I did it! I did it!

And it's only taken since JANUARY for me to finish reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan. I'm giving myself until the beginning of October to start and finish the next book, "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto".

My babbling at LiveJournal.


A few points or things I want to make or retell are below:

- While finishing reading at the air conditioned library I took an eye break, you know looking up from the page of words, and the magazine title in my direct line of sight was "The Art of Eating". Giggled as quietly as I could for a couple minutes on that.


- Quote of a quote regarding "catch and release" type fishing:
"...that's playing your food. You shouldn't play with your food."

- A good paragraph to help sum up the meat dilemma:

The industrialization - and brutalization - of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end - for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

- I want to follow that by mentioning Polyface Farms, which I want to also look into myself. For starters they are a very self sufficient farm with quite good practices, should they really be as described by the author. Also, I think it's a very novel idea of an open air abattoir for the chickens. The cows and pigs, by law, have to go to commercial slaughterhouse. And those don't allow people onto the killing floors, for very good reasons.

- And continuing the murder theme Pollan mentioned a pig hunt/kill that is or was going on in Santa Cruz on some islands there overrun with "feral" pigs.


Lastly, I'm not wanting to become fully vegan anymore. Nope. I can in good conscious eat meat but I'm definitely thinking a helluva lot more about it. Just hammered home the idea I really need to make other changes in my life so I can cook and prepare my own food again and to give myself the permission to pay more for truly better foods.