week 1

Thoughts:

To be honest, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is not so interesting to me when compared with The Help. At first I thought it would be a book about food, which appropriately meets my desire as a foodie. Well, I was wrong. In the earlier part of this chapter, I suspected I was doing the TOFLE reading since it was teemed with chemistry and biology terms, such as stoma, glucose, protons and so on.

The style of this book is quite different from the rest of the books I have read before(maybe because I have only read few English books in the past). It is scientific, informative with vivid languages.

I do appreciate the language in this book.

Here are some examples I randomly selected from my notes:

Hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop.

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

The organ is essentially a twenty-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria dines on grass.

If I were a Chinese teacher, I would definitely make these sentences into a reading comprehension.

I also learned something from this chapter. First, corn is important and ubiquitous. For example, the chicken nuggets piles corn upon corn. Every ingredients seems to have relationships with corns. Second, take care of the excessive fertilizer. According to the food chain, human, the top of this chain, will accumulate a large amount of toxins. So when we begin to put more fertilizer into the farm, think of ourselves. Third, steers are less happier now. In order to solve the surplus of corns, steers have to eat corns which will induce illness instead of grass. Besides, they also suffer from the inferior conditions in pens. Consequently, they are not very happy and their immune systems become weak. Emm…It’s very sad for me to eat the steak form an unhappy steer. But for human，economic logic defeats ecological logic, people are impatient with the slow pace for steers to grow in the natural environment.