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.

Summary: The Omnivore's Dilemma: Chapter 17

In this chapter, the author discusses the ethics of eating animals. He first points out the animal rightists’ main arguments are that “if [people] believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either [people] have to take the steer’s interest into account or accept that [they are speciesists]” (Pollan 309), and he says such arguments are strong enough to persuade him to practice being a vegetarian. The author finds supports to the animal rightists from the industrial food producers. While they are being raised up, the animals suffer in a compact place. The chicken cannot stretch their wrings, and the pigs’ tails are cut off after they are born. The author believes the animals suffer even more while being killed since journalists are not even allowed to witness the process. In spite of such supports for the animal rightists’ arguments, the author also finds counterexamples that come from the real organic farms like the Polyface Farm. The animals live relatively a happy life on such farms, which the author says is better than the life of their relatives in the wild. The owners of the farm also make the killing process transparent, and the author says the animals die peacefully since they receive enough respect while alive. The author concludes that the practice of killing and eating of animals itself makes biological and evolutionary sense, and people should not blame that as unethical. What is unethical is the practice of raising and killing animals in the industrial food chain. The happiness of animals and the clean kill the author finds on the real organic farms finally persuade him to start eating animals again.

Personal Opinions:
I really like the way the author thinks about the issue in a biological perspective. I agree that the practice of killing and eating animal is an inevitable result of the power of natural selection, which makes evolutionary sense. I also think that both industrial food chain the vegetarian practices are going extremes. Nature has selected humans to be omnivores that raise animals just to feed themselves in a sustainable and environmental-friendly way. Disobeying Nature’s will (or say the nature’s rule) would finally bring about unforeseeable disasters such as the Mad Cow Disease and the Vitamin B-12 deficiency, which people did not predict when they first started the industrial food chain and the vegetarian practice.
I also have a question to ask: for farms like the Polyface Farm described in the book, what should we call them? Currently, I’m calling them “real organic farms”, but I doubt if that is the scientific name. (Or are they the “local food chain”?) Also, I’m wondering where we can find food products from such farms in Ithaca.