Omnivore's Dilema Blog

In the book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Michael Pollen discuses the issue of corn and how important it is towards today's society. Chapter two starts out with Pollen targeting the one specific farm in Iowa and how it was for the Naylor family to live the farming lifestyle. At one point during our countries history, the Naylor farm was able to produce enough corn and soybeans that was able to feed up to 129 Americans (Pollen, 34). That statistic right there goes to show how important one man's job was to the survival of man kind. But as the years went on in the farming industry, corn became so cheap that it was put into nearly everything that a person was to consume. With the rapid growth of population throughout the world, corn was at that the top of the list for human survival, and without a more efficient way of producing it, an estimation of two out of every five people on this earth would have lost their lives (Pollen, 43).

Luckily, a man by the name of Fritz Haber came up with one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century that basically saved mankind. "The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything- not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted" (Pollen, 42). Now that nitrogen is being applied to the food that we eat, corn and other products can be made at a much faster rate than ever before, making it possible to feed the mass amounts of people that live on this planet. From Pollen I also learned that the discovery of synthetic nitrogen has not been totally positive towards planet earth. In fact, the factories that create this fertilizer pollutes the atmosphere, and also gets flooded into rivers and oceans causing a deadly effect that has been shrinking its biodiversity (Pollen, 47). In the end corn has placed mainly a positive effect on our planet but has also brought a continuous fall to man from the beginning of agriculture.