Monday, January 25, 2010

Omnivores Dilemma Part 2

In part two of the book Pollan visits a farm in Iowa owned by a guy that’s been growing corn since he was pretty much a kid. He explains that corn had changed so much over the years and how it’s barely edible anymore because it’s chemically altered to grow bigger with fertilizer built inside the seed as well as pesticide. He also goes into how this kind of corn is making people go bankrupt because the yields aren’t near as big as they were in the past and its worth less now a days.

After reading the second part of the book it made me think this is kind of depressing for the farmers who base their whole lives of their farming and end up going bankrupt or have to sell parts of their farm to break even every year. I also don’t get how the government can control what kind of seeds these people can plant, especially when they end up to be low quality products. Since corn is in almost all our processed foods shouldn’t it be good quality corn and the people growing it should be able to make a descent amount of money that they can live off of. The government shouldn’t lower the price of corn so the only way for people to make it worthwhile is to grow more. These people almost spend more money growing it then they do selling it, which isn’t what should be happening.