Summary: The Omnivore's Dilemma: Chapter 12

In this chapter, the author talks about the “processing” (killing) of chicken on the Polyface Farm, an “old-fashioned mixed” farm. Here, the author brings up a social and political problem that many small-scaled farms like the Polyface Farm face: the inappropriate governmental regulations. Taking the current food-safety regulation as an example, the author says the government regulates that “a processing facility must have impermeable white walls so that they can be washed down between shifts” (Pollan 228-229). This regulation makes sense when it is applied to large industrial slaughterhouses, but when owners of the small-scaled farms like the Polyface Farm want to make the killing process transparent so that the sanity of the process is better guaranteed, the inflexible regulations become impediments. The owners thus argue that: “The USDA is being used by the global corporate complex to impede the clean-food movement. They aim to close down all but the biggest meat processors, and to do it in the name of biosecurity. Every government study to date has shown that the reasons we’re having an epidemic of food-brone illness in this country is centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transportation of food. You would think therefore that they’d want to decentralize the food system, especially after 9/11. But no! they’d much rather just irradiate everything instead” (Pollan 230). The farmers’ complains definitely exaggerated the problem, but to some extent, it reflects a problem in reality that many small-scaled farms as well as other small-scaled food-related business face.

Questions to consider:
1. With the mechanism of social imagination, sociologists link problems of small groups of people to large sociological issues and their historical causes. Are the problems the small-scale farms face related to historical materialism, and thus are inevitable in a capitalism society where the bourgeoisies have the power to make the rules?
2. Later in the chapter, the author describes his own experience of killing chickens. When it comes to the problem of chicken suffering from the killing, he says rather subjectively that the chicken do not seem to suffer a lot. Are such subjective descriptions convincing enough? Or are the chickens on the Polyface Farm actually suffer more dying than the ones in an industrial slaughterhouse since they watch other chicken dying while waiting for their own turns.