Lessons taken from Michael Pollan's book that underscore the importance of green living.
You can learn a lot of things from Michael Pollan’s latest book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” not the least of which is that there are very good reasons for living – and eating – green:
1) All things are connected and, ultimately, even the most Space-Age-looking food product has its roots in the sun, the soil and the plant world.
2) There’s always something in nature we can’t improve upon, as we can see from the growing problems surrounding the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified organisms and an industrial approach toward nature.
3) How we eat always has an impact on our planet, for better or for worse. This makes every food choice essentially a decision to protect or harm the place where we live.
4) Corn, as it’s grown and processed by the modern industrial food system, is a lot less wholesome and a lot more pervasive than most of us realize.
5) Meat comes from animals … obvious enough, right? But until we confront how the animals we raise for meat are bred, fed and slaughtered, we can’t honestly defend our decision to eat meat.
6) You really are what you eat. And until you understand what really goes into the food you eat, you can’t know whether it’s good for you or not.
7) Animals were not meant to be treated as “production units,” nor were plants meant to be privatized as “intellectual property.”
8) What we don’t know really can hurt us and disturb us … things like the modern practices of feeding corn to farm-raised salmon, or breeding chickens that grow so fast and big that their legs frequently fail them.
9) How sunlight, soil, water and nutrients become food is truly miraculous, and most of us don’t stop to think about that often enough.
10) We humans are as much a part of nature as anything else, however much we try to ignore, forget or disguise that fact. When we come to terms with that truth, the benefits of living green and sustainably become brilliantly clear.
