature that provide sources of food. However,
hunting, gathering, and growing can nourish our knowledge about where does the
food comes from and solve a problem of suspecting origin of the food. Pollan
instructs us the ways of doing these and addresses that, “For most of us today
hunting and gathering and growing our own food is by and large a form of play”
(280). I definitely agree about this because personally I don’t understand why
people consider fishing as leisure and sports. People should have more respect
to fish that is sacrificed for our appetite. We are basically killing fish for
us.
Eating
meat includes in the human’s food pyramid, maintaining our balance. I think
that the whole mainstream movement of vegetarianism comes from the cruelty of
industrial slaughter and animal killings, raising consciousness and morality. However,
outside of a movement of vegetarianism, cultural mainstream stimulates us to
forget about pain of slaughtered animals and choices that we can independently
make. Pollan says that “For all these people [people worked to justify the
slaughter of animals to themselves through religions and rituals] – the
cultural rules and norms – that allowed them to look, and then to eat. We no
longer have any rituals governing either the slaughter or eating of animals,
which perhaps helps explain why we find ourselves in this dilemma, in a place
where we feel our only choice is either to look away or give up meat” (331). It
is interesting to see how people look away from frustrating and cruel food
industry, which abusing animals, is the prevalent reason why omnivores become vegetarians.
Cruelty of killing animals is the problem of the industry, not faults of
humans. Eating meat is natural thing to do, but I’ve never thought that eating meat
sometimes can be ethical in a way to reduce more intensively cultivated crops. However,
it is our duty to at least respect animals and make them die happily, not like making
them die from industrialized slaughters, which animals suffer from inhumane process
of making animals to products. Pollan says that “happiness seems to consist in
the opportunity to express its creatively character – its essential pigness or
wolfness or chickenness” (319). We should never forget that they sacrifice their
lives for our sustainable eating and pleasure.
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