Hungry Planet - Food with a Face by Michael Pollan

Hungry Planet Report Group 4

Summary of "Food with a Face", by Michael Pollan

Pollan's essay focuses on the relationships humans have with the animals that we eat. Traditionally, a farm animal would be cared for by a farmer who sees the animal's day in and day out. The farmer nurtures the animal from birth to the day it is slaughtered. Today, animals are raised on feed lots known as CAFOs, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. These massive facilities are designed for efficiency of food production. Pollan suggests that our modern food production system is designed to "produce proteins" as opposed to raising animals for meat.

Once the animals are ready for slaughter, they are moved to enormous slaughtering facilities where tons of meat is processed each day. The public doesn't get to see how the animals are slaughtered, and Pollan makes the argument that the goal of the meat packaging industry is to make the meat look as far as possible from an animal. People have subsequently become disconnected from the animals that they eat.

When we look at an animal, we will usually make eye contact with it. Not surprisingly, we can read an animal's emotions. We can generally tell when an animal is happy, scared, or sad. Our pets serve as the greatest example of our ability to understand an animal. When your dog is happy, his eyes say so. When your cat needs attention, her eyes can tell you that. Yet our society has discouraged eye contact with the animals that we eat. It appears as though we have made efforts to remove ourselves from the source of the food we eat. Pollan believes that if slaughter houses had glass walls, we would all think very differently about the meat that we eat. If we bring eye contact back to the farm animal, the animals would be treated with much more respect.

The Madsen family of Greenland is an example of a family that is very connected to the food they eat. They live in such a remote region that they have no choice but to hunt for their food. They also depend on their dogs for transportation while hunting. In this segment of the book, they go on a seal hunt. After they have succeeded in killing a seal, they do everything themselves by processing all of the animal parts into usable feed or supply. This family is almost exactly the opposite of the type of family Pollan suggests to be the norm in the United States. Instead of buying our beef products and never even thinking about the cow that was born and died to make that product,