utenzi

Micheal Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma is one of those books that you keep on thinking about long after you finish reading it. I wrote a review of it a few days ago in case you're interested. The reason I bring this up is that today while driving past a number of cow pastures on my way to work---have I mentioned that I live in a very rural area?--I was thinking of Pollan's description of Polyface, a small self-sustaining farm in Virginia , and their methods of keeping cows. Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface, doesn't just put cows out in a pasture, which is the common practice elsewhere. What they do at Polyface is only allow the cows in any given area for a short period of time and use light portable fences to keep them in that one area. The reason for this is that cows, not surprisingly, like to eat the grass that tastes the best to them. In fact they'll crop that type of grass right down to the ground which often kills the grass. Then the cows will m...

I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma last Saturday morning just before going to that Science Blogging Convention I posted about last Sunday. It's a book that is very difficult to put down. The book is well written which is no surprise since Michael Pollan has long been a contributing writer at the New York Times as well as a professor of journalism at UC Berkley. Pollan asks the question "What should we eat?" in this book and the answer occurs organically during the course of the book. By the time you've finished the last chapter you'll know the answer to that question and I doubt it'll be the same as before you started the book. In that sense The Omnivore's Dilemma is revolutionary. It will affect the way you look at food and change your world view of the morality of food and of the government agencies that have aided in making our food choices of today what they are. Is that a run on sentence? It felt rather long and breathless. First of all, l...