Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan Summar

Michael Pollan in the Omnivore’s dilemma explains how humans with complex digestive systems have the luxury to choose everyday on what is good or bad for them to eat. Pollan’s broader concept is to try and get the reader to understand the benefits of being closer to the origin of their food. He analyzes and the American food chains and tries to inform the reader about the environment from which their food is harvested from.

The dilemma is that omnivores have a vast choice when eating. Specialized animals, such as the koala, know only to eat one single food because that is all its body is designed to eat. However, omnivores have an enormous array of food to select from, and those animals must rely in the wild on skills such as taste, food detection, reminiscence, culture, and aroma in order to determine which foods are safe to eat, and which are dangerous. 

Also, Michael Pollan discussed a lot about how Corn has lucratively altered the United States diet and animals diet. Pollan observed the horrible developmental process of a calf from a pasture in South Dakota and how the calf lived a short life in the disgusting feedlots. He writes about how animals are naturally evolved to eat grass, but more than half of a feedlot cow’s food comes from corn. Now a day’s corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, even the salmon. This is very unfortunately; because it seems like everything we come from corn. Also, the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer invented be the German scientist, Fritz Haber, marks the moment when the “flood tide of cheap corn” made the food industry markets to be more profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass. According to Pollan, the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is the foundation of soil fertility transferred from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.