1. Pollan means that with so many contradicting facts being thrown at people, instead of doing what is right people want to be told what to buy. So if a commercial or someone tells us a fact about a certain food to make it seem healthy people will buy it. People will hesitate from just doing what is right like eating balanced will let someone pursued them into buying something that actually isn’t that healthy for them. This is how the question has become confusing.
2. Pollan means that nationwide we are obsessed with the fact of looking healthy instead of actually being healthy. I completely agree with this because people base what they buy off of what it is supposed to make them look like instead of just plane eating right and exercising.
3. Pollan thinks this because “it never would have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted tradition of food and eating”. We are more vulnerable because we are so ethnically and culturally different. We as Americans have no massive religious and cultural ties to food so it makes us more vulnerable to be persuaded into eating no necessarily healthy things.
4. The American Paradox is the people here that are unhealthy and are obsessed with the idea of being or becoming healthy. The French paradox is a healthy group of people that live and eat in ways that we look at as unhealthy.
5. An omnivore eats both other animals and plants.
6. The omnivore’s dilemma is that as omnivore’s we have such a huge selection of possible items of food, but we have to base possible items off of what is healthy or what could eventually kill us. A koala is an omnivore but it has less an issue finding food because it has a specific gene that tells the koala to eat eucalyptus leaves. Humans do not have a gene telling us what to eat so it is easier for us to eat the wrong thing.
7. He believes that the omnivore’s dilemma is the fact that as omnivores there is such a huge selection of things to eat that it is hard to find out what is right to eat and what will not hurt us if we eat it. The American eating disorder is similar because American’s don’t have problems finding food we just eat a bunch of the wrong things that eventually will deplete our overall health. Supermarkets make all of these unhealthy foods available for anyone to purchase.
8. It is to show how the human diet has become more of a question instead of a habit or tradition. He is showing how much confusion is present on an everyday basis of what to eat and how much to eat as an omnivore.
9. He is referring that everything in nature is either eating or being eaten. He is telling us how nature is an infinite cycle of food chains.
10. A hierarchical series of organisms each dependent on the next as a source of food.
11. We as humans have learned by the taste of some foods that might make us sick and or harm us. These taste come off as tasting bad so we do not keep eating them or eat them again. Also we have developed teeth that are perfect for the combination of chewing and ripping flesh. He means that we have made foods that would not be possible for us to eat possible by cooking with fire, hunting, or fishing.
12. He means that since the changes happened so fast we are still finding out every day that what we have changed could actually harm us instead of being completely beneficial like we had thought. Some good implications of the changes is that food is more available to even the poor and some bad implications is that the food is less healthy then natural food, and they cause a lot of pollution to be made.
13. Industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer. Industrial food chains are massive man-made crops with extremely high yields and are focused on profits and not health beneficially to humans. Organic is food grown just like it would be without human involvement, and hunter-gatherer is taking the natural food straight out of its natural habitat.
14. He thinks that the industrial revolution has changed the food chain by increasing the availability of energy to create food, which he thinks this is bad because instead of getting energy from the sun we are creating it with fossil fuels. This is how we have “changed the fundamental rules of the game”.
15. This is because with so much food out there available to omnivores it gives them too many choices. There are a lot more unhealthy foods out there then there are healthy foods. As humans we are going to eat what seems or taste appealing to us and more often than not with more choices sometimes those food options are not the healthiest.
16. He faced challenges like having to go and find the food and gathered it himself instead of going to the store and buying it which that food has already been prepared and gathered for you.
17. When he gathered everything himself he had to face every element and challenge there was to gathering that food. That made the food that much more valuable to him rather than eating food that has been put in front of you because of the work some other guy put in.
18. He means that there is conflict between human industry and nature and as of right now there always will be. Nature tries to remain balanced and healthy and diverse while industry tries to make the most profit at the fastest rate with the items that are mostly in demand. With these two differences industry and nature simply collide.
19. We are taking what has happened on this earth for millions of years and we are theoretically flipping it onto its head. We are changing natural plants to benefit just us and not the overall health of the earth. We are mass producing crops that lower the biodiversity of the planet and without biodiversity the planet cannot heal itself. For the overall health of us we are changing plants genetically that we have adapted to eating naturally over thousands of years. With these sudden changes our bodies eventually may not be able to keep up and we could end up killing off humans just from eating the food we industrially produce.
20. Pollan is referencing that everything in the giant food chain the earth is built on depends on every organism that is inside of it. If you were to take out one of these organisms you could potentially be killing ten other organisms in the process.
21. If you lose knowledge of where your food comes from you could potentially put something into your body that you are not even aware of could harm you. If you had knowledge of this you would have never put that substance in your body in the first place. If we knew what and where every bit of our food came from I think the overall health of humans would be better because normal people would not put unhealthy or potentially dangerous things into their body.
22. Wendell means that whenever that you buy something you are increasing the demand of that product from wherever it came from that is how it is an agricultural act. Ecologically you could be supporting the destruction of rain forest in Brazil when you buy fruits that are made in Brazil, and politically you could be supporting products from other countries when you could buy the same product made here and keep that money in the U.S.
23. People that do not care and or are not aware of the problems they cause when they go to the store and purchase items, and the audience is for people that even understand slightly or people willing to learn.

1. He means that when you go to the produce or meat section you are going to get the food in pretty much it’s raw or natural form. Anywhere else in the store there is food you could not tell me what exactly that product is made of.
2. Baby carrots and potatoes already skinned and shaped to be more appealing. I would define supermarket euphemism as a change to the food from its natural state to make it more appealing to humans.
3. A naturalist would be astounded by a supermarket because of the amount of products that are made chemically instead of found in nature.
4. He sees that the foods in the produce and meat department are almost natural and everything else in the store is processed and cannot be found in nature.
5. The two other questions that you should ask are “what am I eating” and “where in the world did this food that I am eating come from”. These two questions are extremely important now because I guarantee half or more of the population is unaware of what exactly is inside some of the foods they and where some of these ingredients come from. This is bad because they could be potentially putting something inside their body they normally wouldn’t or over time could harm them. They help define the working definition because we used to grow everything we needed here instead of relying on the creation of ingredients through processes or getting them from other countries.
6. Industrial food is any food that requires an expert or requires special education to tell you exactly all the ingredients and tell you where they come from, also any food that requires an unnatural process to be edible.
7. He ended up at an American corn field. This is because corn is tied to almost every food that you can purchase in some sort of way.
8. The salmon and Beef are farm raised so most of their diet consists of corn. In Twinkies most of the ingredients are made from corn or corn oil. Also a lot of the sugar found in Twinkies comes from corn because corns are able to be converted into many different types of sugars. Lastly, the trash bags plastic is mostly made up or corn.
9. Every single one of the products you pick up has some sort of ties with corn.
10. Batteries
11. I feel as if a problem would be that if we ran out of corn, even if this is unlikely the more plausible idea would be if the demand for corn out competed the production. If this were to happen then all the products we make from corn would be a lot more expensive and no longer as cheaply made as they are now.
12. Corn was a huge part of their diet and like us they used corn for countless amounts of things.
13. He means that as an American to think that we are not corn people would be an ignorant statement. The truth is, believe it or not, most of our diet consists of corn and most of the products we use to today come somehow from corn. So to think that we are not corn people you would just be insubordinate or plane ignorant.
14. By taking your DNA from your hair and finding how many different isotopes of carbon there are.
15. Corn takes compounds of four carbons (along with some other plants) from the air instead of three like a majority of other plants that we use.
16. It is the nickname given to plants that take four carbon compounds from the air.
17. The corn opens its stoma.
18. It allows the stomata to stay open without losing as much water as other plants while with other plants if the stoma stays open they will lose all of their water and die.
19. He means that when a plant opens its stoma they are letting their water out so eventually they will die like if a human lost a lot of their blood. He compares it to if the human lost blood when it opens its mouth so we would have to pick a time when we could eat like plants do.
20. Carbon 12 has 6 protons and 6 neutrons while carbon 13 has 6 protons and 7 neutrons, it allows scientist to find the ratio of how much carbon 13 to 12 is in your body. The higher the ratio the more corn that consists of the food you eat.
21. Pollan said this because in the north we now rely on corn more than many countries in the world. This is because we have industrialized corn so much that we can pretty much use it for anything and we do. What Todd means is that we use corn so much and rely on corn so much in our day to day lives that you could consider us one big corn chip.
22. It is considered a big success story because before 1491 white man never knew what corn was. After the Indians introduced it to us we now use corn for just about everything. He means it has domesticated us because it has forced us to become dependent on it.
23. When he taught the white man about corn he introduced a valuable crop to Europeans. This allowed more to move to the America’s because it was a great source of food. They could eventually use corn for other things like alcohol and other materials.
24. This is different because we normally view our crops as us being in full control of them, but in corns case corn has control over us. I feel as if soy has a lot of control over humans as well. We depend on soy a lot like we depend on corn.
25. He means the corn allowed countries to transition to capitalists because it gave common people an item to value themselves with.
26. Corn could not reproduce without humans because the tusks of corn are too strong for the seeds to be dropped into the soil without human involvement. Without humans corn would eventually run out. This is beneficial to corn because humans have caused corn to explode in numbers, and it is beneficial to humans because we can control how much corn is produced based on demand instead of over producing corn.
27. The female plant sends out a sticky string that grabs a grain of pollen, and then the pollen splits into two twins and fertilizes the female which produces more kernels. This allows humans to catch one of the pollen twins and genetically change them more easily than most plants.
28. Corn turned itself into a plant that is under complete control of humans. Without humans corn would not be able to survive and without corn humans would not be able to survive.
29. The F-1 generation is the first generation. This is beneficial because the capitalist can keep ahold of first generation seeds and only he can sell them. Since the second generations aren’t as profitable more farmers will buy first generation seeds so the capitalist will make more money.
30. He means that it allowed corn could now be owned by anyone so anyone could make a profit from it. This also allowed for giant corporations to mass produce it and sell it into supermarkets. This created a high demand for corn, so we started coming up with new ways we could use corn to benefit us as humans. Eventually this turned us into what we are today, corn people.