Chapters 11 and 13 and The Pleasures of Eating

As The Pleasures of Eating points out, consumers know very little about their food. Consumers have become “passive, uncritical, and dependent” on the current industrial system, not link their food to the agricultural processes taking place. Majority of consumers chose premade food, dressed up by advertising. Food is not looked at as a product of nature, but instead a product of industry. Things will only change is consumers to take responsibility. Berry gives seven suggestions about what consumers (even those living in cities) can do: participate in the production of food, cook, buy local and know where food comes from, when possible buy directly from the farmer, learn about the economy and technology of production, learn what is involved in the best farming, and learn as much as you can about the life histories of food.

            Chapters 11 and 13 in Omnivore’s Dilemma show exactly what it means to know where food is coming from. Pollan visits Polyface Farm in Virgina. Here chickens, cows, rabbits, turkeys, and pigs are raised in a way different from the many monocultures that exist in the industry. Here the processes of nature are taken advantage of and technology is used to help instead of completely change the way animals are raised. Animals are rotated on the farm. Instead of having waste, the waste is used by other animals or in some way to benefit the farm. Joel, one of the farmers, describes himself as an “orchestra conductor, making sure everybody’s in the right place at the right time” (212). People often complain about food prices, but Joel says that clean food like his is actually the cheapest, because all the prices are factored in. There are no additional costs of water pollution, antibiotic resistance, food-borne illness, crop subsidies, or of subsidized oil and water. We should be willing to pay for what’s best when it comes to food. After all, we do that in so many other parts of life.

            It is very true that as a consumer I know little about where my food is coming from. I only see the final product, so it is easy to separate what I am eating from any sort of agricultural process. The systems that have been developed on Polyface Farm seem so ingenious. Many times farmers are portrayed as unintelligent, but this showed how much thought can be involved in running a farm. Instead of seeing natural processes as problems, like often happens in industrial monocultures, Polyface uses natural processes to its benefit. The ecological loop remains intact and as a result, clean food can be produced and profitable. 

Is it really possible for large cities to rely on locally produced food, when so much of our countries farming takes place far away from cities? 

Would eliminating government subsidies or making stricter rules about using fossil fuels and creating pollution benefit us? If so, is that possible to do?