The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 2006
464 pages

The decline of America is obvious to anyone who examines disease statistics, a great deal of which must go back to what America puts in its mouth as fuel for maintaining a life style that is more akin to a robot than anything human.
Michael Pollan tells a good part of the recent history of that story in his Omnivorse’s Dilemma – those who have some knowledge of P.T. Barnum will understand how it happened.
Vanada Shiva’s statement: “we’re still eating the leftovers of World War II” has lead to Todd Dawson’s statement: “when you look at the isotope ratios, we North Americans look like little corn chips with legs.”
Those two statement are put into historical perspective and explained in detail in Pollan’s fascinating and very important book.

The entire horror is epitomized by another quote whish is descriptive of the DEATH in life that I’ve experienced since my return t the USA in 2001 after a twenty year absence.
“For though the farm might feed 129, it can no longer support the 4 who live on it.” “Nor can it feed the family.” (p. 34)
The sadness of that statement is the story of the USA at present, perhaps a question of product differentiation re: Gertrude Stein: “There is no there, there.” She was talking about Oakland. I would extend her metaphor to the entire country.

All sense of proportion has been lost whether it has to do with our overworked and depleted soil and work force, our dying bee population that is trucked from place to place, without a period of rest/hibernation, until the bees literally die from exhaustion, or our Indian Ocean bomber crews who fly over six hours daily to shoot and bomb a handful of bad guys at a cost that dwarfs the subprime fiasco.

When I came across a few diggers – Peter Coyote among them – taking machines apart in a San Francisco apartment in 1965, I took deep note of the activity and filed it away. Today I would train a child in basic insurgency activities and exactly what Peter and Kent were doing over 40 years ago.
The financial meltdown, though unexpected to most – a black swan – was not a surprise to me. But much worse is coming, as our entire civilization is built on sand dunes and a tsunami lurks just off shore.
Pollan knows this, but as with so many right thinking liberal Americans, he is repressing the full implications of what he knows and he knows a lot about the basis of the disaster and provides the reader of Omnivorse’s Dilemma with a raft of clear and concise facts about the nature and extent of our growing crisis.
To deal directly with the crisis he would have to mention Marx who is still our best guide to the system, Capitalism, which has replaced the Christian God with a god of its own, the market and elevated profits, a suboptimizing linear variable, which has lead to a family farm feeding 129 others, but can no loner support the four who live on it or most important: feed them!
Our economic system works soil and bees to death, not to mention people. It has lead to an unimaginable greed that has produced this latest destructive act: the ruination of the lives of tens and tens of millions of people. It is a system without heart that treats people as mechanical disposable parts.
How this applies to the most basic of our needs, Food, is the subtext of this book, for what has happened to our food is due to capitalism and the profit motive. It has nothing to do with our health or the most basic enjoyment of life: sharing a meal with family and friends.

We are supping petroleum (page 45) and from the standpoint of industrial efficiency it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly (page 46).
Think on the implications of this statement: “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.” (page 95)
The entire system reflects our growing madness and the exponentiating destruction of the planet that the American way of life is creating for an increasingly sick polity.
Obesity, a national problem, that is quickly becoming a planetary problem, takes years off the life of the person carrying the extra weight.
A good percentage of that added unnecessary weight is due to the annual corn harvest: a large part of that harvest is turned into 17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup whose use in thousands of processed food products is killing US, no matter what the defensive ads are saying.

If you are living off processed food, you are killing yourself. Whether that food comes from a supermarket or a fast food outlet is irrelevant.
Sir Alfred Howard expressed the entire idea very succinctly many years ago: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”
Pollan, a journalist, clarifies the statement by Howard again and again on page after page. If we take his facts seriously, we would quickly realize that the life we are living is not sustainable and that the heritage we are leaving to our children is sand and ashes.
Those involved in producing processed food are as criminal in their behaviour as those AIG executives who put over $400 billion of unsecured risk on their books.
A man I talk to daily: a calm middle American corrections officer feels that those executives should be executed for destroying our economic system. I don’t disagree though I am not a proponent of capital punishment. I would do the same to those who have turned agriculture into a processed food’s industry.
If you read Michael Pollan’s Omnivorse’s Dilemma you might be willing to volunteer for such humanitarian service.

The late Tom Anderson, the family doctor in this little farm town in northwestern Indiana, at first was puzzled, then frightened.
He began seeing strange rashes on his patients, starting more than a year ago. They began as innocuous bumps – “pimples from hell,” he called them – and quickly became lesions as big as saucers, fiery red and agonizing to touch.
They could be anywhere, but were most common the face, armpits, knees and buttocks. Anderson took cultures and sent them off to a lab, which reported that they were MRSA, or staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics.
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a “superbug” or “flesh-eating bacteria.” The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s, but more recently different strains also have been passed among high school and college athletes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS.
Anderson at first couldn’t figure out why he was seeing patient after patient with MRSA in a small Indiana town. And then he began to wonder about all the hog farms outside of town. Could the pigs be incubating and spreading the disease?
“Tom was very concerned with what he was seeing,” recalls his widow, Cindi Anderson. “Tom said he felt the MRSA was at phenomenal levels.”
By last fall, Anderson was ready to be a whistle-blower, and he agreed to welcome me on a reporting visit and go on the record with his suspicions. That was a bold move, for any insinuation that the hog industry harms public health was sure to outrage many neighbors. So I made plans to come here and visit Anderson in his practice. And then, very abruptly, Anderson died at the age of 54.
There was no autopsy, but a blood test suggested a heart attack or aneurysm. Anderson had himself suffered at least three bouts of MRSA, and a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to dangerous human heart inflammation.
The larger question is whether we Americans as a nation have moved to a model of agriculture that produces cheap bacon bur risks the health of all of us. And the evidence, while far form conclusive, is growing that the answer is yes.
A few caveats: The uncertainties are huge, partly because our surveillance system is wretched (the cases here in Camden were never reported to the health authorities). The vast majority of port is safe, and there is no proven case of transmission of MRSA from eating pork. I’ll still offer my kids BLTs – but I’ll scrub my hands carefully after handling raw pork.
Let me also be very clear that I’m not against hog farmers. I grew up on a farm outside Yamhill, Oregon, and was a state officer of the Future Farmers of America: we raised pigs for a time, including a sow named Brunhilda with such a strong personality that I remember her better than some of my high school dates.
One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in – and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.
Since then, that strain of MRSA has spread rapidly through the Netherlands – especially in swine-producing areas. A small Dutch study found pig farmers there were 760 times more likely than the general population to carry MRSA (without necessarily showing symptoms), and Scientific American reports that this strain of MRSA has turned up in 12 percent of Dutch retail pork samples.
Now this same strain of MRSA has also been found in the United States. A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested.
The study was small, and much more investigation is necessary. Yet it might shed light on the surge in rashes in the now vacant doctor’s office here in Camden. Linda Barnard, Anderson’s assistant, thinks that perhaps 10 percent of the town’s population of a bit more than 500 came in to be treated for MRSA. Indeed, during my visit, Anderson’s 13-year-old daughter, Lily, showed me a MRSA rash inflaming her knee.
“I’ve had it many times,” she said.
So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably form the routine use – make that insane overuse – of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all.

American agriculture is dangerous to the health of anyone who consumes it. Animals are tortured by being fed food that is alien to their history. Their resulting sickness is then treated by antibiotics which will eventually result in organisms that are resistant to treatment.
The peanut scandal and now the pig/MRSA incident are the tip of the iceberg.
American food is manufactured, not grown.
PROFIT is the only consideration. People do not matter. They are slaves to finance. The soil and health is at risk. Do not buy American food. Boycott it. Consume locally. Know what you are eating. American capitalism has destroyed the world financial system. Rebuild that system in a new way, without the unsustainable American mode of doing things. Choose life, not death.

If Chicken Little is out there running around, please tell him to call: the sky is falling and we need him badly.

AIG just reported a $ 61.7 billion loss, the biggest quarterly loss ever posted by a company. AIG lost $99.3 billion for the year. They will be rewarded with another chunk of taxpayers money: $ 30 billion.
The government has now given AIG $180 billion. What did they do to deserve such benevolence from our staunchly capitalist government.
You may be surprised to learn that what the $180 billion is covering, is a gambling loss and I am sure that you will not be happy to learn that much more government (read taxpayer) money will follow as AIG’s black hole of gambling debts has only been 25% covered.
Keep in mind this in an insurance company skilled in risk management, replete with mathmavens who are experts in actuarial tables but they booked $400 billion in risky instruments without any concern for provision for the risk they took on.
I know things are moving fast, but just dwell on that for a moment: an insurance company whose major skill is risk management, took on $400 billion of unsecured risk.
The new chief executive had this to say about the future of his company which is carrying ca. $300 billion of these unsecured instruments on its books. I am quoting Edward Liddy from an NBC interview: AIG was “very much going to be influenced by what happens to the condition of the economy and the financial marketplace around the globe.”
Very forthcoming.
In other words: in a short time, AIG will be back from more money, as conditions are worsening daily and the honest human – there are a few left – is now talking depression.
Some other facts:
The economy lost 6.2% in the last quarter.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are basket cases (they incidentally are the housing market).
Fannie Mae lost $58.7 billion in 2008, more than all its net profits since 1992 (!). All those big bonuses are coming home to roost.
Freddie will announce record losses shortly.
GM is bankrupt. We (taxpayers) should not pay for the reorganization. The managers who drove the country off the cliff should resign: yesterday.

The health mess is even worse: I won’t bore you with any more stats, but it is clear that, again, the taxpayer is being robbed by doctors and drug companies and those who now manage our health system for $100s of billion a year.
It’s not Botswana, but considering the outlay regarding the return – it might as well be.

American capitalism is dead in the H2O. The people know it, but their hypocritical leaders refuse to face the reality that now surrounds them. Class warfare on the Q.T. has been the life blood of American history.
Screw the common man; screw the worker; protect and enrich those with money.
Anyone, as I have, who studies law, immediately sees this: the law favors those with property and money and the Roberts court has carried on this tradition. This must end NOW and could end now if all those tens of millions of middle class individuals who just lost their future to the greed of those who have betrayed every principle of fiduciary responsibility – AIG mentioned above as one example – begin to put aside their shock and dismay at their sudden change of state and begin to organize around basic principles of sharing, fairness and sustainability.
They must have the courage to displace work, profit and consumerism from the center of their lives. The family, people, care for the neighbourhood and others must replaced the GREED that has ruled American society of late. The farm with animals must come back. Corn and corn syrup must be displaced. The American waist must reappear as the obese downsize. And perhaps as important, we must pay heed to that old miscegenist: Tom Jefferson and think of blood as the water of liberty.

The question of regressing consciously to a simpler way of life that is less resource based is not a simple one, but the resource limits of inhabiting a planet that is a closed system, except for sunlight and cosmic debris, and the constraints that those limits impose must be part of our present agenda.
The abrupt climate change we are presently experiencing a small taste of is indicative of resource use that is out of balance with the planetary processes that normally provide an invisible free lunch.
Pollution is feed back: it says you are generating ‘waste’ at a rate that the planet can’t handle within time frames that will sustain your ‘standard’ of living.
The ‘west’ – mainly the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan – have fostered a capitalism that is not sustainable. To allow this model to be transmitted to China, India, Brazil and others is the madness of our times.
The present economic correction is a small indication of how crazy it has all become.
The market as GOD is a fundamentalism that must be countered. Genuine human satisfaction must be an inherent part of any new structure that rises from the present ashes. Profit must take second place to satisfying real needs.
The market must be constrained and the propaganda of the free market must be exposed for the lie that it is. The life created for most by the constant consumption of useless objects is pitiful.
Europe, due to its sensible safety net can better weather the storm that is still in its early stages. The USA is naked and bankrupt – impaled upon a greed that seems infinite as one reads Lewis’s “The End” and other reports from the frontlines.
Reflect on Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton and then think about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears and you will sense how degraded we have become.
Turn off your TV, let your cell phone relax and above all be radical in this time of change: STOP CONSUMING.

Take this recent joke:

Doctor, I have a problem.
Where does it hurt?
Just give me some medicine.
But, I must examine you.
Do you want me to die?
Here’s a blank prescription form.
How many $billions should I make it out for?

All the effort to rebalance the economy has so far been absurd, as we don’t know how large the problem is, as we have been taking the word of the greedy liars who created the problem.
To get the real data, we must nationalize the banks. If not now, when?

“Say it ain’t so Joe, Alex, Mark, Barry, etc.”

9/11 was minor compared to the harm that the bankers have done to both American reality and American power. Yet those even thought, wrongly, to be associated with 9/11 have been the victims of rendition (sent to another country to be tortured) tortured at Gitmo, held without charge for years and then when determined, grudgingly, to be innocent, deprived of the right to compensation by the use of a court precedent that has been shown to be based on a flagrant lie.
Bankers are crying about bonuses when they ought to be stripped naked and beaten through the streets of New York City. They have totally failed to carry out their basic fiduciary responsibilities and they and those who allowed torture to sully the name of America must be publicly exposed and punished.
We can only move on when the past is exposed and sunlight is applied to those who treated the constitution as a document of convenience instead of being the bedrock upon which the nation rests.
The crimes that have shamed the USA must be exposed. Bi-partisanship must not be extended to criminals.
It is [hypocrisy]² to arrest and convict a thief when those who stole our economy and good name go free. W, Cheney and company ran the country like a kleptocracy. They must be held accountable for their deeds.

I was a consultant, official and unofficial, for a decade at the highest levels of corporate America. I would only agree to consult and give my opinion when I had looked at all the facts.
You can’t turn around a bad situation, if you do not know what the facts are. That is particularly true in our economic crisis. Money given to a bank that is technically bankrupt is lost money.
The entire top tier of the economy, fuelled by greed and abetted by a sleeping president and financial rating agencies that ought to be dissolved, has created the worst financial crisis in capitalist history.
It is unique, so the Barnackes, the Geithners, the Sommers, who are very intelligent men, are using tools that may not apply to 2009: they are generals fighting the last war. See the incredible debacle of WWI, if you need an example.
All that said as preamble, the facts are not known, so most of the money so far allocated may be money thrown down a rathole.
We must know the exact financial situation of all of our large banks and financial institutions. Until we do, any money given to them would better be distributed by wind from the top of the Empire State Building.
We may have to nationalize the banking system to do this. Consider AIG, given ca. $170 billion, now selling $.43 share and bankrupt again.
To give money to G.M. is madness. It is still managed by those who created the crisis. Let it die. Creative destruction, perhaps the end of capitalism, but the image of Mrs. Clinton holding out the begging bowl to the Chinese tells the real story.

We are beholden to the Chinese and USA Hyperpower has become USA Beggar. Brought to our knees by men who must be exposed and punished for their lack of fiduciary responsibility.

The court is now doing all it can to prevent a key issue in my case: the illegal taking of 63 volumes of personal diaries from my apartment on March 29, 1979, from surfacing.
Material of such nature can’t be used in court as it is fifth amendment protected. A basic right against self-incrimination and one of the first ten amendments to the constitution and the basis for the unique form of freedom – when observed – that citizens of the USA enjoy.
The material was taken under the aegis of a poisonous warrant.
It was then given to a journalist, Steven Levy. Such behaviour is unprecedented in American law as evidence is sacrosanct and supposedly protected under bond of law. His use of such stolen property is plagiarism among other crimes.
All of this is described clearly in my pro-se petition.
It is a legal horror story that my two closest prosecutors, posing as lawyers, William Cannon and Mitchell S. Strutin, ‘missed’, though the series of actions would have given any first year law student apoplexy.
The diaries were used at the trial and dominated the trial. Egregious prosecutorial misconduct and legal error on the part of Mitch and bill that would bring about hara-kiri in Japan. When they were history, I immediately tried to reclaim my property.

I am public enemy no. 1, so the DA avoided the motion for a year, then tried to time bar me and added an insult as part of the process. A continuous ad hominem attack that has gone on for almost three decades and was furthered by the DA’s office illegally giving my diaries to a writer to use against me for his own purposes.
See page 32 for the DA’s insult. It has nothing to do with the law and is indicative of their bankruptcy.

The judge has refused to put anything on paper, thus avoiding the basic function of the law. To commit rulings to paper, so they can be discussed and appealed when necessary.
When a petitioner submits a motion to a court, a judge must rule on it. That is the function of the court. That ruling must then be put in writing and sent to the petitioner.
Judge Palumbo has not ruled on:
1. my asking for additional time
2. my in forma pauperis petition
3. my motion itself.
Or to be more accurate, he has ruled on all three matters, but has not taken the trouble to inform the petitioner in writing, an abrogation of his basic function and a destruction of the basic due process rights of the petitioner.
I have appealed the matter and sent a copy of the appeal to the present judge and a number of other people of note.
Yet, technically you can’t appeal unless you have a written order. Knowing this and suspecting that the judge would never issue one, or issue it too late (sorry, you are time barred is the bane of so many of those fighting an unjust system), I asked leave to appeal from his verbal order which he granted, but you can’t get a transcript without a signed in forma pauperis order which the judge never signed and without a transcript – a record of what happened – you can’t perfect an appeal.
Yet I sent the appeal in, explaining the defects, including a secondary (copy) cover sheet, asking that it be date stamped and returned to me in a SASE that I included with the appeal.
That was three weeks ago. My SASE has not come back.
The motion about my property that you will find below is mainly factual. The law I used is simple and straightforward. The principle is clear; if something is not contraband, it must be returned.
The pages were written in response to a three part submission by a SA that I can sum up very concisely: the sum total of the Commonwealth’s argument adds up to the following:
A. an argument based on fallacious facts.
B. an argument based upon conflating a return of property hearing with a forfeiture hearing, using as support a case that has little relevance in our court system.
C. an insult that is based on the total misstating of the actual factual situation.

In situation after situation, the court has acted towards me in a manner that an objective observer would describe as subterfuge.
It is the tonus of Pensylvania courts in too many instances as the article below illustrates:

International Herald Tribune, February 14-15, 2009, p. 5

While prosecutors say that Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.
“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur Grim, who was appointed by the state Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.
The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines. It raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.
If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months.
Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.
With Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said. They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the new private detention centers.
Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.
Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod said that the government continued to allege a quid pro quo.
“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”
No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.
For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants lo detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.
“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.
“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge, and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”

I was told Friday there will be many more arrests to follow. Given my egregious experience, I am not surprised.

February 22, 2009