AN OMNIVORES DILEMMA
Pollan kills childhood Chicken Nugget memories and breaks down walls, page by page
You are what what you eat eats, so you are all walking corn chips
People might say that you are what you eat, but we always see that as a figure of speech. After reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I no longer do. Shocking as it might seem, Pollan proves page by page that we literally are becoming what we eat. Well of course, I thought, if you eat a lot of French fries and hamburgers, you become fat. If you eat plenty of salads and fruits, you stay thin. It seems this simple but it appears that in reality, there’s more to ‘being what you eat’ than I could have ever imagined.
Shockingly more than a quarter of the 45.000 items in a supermarket, predominantly contains corn. I’m talking fast foods, beef, whiskey, vegetables, syrup that sweetens the sodas, diapers, oil that’s used to cook, Tropicana juice… We eat corn directly, it’s fed to all animals we eat, and it’s processed into chemicals that are used for many other products. Americans are constantly eating the same thing over and over again, but the food industry tricks them into believing that they aren’t. The worse thing is that corn, the main ingredient of about everything we eat and drink, contains cheap energy, which means many calories and – when eaten in the form of meat - sometimes even microbes like E-coli. We’re unknowingly stuffing ourselves with it and we’re slowly going into history as Generation Fat, the first generation so unhealthy that we might not even outlive our parents. Never in my life could I have thought that one ingredient would be able to alter the formation of one’s body (a human body as well as an animal’s body) the way corn does.
In his book Pollan tackles the fact that we don’t select enough what we eat. We’re walking in the supermarket and we’re filling our baskets and stomachs with fish without grates, meat without bones, straight cucumbers, tomatoes that can’t even be
You are what what you eat eats, so you are all walking corn chips
People might say that you are what you eat, but we always see that as a figure of speech. After reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I no longer do. Shocking as it might seem, Pollan proves page by page that we literally are becoming what we eat. Well of course, I thought, if you eat a lot of French fries and hamburgers, you become fat. If you eat plenty of salads and fruits, you stay thin. It seems this simple but it appears that in reality, there’s more to ‘being what you eat’ than I could have ever imagined.
Shockingly more than a quarter of the 45.000 items in a supermarket, predominantly contains corn. I’m talking fast foods, beef, whiskey, vegetables, syrup that sweetens the sodas, diapers, oil that’s used to cook, Tropicana juice… We eat corn directly, it’s fed to all animals we eat, and it’s processed into chemicals that are used for many other products. Americans are constantly eating the same thing over and over again, but the food industry tricks them into believing that they aren’t. The worse thing is that corn, the main ingredient of about everything we eat and drink, contains cheap energy, which means many calories and – when eaten in the form of meat - sometimes even microbes like E-coli. We’re unknowingly stuffing ourselves with it and we’re slowly going into history as Generation Fat, the first generation so unhealthy that we might not even outlive our parents. Never in my life could I have thought that one ingredient would be able to alter the formation of one’s body (a human body as well as an animal’s body) the way corn does.
In his book Pollan tackles the fact that we don’t select enough what we eat. We’re walking in the supermarket and we’re filling our baskets and stomachs with fish without grates, meat without bones, straight cucumbers, tomatoes that can’t even be