Friday, September 18, 2009

In Defense of Food- First Read

So I started reading a book called "In Defense of Food- An Eater's Manifesto" by Michael Pollan.
It is a rather interesting book that does a very good job at persuading you to view food as Michael Pollan would. Michael Pollan's main argument in the book thus far (pgs 1-40) is that food is disappearing. Not just any food, real food, this is not the stuff you see filling the shelves of your local wall-mart aisles. The other argument is that the food that replaced it is killing us slowly with all of its nutrition.
To start off the book Pollan voices his opinion on how food today can no longer be found in a super market. Replacing the food is nutrition and highly processed foods. These foods, according to Pollan, are not good for you. This does have truth to it there are many health affects to eating highly processed foods such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Also a seven year study done at the university of Hawaii on nearly 200,000 people, showed that people who ate mostly processed meats where 67 percent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer.
I am upset with Pollan's veiw that farmers are putting all there time focusing on producing quick and cheap food. Having grown up working on seven different farms I will admit that they do in fact do that, but that is only because they have to. The amount of work that goes into farming is enormous, especially considering how much they get paid for it. The way Pollan makes it sound makes it seem like all farmers care about is money. I do not think that what Pollan said was very fair the farmers. They are only doing there job and trying to make a living.

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