For most people a “conventional farmer” is another way of saying “a farmer who is willing to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides”. That doesn’t really do conventional farmers justice, but for a thumbnail description on a busy Thursday morning, it’ll do. As anyone who’s ever tried to maintain a garden knows, the hardest thing about […]
READ ONA LOT of people are writing in asking why a.) I would choose to side with horrible “agrobusiness” companies like Monsanto, especially when b.) only a tiny proportion of Americans follow Michael Pollan’s advice on organic eating. To that all I can say is a.) I’m not taking sides with Monsanto (you want to hear […]
READ ONCorn, as I’ve written before, is a New World crop. It’s been said that corn is to the Americas what wheat is to Europe and rice is to Asia. More than just a food, it’s practically part of our DNA. Ancient Mesoamericans liked to describe themselves as “corn people” or “corn walking”. Art from the […]
READ ONReader Michael writes in to say: Sorry, Joe, but corn is, in fact, primarily fertilized with a petroleum product. Mass scale corn production requires a massive infusion of fixed nitrogen fertilizers. The primary fertilizer of choice for use with corn is anhydrous ammonia, which is a primarily petroleum based product. So, corn is, in fact, […]
READ ONLet’s stop beating up on poor Michael Pollan for a while, why don’t we, and switch gears to farming. For obviously there are more than a few misconceptions about it out there. I’m not a farmer mind you, though I am descended from a long line of corn and soy farmers and elevator operators (grain […]
READ ONSo far I’ve done my best to call attention to what I think are some of the major logical fallacies that underlie Omnivore’s Dilemma, and by extension Food Inc.. There was Pollan’s cobbled together “agrobusiness” nemesis, an amalgam of everybody from Exxon and Monsanto on down to small family farmers, all of whom think and […]
READ ONThis is one of the main tropes to have emerged about corn from the pages of Omnivore’s Dilemma since its publication, and one which it seems we’ll be stuck with for a while. Indeed it’s hard to read a food blog or a major newspaper food section nowadays without coming across at least one instance […]
READ ONAs anticipated, a lot of feisty emails in my box — and it’s only Tuesday — most of them stuffed with arguments about that’s wrong with the modern food system. Let me clarify something: my purpose is not to argue that everything’s hunky dory with modern agriculture. There are problems — serious ones — as […]
READ ONThe thing I love so much about the paragraph from Omnivore’s Dilemma I quoted earlier is the insinuation that the sheer versatility of corn somehow makes it bad. As though processed foods, consumer packaged goods, and ugly retail architecture would all just disappear — or better still, would never even have been invented — if […]
READ ONWhy do we grow corn? I mean, I don’t eat a whole lot of corn on the cob. Do we really need that much? It’s a fair question, for indeed worldwide, we grow a ton of corn. More than a ton, in fact, much more. 700 million metric tons according to recent UN figures, with […]
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