Entry 1: Authors credibility and background

“The organic apple or the conventional? And if the organic, the local one or the imported? The wild fish or the farmed? The trans fats or the butter or the “not butter”? Shall I be a carnivore or a vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegeterian or a vegan?” Michael Pollan from The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pg.5 Commentary I chose this quote because as I started reading this book I liked how it had an introductory chapter that made you question yourself about what type of food you eat. I also liked the reasons why the author was writing about what type of foods mean in our everyday lives. Now in days we have so many processed foods that contain various types of chemicals that make each one taste different even though it’s supposed to be the same. For example farmers back then grew normal crops that took a while to produce but they did it naturally and it was considered normal for everyone, but now you have people growing as much products in a more rapid way for a larger consumer which is us. And the consequences of it all are having forgotten how a natural product tastes like without calling it a processed food. The methods used for processing foods include canning, freezing, refrigeration, dehydration, and aseptic processing. All of these effects are indeed something we see that is made of our food which we eat every day, and as bad as it seems we consider ourselves to rather go into the more “healthier” side which is supposed to be more effective and not contain any chemicals, but as a matter of fact even going “organic” is something you have to really think about before committing. In regards to this topic I also have a connection that I had with the quote and which was during my recent trip to the store with my mom to buy groceries where I realized that not a lot of the things my mom was putting into the cart were easy to read in the back of the ingredients section. As I looked through many other products they also had weird ingredients that I couldn’t even pronounce. This also made me think back into sophomore year when I had chemistry and my teacher had told us a phrase he used in his everyday life which was, “Like I always said, try to not drink or eat anything that contains something that you can’t even pronounce.” And this really makes sense to me relating it back to the significance of my quote. Even before I had found my quote everything that had been said was leading up to what my quote meant. For example it made statements about how us humans have a variety of options that are either likely to be healthy or sufficiently satisfying. Even sometimes by giving us too much of a variety of options, people tend to choose the most incorrect one. However, maybe my quote will open a new subject towards the history of what might be the reasons of food production. There has also been a lot of food production stories on the news that cover the meaning of my quote and state various opinions of how they think people choose what to eat by looking at where it came from, or how it was grown. They explain the pesticides they use to kill any harm from the product that they are growing, but they also explain the bad effects of it.