The Omnivore's Dilemma Summary

After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma CH 8-10 by Michael Pollan, he mainly talks about the organic farms and the importance of grass in farming. Joe Salatin uses many modern technologies and many biological ways to create a natural ecosystem. In Polyface Farm, there are many species of animals and plants, and the fresh grass is all over around which makes the farm more natural. The reason why Salatin consider himself as a “grass farmer” is that the grass has a high status in Salatin’s farm, which is one of the main factors that make the high quality of this farm. The industrial farm setting includes “a great machine, transforming inputs of seed and fossil energy into outputs of carbohydrate and protein” (Pollan 130). In the other hand, the industrial farm makes everything perform like a machine, which makes the food become not natural any more in the process of producing food. Comparing the Salatin’s farm to the big organic farms, Salatin gets a different farming system, less trading, healthy soils and localized transport. In contrast to the Naylor’s farm, Salatin’s farm seems that he intends to make a more natural crop farming system, and he makes diversified species which keeps the balance of the ecology. I think that it is better to get a small-scale organic farming, which provides the high quality food; however, the requirement of the organic food is much higher than the outputs of the small-scale organic farming so that
Nevertheless, Pollan suspects the moral of those industrial companies, which utilizes the terms vulnerabilities of the organic food. In this section, Pollan’s investigates make me think that the modern food industry takes advantage of the huaman’s trust, which provides them millions of dollars. I hope Pollan can investigate more about the industrial food chain and talks about the impact on his life after researching the industrial