Omnivore's Dilemma: Part III

The third part of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma was by far my favorite part of this book.  It incorporated all of his research and Pollan also applied it to himself.  On page 327, Pollan asks, "Are these good enough reasons to give up my vegetarianism?  Can I in good conscience eat a happy and sustainable raised chicken?"  This brings up a good point for my own vegetarianism, and the health benefits that I see it inflecting on my body.  I have read countless articles about red meat and its effect on the heart and arteries, but all of these have been in the context of just how much meat U.S. Americans eat!  If eating red meat on the daily, and at times more than once a day, of course there will be side effects.  Add to that the antibiotics and whatever else is added to our industrial meat and you add a whole new danger factor!  But it is not only the meat industry that has had negative effects on people's bodies, but there have also been countless accounts of salmonella in spinach and a whole slew of non-meat related food scares.  This is not a question of industrial meat, but of all processed and packaged foods.  If I am a vegetarian because I do not feel safe consuming industrial meat, then what about packaged spinach and highly processed foods?  Pollan makes a great point when debating the morality of eating meat - "What's wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle" (328).  In other words, if an animal is raised to not suffer and is killed swiftly and humanely, is there something morally wrong with it? 

In the last section of this part, entitled The Perfect Meal, Pollan gathers fungi and vegetables and hunts himself a wild boar.  Everything at his meal he has produced/gathered himself (with the exception of things he uses that are already in the pantry), and he cooks the meal himself.  The meal is something out of a dream to me.  To go to all of that work and to produce something so tasty and from my view wholesome is something that I would like to do all the time.  But in reality this is not realistic, and also not an end-all solution to our bigger food-related problems.  Pollan states that "this is not the way I want to eat every day. I like to be able to open a can of stock ... But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating.  Where it cam from.  How it found its way to our table.  And what, in true accounting, it really cost" (411).  He brings it all back to the process.  The way in which we think about food and how we go about producing and consuming it is paramount to a revolutionizing of the American food industry.