Mood Of The Omnivore's Dilemma By Michael Pollan

Do you ever wonder how our food starts as sunlight and ends up on our plates? Michael Pollan takes the reader on a journey to show just that. The path energy travels from the sun to our plates may be more complex than you think for it is not a straight line, but a bird’s nest. Human intervention creates a disorder within nature entangling the problem even more. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan uses a variety of sentence structures ranging from fast and aggressive calling out the system with a tone that shows his emotions towards the situation, to a slower more conversational approach that shows he really is just trying to help us. He uses engaging language that constantly makes the reader ask themselves questions driving them to find

He takes the reader through the process of turning sunlight into food. He starts at a farm in Iowa that grows predominantly corn. This corn is sent to labs to be made into “edible foodlike substances” (Michael Pollan, 2008) and then to food companies to be made into products we buy in the store. He then writes about how farmers have grown a mountain of golden kernels that we now have to use up. There is a lot of it so it is cheap and that means cheap feed for the animals it is! Pollan shows all the side effects of this human intervention vs. nature and how unsustainable the current system really is.

In the beginning, Pollan uses a style of writing that makes the reader feel uncomfortable and leaves them with questions that they want to know so they keep reading to find them. Pollan (2006) states the following:

The Industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical– in short, a victim. When food, in the mind of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. (p.

He shows this in the following.

The corn is not yet knee-high, but it’s growing fast now, putting on six inches a day in this hot weather. The stalks are already sturdy, though, and the leaves broad and green, forming a dense canopy that shades the ground beneath. The air inside the cornfield is still and humid, and the only sounds are the rustling of the leaves and the occasional chirp of a grasshopper. It’s a peaceful place, but also a little eerie, as if the corn were a vast army of clones, standing at attention waiting for orders. (p. 25)

This whole quote is a metaphor comparing corn to soldiers. The soldiers are the foundation of the military as corn is to the food industry. The soldiers have a variety of jobs to do in the military and Pollan hints at corn having many different jobs as they are “standing at attention waiting for orders.” This idea flows into the coming chapters begging the question, what are all the jobs corn has in the food industry? Also, he describes the cornfield as a calm place on the surface, but below it is eerie. On the surface, it may not seem like there are too many problems with our current system, but dive deeper into it and there are problems