Readings March 30th

Since coming to Washington State University, and for English 101 in particular, I use the online library resources to find sources for my papers. At first the online library database was a bit confusing but after the lab at the library explaining the system and being exposed to a basic walk through of it, I found it very helpful to find a wide variety of sources on several particular topics. I specifically use the Griffin catalog and the WorldCat resources to find scholarly resources for my papers in English 101. I find Worldcat to be most useful because of the similarity of the search with Google and the ease of filtering content to find exactly what I'm looking for. After finding a few sources that I deem helpful I typically read the abstract of each source and check to see if it was a peer reviewed, scholarly article or journal and then narrow my list of sources down to fit exactly what I want and what I think will work best in my paper. A peer reviewed article is typically the best article or source that one can find for writing papers because it has usually been written by a credibly person, such as a professor or expert in a particular field, and has then been dissected and analyzed by a wide range of knowledgeable people in the field of writing. This makes these sources very useful and strengthens the validity of one's paper. Another bonus of finding sources using the Washington State University online library database is that the citation of most sources you find are already posted on the page of the abstract if the article or journal. This makes writing papers much more efficient because it cuts down on the time it takes to write a proper citation.

Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug has some very interesting ideas for agricultural awareness. I think that he rightly deserves his Nobel Prize. His view of genetically modified foods are backed up by the idea of feeding the entire world. From a humanitarian perspective, genetically modified foods could perhaps one day stop world hunger, which was one of Norman Borlaug's main goals. Even though some people think genetically modified foods could turn you into Frankenstein, it seems to me that there is far too much concern over these artificial foods. There is no way a food can alter you're DNA or something and turn you into some monster with two heads like some 'health' cults believe. We should, however, be a little cautious about what genetically modified foods can do to people in the long run. I think that these type of artificial foods should be thoroughly tested for many years to rule out the likelihood of adverse side effects in the long run to people's health. Norman Borlaug was a trendsetter and a highly ingenious man and I think that his ideas for aiding in preventing world hunger should be continued and not forgotten.

Chapter 15, 18, 19, 20

While reading this last section of The Omnivore's Dilemma, I found chapter 15 to be the most interesting out of all of them. It seemed very fitting for Pollan to end his adventures with a meal made entirely from scratch. His quest to hunt and gather a well rounded three course meal was very respectable by Pollan. I agree with him that hunting and gathering has no chance of becoming a viable way of life for humans in this day in age. The times of mobile hunter and gatherer societies are long gone and agriculture has took it's place to feed the sheer amount of people that are on this planet.

I also found it funny how he couldn't eat the meal he had prepared because we was too worried abut if the mushrooms he picked were poisonous. I guess all the negative things parents say about mushrooms actually do help us sometimes, as it did to Pollan in this case. Pollan's effort to prepare a well rounded meal entirely from "scratch" was noble, however, I would have found it much more satisfying if Pollan had manned up and ate the food he found anyway. If the food was bad, he could have just wrote about his experiences in the hospital. It would have made it more interesting and satisfying, in my opinion.