Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Lemme get this straight: getting in the groove of the moment when
hunting for the first time, or getting a thrill out of eating what
you’ve caught and prepared with what sound like some real characters,
suggests a generalized ideology of nature-romanticism? Do I have that
right?
My argument is that he is not opposed to romanticization of nature — […]

Answer to the title question? Obviously, I think not. Since I also had on my shelf Pollan’s _The Botany of Desire_ (look, if some wanker is going to tell me that I didn’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma even after I quote line after line from the book, I’ll go out and read every thing Pollan’s […]

In this post, I take on the irritant of Pollan’s inability to see all the labor involved in the production of even his hunted and gathered meal. It strikes me that someone like Pollan, who talk repeatedly about how everything is connected in an ecological system, can’t extend that same thinking to *people.*
At 05:14 PM […]

As andy’s increasingly angry responses reveal, what seemed to really motivate was the assumption that if you criticize pollan, you must be someone with rilly rilly declasse tastes. Which, I don’t know, might have been more a reaction to me and Andy’s assumptions about who I am. Which I hand’t considered until just now. Anyway, […]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 1:39 PM, shag wrote:
> Andy, I apologize if I’m dense, but I am having a hard time parsing the
> sentence. Are you saying that you don’t understand why people think Pollan
> romanticizes nature? That you took him as someone who doesn’t? Both?
> Neither?
At 11:19 PM 10/15/2008, Andy wrote:
I […]

Here, I start to show, in a rather long convoluted way, that Pollan’s arguments ultimately lead to a weird kind of antipathy to science that encourages sciency types to lurv him anyway. I think they are self-hating sciency types, is what it is. *snort*
but more seriously, what I’m getting at is the way pollan needs […]

In response to Andy’s objections that Pollan is most certainly not a reviled romantic, I wrote a couple of posts showing that Pollan is not at all opposed to capitalism, and wouldn’t be ashamed to be described as a pro-market capitalist. Rather, the enemy for Pollan is a kind of “bigness”. More precisely, the enemy […]

I have no idea why Shane Mage responded the way he did in my quote below. But he did. And of course it pissed me off that anyone could justify that paying of substandard wages, especially somone like Mage, who I consider a pretty hard core Marxist.
Alas, shouldn’t be surprised.
This was my restrained response. heh.
At […]

as other reviewers of Pollan have noted, Pollan gives an uncritical pass to his protagonist, Joel Saletin, in _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. Saletin has some pretty reprehensible politics and Pollan largely lets him off the hook. If he scolds anyone it is the urbanite for hating on rural farmers like Saletin, rather than investigating Saletin’s belief […]

So, to continue with my posts on Michael Pollan’s work, particularly _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_, to give a little more background, apparently when commenting on the book to Dwayne, mostly agreeing with him, I was unaware of the bee’s nest I was stepping on. As in: no idea that Michael Pollan has a zealous fanbase of […]

my spirit animal is a giraffe. yours?
Anyway, as I continued reading _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_ I became increasingly annoyed with Pollan’s romanticism. His decided tendency to insist that his experience is everyone’s experience, that as he says, eating lettuce is like getting rilly rilly close to our herbivorous buddies, deer, cows, giraffes, etc.
Here’s what I posted […]

More ramblings on the things that irritated me about Pollan’s book, _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. In line with a lot of other “green,” “ecology,” and “animal rights” perspectives, Pollan tends to ignore the role of labor in food production. OK, so the point of his book was to trace food specifically, and not concern himself too […]

I’m going to repost some exchanges that went on regarding an editorial Michael Pollan wrote regarding food security. I’d just picked up Pollan’s book, _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. I’d spied it on the “new” book shelf at the library and remembered that a couple of people at LBO recommended the book for our book reading group […]