This week's reading of "The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 2: Grass" was especially troubling. The following are just a few quotes from this section that really stood out to me, in which I will elaborate.
[2]"But in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential." (178)
[3]"I'm just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time." (212)
[4]"This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale." (213)
[5]"It was all of a biological piece, the trees and the grasses and the animals, the wild and the domestic, all part of a single ecological system." (224)
[6]"The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked - nature into culture." (264)
The first quote was especially bothering because, like I've expressed in a previous blog post, the human race makes things adapt to us. We make the world and all things in it revolve around us. This is dumb. Rather than referring directly toward nature, this time it was directed toward industrialization of farming and selling food. Quote [2] also sparks some conflict, we've made everything adapt to us to the point that all we care about is having a lot. Quantity is now more valued than quality. In order to make our industrialization of food "equal" to the natural way of growing truly "organic" (if I can still use that word as it's intended), we've began telling our country that all foods are created equal.
I appreciated [3][4][5] because they express how the growth of food is a natural process, one that we (humans) aren't the divine force in; we are merely "the orchestra conductor." Our ecosystems know what to do to optimally create nutritious life as it were intended; they really are their own machine. This machine is the same machine that we think we are better/smarter than (referring back to previous rants about humanity).
[6] is just food for thought. Raw : Cooked :: Nature : Culture
I also have concerns in regards to the first two quotes. I completely agree with what you have to say but I am still at a loss. How can we effectively make any sort of change now? As we have mentioned several times in class, we live in a society that too easily listens to what is considered the best food options. We are definitely not eating properly, but how can we make that universally known?
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