|
ae04872
|
The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
|
|
universe
history
dream
fantasy
adoration
expenses
lord-god
petulant
preposterous
prayers
homo-sapiens
ruler
industry
lord
evidence
flattery
creation
|
Robert A. Heinlein |
|
0d269f7
|
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.
|
|
meat
industry
ethics
|
Michael Pollan |
|
b41edb8
|
Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.
|
|
politics
life
industry
ignorance
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
2f776d8
|
"Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring-to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories-"dolphin safe," "humanely slaughtered," etc.-about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values-and not just "value"-will inform their purchasing decisions."
|
|
dilemma
michael-pollan-omnivore-dilemma
pollan
food-chain
omnivore
michael
food-regulation
food-safety
product
industry
purchase
ignorance
|
Michael Pollan |
|
4b32ce4
|
An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences.
|
|
industry
|
Georges Bataille |
|
f31ef58
|
What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken ( ) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.
|
|
industry
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
355b128
|
You know the proverb, Mr. Hale, 'set a beggar on horseback, and he'll ride to the devil' - well, some of these early manufacturers did ride to the devil in a magnificent style - crushing human bone and flesh beneath their horses' hoofs without remorse.
|
|
industry
manufacturers
trade
devil
|
Elizabeth Gaskell |
|
2b11445
|
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
|
|
factory-farms
corn
cows
oil
petroleum
industry
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
e051000
|
The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.
|
|
character
work
industry
class
english
|
Paul Theroux |
|
88819d4
|
"Industry and determination, Mister Kettle, can transform the difficult into the routine," Grimm said."
|
|
difficult
possible
industry
impossible
|
Jim Butcher |
|
5778435
|
I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there's money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn't you go out and paint?
|
|
theory
emily-bach
renaissance
industry
|
Allegra Goodman |