Books |
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Non Fiction
This is the most important book I’ve read in a long, long time, and unlike other books which may or may not “change your life,” this is a book that may save your life.
Oh, not right away. The kind of poison that most of us call food takes years to hurt you. And maybe, just maybe, you and yours will thrive on “industrial food” that comes to you via a production chain so ugly you’d throw up if you saw any part of it. Then again, if “you are what you eat,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” may inspire you to turn away from the all-American diet that is built around corn, that makes you fat, that gives you diabetes and heart disease — but you get the idea…
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” divides meals into three food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. Of these, we need only concern ourselves with the first two — that’s the first 185 of the book’s 412 pages. The final chapters are interesting, but not crucial. It’s those first 185 pages that you must, must, must read and that I want to discuss here.
They’re actually pretty simple. If you buy processed food in a supermarket, it is very likely that you are eating corn — that’s what feeds cows that become your beef, chicken, turkey, lamb and fish. Corn becomes eggs. Corn is the diet for milk cows. And then it gets turned into sugar, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Drink a Coke or beer, eat a Chicken Nugget, consume almost any frozen food, hot dog, cake, mayonnaise, margarine, salad dressing — even vitamins. Of the 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, more than 25% contain corn. (And that goes for non-food items too.)
So if you are what you eat, greetings — you are corn. Oops. Processed corn. You’re a “corn chip with legs.” Which is very bad for you. Very bad for farmers. But very good for huge corporations like Cargill and ADM. And — how crazy is this? — very good for the military-industrial complex and the oil business.
Because we consume, each of us, about 66 pounds of corn. You read that right. Your total consumption of corn? 158 pounds.
Michael Pollan tells the amazing story of how this came to be. And what this does to the animals raised on giant industrial farms (almost all of them are sick — “most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed”). And what that does to the planet (“One fifth of America’s petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food”). And what it does to you (it turns you into a new kind of creature: an “industrial eater”).
There’s more. By Michael Pollan’s calculations, it takes a third of a gallon of oil to grow a bushel of industrial corn. That’s about 50 gallons of oil an acre. (Want to help those terrorists who live off contributions from Arab oil producers? Keep yourself plugged in to the current nutritional hierarchy.) Corn growers use 100 to 200 pounds of synthetic nitrogen per acre as fertilizer. Not all is absorbed by the plants. During the spring rains, synthetic nitrogen washes into streams and rivers. In Des Moines, this runoff is so serious that the city issues “blue baby alerts” so parents won’t let their kids drink tap water. Why? Here’s Pollan: “The nitrates in the water convert to nitrite, which binds to hemoglobin, compromising the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain.” And more: Who ever told you “corn-fed” beef was superior? By nature, cows are herbivores! But cows raised on grass need two or three years to reach slaughter weight; with corn and drugs, they can be big enough to kill in 14 months. Along the way, this diet kills some cows. The rest? “Between 15-35% of feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abcessed livers.” Still hungry for a burger? [To buy the paperback of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
In the second key section of the book, Pollan takes readers on a guided tour of “big organic.” He starts with the result — the product at Whole Foods — and works back to the farm. It should be a reassuring trip: The story on offer in Whole Foods is a pastoral narrative in which farm animals live much as they did in the books we read as children. Whole Foods is a giant business. It can’t buy from small, local growers. Most of its produce comes from two organic growers in California — one of them, Earthbound, grows 80% of America’s organic lettuce. Yes, the produce is organic. But it’s hardly “pastoral.”
It’s in the meat department of “organic” markets that you discover how little that word can mean. Did you know that “organic” beef can be raised in an “organic feedlot” — and fed organic high-fructose corn syrup? Did you know that “free range” chicken may be raised in chicken houses? Oh, the birds have access to the great outdoors. It’s just that their shed doors are shut for the first five weeks of their lives. In the final two weeks of their existence, the chickens could venture outside, but force of habit generally keeps them in.
So, again, what’s the answer? The purist in Michael Pollan adores Joel Salatin, a brilliant Virginia farmer who uses nature to do what other farmers can’t achieve without chemicals. In a later chapter, Pollan goes even further and harvests — or kills — his own dinner. There aren’t many farmers like Salatin. There are even fewer of us inclined to “eat what you kill.”
I have come to view this book as deeply subversive. The more reasonable minds that are exposed to it, the better: the real reasons for the health crisis in this country is not a matter of willpower, but the result of a corn surplus perpetuated by the powerful machine of industrial agriculture.
Rejecting industrial food is a political and moral act. But beyond defiance lies affirmation. Every day we have more opportunities to buy wholesome food, locally grown by farmers we can meet and know; every day, we have a chance to choose foods that are more likely to nurture us than bring us weight problems, illness and early death.
This doesn’t feel like a political movement. But notice how trans-fats are leaving mass-produced food. Check out the label on Heinz organic ketchup — it uses real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.
Clearly, more and more Americans are rolling back the clock in their personal lives. They want less convenience. More choice. And, though they may not know it, less government involvement in what farmers grow.
It’s an interesting moment. You buy better food because you want to do a good thing for your loved ones. At the same time, you’re standing up for life as it was lived on this planet until the Nixon Administration. It’s a silent protest, a marketplace choice that won’t draw much attention. But by eating a diet that helps you stay smart and fit, you just might be helping to make the most important revolution of our time.
