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Dominique Driver
College Writing II
Professor Joines
4/18/2013

“Addressing the Problem: Childhood Obesity”

The State of the Union is in a crisis over the direction that our country is heading towards. People are consuming large amounts of fast & processed foods, which is resulting in health problems. People are not realizing that there could be consequences for their actions. Quick decision making can have a long term effect on us. The lack of a balanced diet and an adequate amount of exercise has led to the crisis that we are facing around the country today. Michael Pollan addresses these problems in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was written by the famous journalist, Michael Pollan in 2007. Pollan opens by addressing the simple question, what should we have for dinner? A simple question that use to be so straightforward has now become so complicated. The book is split into three parts dividing the food chain up based on the three principal food systems that continue to flourish today: industrial, organic, and the hunter-gatherer. The industrial section of the book discusses the process that corn goes through before the general public consumes it as a fast food
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meal. The second section discusses alternatives to industrial food and farming, which is referred to as organic food and farming. Pollan states in the introduction, “ So the book’s pastoral section serves up the natural history of two very different “organic” meals: one whose ingredients came from my local Whole Foods supermarket (gathered there from as far away as Argentina), and the other tracing its origins to a single polyculture of grasses growing at Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia” (Pollan 8). The Omnivore’s Dilemma gives history about where the foods that we consume come from. Pollan furthermore discusses how majority of the processed foods that we consume are