Omnivore’s Dilemma: Human-Centered Alternation

              “I want to eat corn.” That was a first impression after reading this book. I was so surprised at the fact our daily lives are totally relying on corn that seems to be not so familiar with me. And as I continue to read, that surprise gradually turned to guiltiness and then dread, because this book told me that how drastically humans can change system of nature itself. Of course, it can be natural for us to change our environment to live more comfortably. We humans have improved our civilizations so that we will not suffer from disaster like starvations and live reasonably and culturally. All of these improvements can be justified only because they are beneficial for humans. However, considering for what I could understand from this book, I cannot say that resent situations are truly beneficial even for us. Clearly nature has been exploited and devastated. Furthermore, I think our lives are also getting damaged by humans’ exploitations. As a result of destroying nature, the climate change comes to cause serious damages to our civilizations and unnatural, industrialized foods directly pollute our healthy. In this book, I could understand actual examples of these phenomena, focusing on “corn”.

              “How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?(1)” When I read this sentence, I realized an extreme simple fact that I am not sure what I am eating every day. Then the author states human industry has changed eating habit completely, and one of the most important factors is corn. By this time, I did not understand yet what corn is doing for us. “So that’s us: processed corn, walking. (23)” This sentence explains well about our situations. Surprisingly, corn has something to do with almost all of our food, also nonfood; as feed, corn syrup, caramel color, xanthan gum, even fuel. This fact made me think that corn is wonderful grain, but that how much corn is grown, and that such a huge amount of corn must have serious influences on everywhere.

              In chapter 2, I knew corn has been changed farmers’ lives badly. According to the author, farmers came to make only corn so their agriculture no longer need much people, and this resulted that many workers lost their jobs and it made many ghost towns. (40) At this time, I thought that indeed our convenient lives based on corn have been making sacrifices at the place where I had not known.

              In chapter 3, I could understand much corn are spent to raise livestock, in order to “create” proteins. Also, the book showed the fact; cows naturally tend to eat glass, but people make them eat corn so that they can glow up much faster. The result is cows come to suffer from sick. This industrial point of view also caused BSE, a cow’s disease comes from feeding them cow’s proteins. The sarcasm was that we ceased to feed cow’s proteins because BSE would be serious danger for humans. It may be too natural to say that we human think about serious issues only from our benefits.

              Finally, in chapter 7, I could deeply understand about the corn issue through familiar example: fast food. According to the author, many food in McDonald’s are made of corn and even a high proportion of chicken nuggets are corn (53 percent). In addition, corn enables us to get cheap calories but this leads us to get serious diseases like obesity and heart problem, so in a long run we have to spend much money to medication.(117) What a sarcastic.

              We are facing with these “dilemma”. I am looking forward to seeing how the author will show solutions in next parts.