We had a very productive discussion during the morning of Tuesday, July 26.
I started class by sharing some observations I made while reading your All Souls passage responses. (Those of you who emailed them will get them back soon.) I noticed that in general you showed an understanding of the passages you chose and say something about why those particular passages were meaningful. Many of you were also able to make meaningful personal connections. What we need to work on is connecting the passages to the work as a whole and discussing how language choices, literary techniques, and structure are significant in the passages.
We then discussed lingering thoughts about All Souls. I was particularly interested in the comparisons between Gloucester and Southie that some of you made in your passage responses. So we talked about civic pride (pride for your city, town, or neighborhood) and how civic pride can make a place better or be used to cover over problems. Those you present for class had some interesting final thoughts about All Souls in relation to your own lives.
After wrapping up All Souls we began discussing The Ominvore's Dilemma. I started by asking, "What is the book's main argument? What is it's overall point?" This led to a lively discussion in which we tried to conceptualize the overall argument and how that large argument is made up of smaller, subordinate arguments. (How does the argument in each section contribute to the main argument?) For those of you who were not there on Tuesday: what for you was Michael Pollan's main point and how did other points (and the different sections) contribute to the main point?
At different moments in the discussion I asked questions about how Pollan's choices in structure and in language were contributing to the argument. We talked about the way the book was structured and how that structure might be significant. We talked about Pollan's use of storytelling to make a point. (Sometimes instead of stating an opinion directly he suggested -- or implied -- an opinion through storytelling.) We talked about how he sometimes juxtaposed details in order to make a point. We discussed ways he created a personal, dramatic situations to intensify the reader's attention. (I pointed out the drama of eating meat while reading Peter Singer's book about the immorality of meat eating.) We looked closely at the conclusion to see how he wove the final argument from materials presented earlier in the book. We talked about the tone and style of Pollan's argument. (We compared the style to MacDonald's style and to other forms of argument.) What did you notice about the language and techniques Pollan used? How did what you notice affect the argument the book makes?
Finally we answered the questions "Is Pollan's overall argument convincing? What about other particular arguments along the way? Did the book have an effect on how you view food? How so?" We cut this part of the discussion a little short and I hope to return to it later.
If you weren't there Tuesday write a substantial response before the last summer session (Tuesday, August 16). Let your voice be heard.
Main point: ignorance is destructive (bad) while basic knowledge of your food is necessary for sustainability (good). Each section explores a different food system based on a certain degree of separation between stuffs and platter, the progression of sections riding the degrees down to personal experience and observing each degree of sustainablilty. They lure the reader through what it thinks is an exploration of the food industry but what ends up forcing the reader to want to live in a shack in the woods. Not until the reader completes the final section can it understand how outrageous the first is. The complete lack of environmental impact of hunting a wild pig puts to shame any attempted decrease of impact that certain products boast of in the supermarket. With such a wild occurrence of a government supported environmental attack, which is only one amoung a slew, I can only become angry at petty regulations and small attempts to save the environment, which I’ll plainly and self-condemningly say a cowards’ approaches. Pollan’s four-part structure lures the reader slowly, like a frog in a pot, into self condemnation. He also treats accepted practice, like shopping at the supermarket and buying processed foods and driving in the car with humor, rather than scorn, while he treats the other aspects of industrialized food with disgust. He likes contrast a lot, and he likes it to be as stark as possible, because then it’s undeniable. Despite his use of good argument, I had to consider his argument at a distance, or get annoyed, because I knew that, even if completely agreed with him, he was trying to manipulate me overall. In the end, though, so much for manipulating, all it makes me want to do is attend one of Pollan’s dinner parties.
ReplyDeleteI think that the main point of the book was the dangers of progress and over efficiency at the cost of the land the food is grown on, the animals, and our health. It almost seems stupid that we can be so delusional with how we produce our food. I personally never think about it too much when I’m eating it, even though the subject has been brought to my attention before. Never like this though. I didn’t realize how corrupt the USDA was, and this book really made me stop and think. It made me realize how big a hole we’ve dug ourselves into by being able to grow more food per acre. Especially in the last section, when Pollan said that even though we are foragers, it’s impossible to do that now with all the people on earth since we’d use all the resources up almost immediately. The technology that Fritz Harber, the Nobel Prize winner for “improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind,” created to make nitrogen in order to sustain such high amounts of food per acre inevitably is leading to our downfall since more food means we can support more people, but for how long. This book is really a warning, giving a few different options we can take. It’s hinting that we should probably change our ways now because sooner or later the time will come where it will be so unavoidable that something will have to be done about how food is created, and how we consume it, blind to all the procedures used to bring it to our tables.
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