The Omnivore’s Dilemma A Nat­ural His­tory of Four MealsMichael Pol­lan, Michael Pol­lan
Pen­guin 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pol­lan sets out to trace the ori­gins of three meals, each the prod­uct of a dif­fer­ent food chain. These food chains — the indus­trial, the pas­toral, and the per­sonal, as he calls them — basi­cally rep­re­sent in reverse order the var­i­ous human rela­tion­ships with food. In doing this, he hopes to shed light on what he terms America’s “national eat­ing dis­or­der:” we lack national food tra­di­tions, and are often so far removed from our food’s ori­gins that we have to rely on food com­pa­nies and nutri­tion­ists to tell us what to eat. For Pol­lan, this dis­or­der reached its height with the Atkins diet craze, that fad that sought to suck the soul (bread, pasta, even fruit!) out of Amer­i­can meals and replace it with large quan­ti­ties of meat.

In America’s indus­trial food chain, every­thing seems to revolve around corn. Gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies encour­age farms to pro­duce far more Zea mays than the Amer­i­can peo­ple can eat. It falls to food sci­en­tists to fig­ure out what to do with the sur­plus (and suc­cess­ful corn-based prod­ucts only lead to a demand for more corn). Today, corn is processed by so-called “wet mills” into dozens of diverse sub­stances: vit­a­mins, corn oil, adhe­sives, sta­bi­liz­ers, acids, ethanol, emul­si­fiers, and sweet­en­ers (includ­ing the sneak­ily ubiq­ui­tous high-fructose corn syrup). These var­i­ous “frac­tions” of corn are the build­ing blocks of the processed foods industry.

Besides pro­vid­ing the raw mate­ri­als for such Franken­foods as Cool Whip and Cheez Whiz, corn fuels the indus­trial pro­duc­tion of beef. A far cry from the pas­toral stereo­type of cows lazily munch­ing grass in an open field, the pur­pose of indus­trial feed­lots is to cram cows full of cheap calo­ries (largely from corn), fat­ten­ing them up as quickly as pos­si­ble. Cows on a corn diet must also be med­icated, as their diges­tive sys­tems have evolved to process grass, not corn (antibi­otics are also nec­es­sary to deal with the cramped and squalid liv­ing con­di­tions on a feedlot).

The first meal that Pol­lan and his fam­ily eat comes from McDonald’s, and they con­sume it — appro­pri­ately — in their car. The meal’s con­stituent parts are known (corn prod­ucts are used to cook the fries, thicken the shake, sweeten the soda, con­struct the chicken nuggets, feed the chick­ens and cows, and par­tially fuel the car), but their ori­gins are totally obscured by the indus­trial food chain. Pol­lan asks the ques­tion “Where does [this food] come from?” and pro­vides the only viable answer: “It comes from McDonald’s.”

Pol­lan approaches the pas­toral food chain with the inten­tion of once again trac­ing the ori­gins of a sin­gle meal. But he soon real­izes that “organic” food runs the gamut from that pro­duced by indus­trial farms that care­fully adhere to gov­ern­ment stan­dards to that frown on very small farms that fol­low more tra­di­tional meth­ods. Thus, he splits his time in this sec­tion of the book between the “super­mar­ket pas­toral” (think Whole Foods) and the “beyond organic” (think Amish farm stand).

Behind the flow­ery descrip­tions of pro­duce and meat at Whole Foods, Pol­lan dis­cov­ers huge fac­tory farms that resem­ble those he vis­ited in pur­suit of indus­trial food. The only dif­fer­ence, in most cases, is that small changes have been made to fit gov­ern­ment def­i­n­i­tions of “organic,” “free range,” or “all nat­ural.” He finds that often what’s being sold is a nice story, not nec­es­sar­ily more sus­tain­able or more friendly food.

At the other end of the spec­trum lie much smaller oper­a­tions, like Poly­face Farm in Vir­ginia, that adhere to the spirit of the organic move­ment rather than to the let­ter of organic law. Poly­face is in many ways a tra­di­tional fam­ily farm, rais­ing cows, pigs, chick­ens, rab­bits, and a vari­ety of pro­duce on about a hun­dred acres of open land. But Joel Salatin, the farm’s owner, prac­tices a very com­plex form of rota­tional graz­ing that keeps the pas­ture healthy and vibrat, pro­duces an astound­ing quan­tity of meat, and requires but a sin­gle out­side input: chicken food — no fer­til­iz­ers, no antibi­otics, no pariciti­cides. Para­dox­i­cally, Salatin’s farm is not cer­ti­fied “organic,” although it cer­tainly is among the most sus­tain­able and truly pas­toral farms anywhere.

The final food chain that Pol­lan fol­lows is cer­tainly the short­est and in many ways the old­est of the three. The task he sets for him­self is to per­son­ally hunt, gather, or grow all the ingre­di­ents for a four-course meal for ten peo­ple (the last action, “grow,” keeps his food chain from being totally pri­mal). He also intends to serve rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the three edi­ble king­doms: ani­mal, plant, and fun­gus. To do this, city-raised Pol­lan must first learn to hunt and butcher game as well as to find mush­rooms and dis­tin­guish the deli­cious from the deadly. Luck­ily, he befriends a Sicil­ian expat who intro­duces him to the flo­ral, fau­nal, and fun­gal riches of the forests of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Pol­lan basi­cally achieves his goal, although he ends up using for his diner party a cou­ple of store-bought ingre­di­ents and a few things pro­vided by friends. But in the process of assem­bling the meal he accom­plishes a more abstract aim: being cog­nizant of every­thing that went into his dinner.

Read­ing The Omnivore’s Dilemma (more than a year ago, actu­ally) was for me an eye-opening expe­ri­ence. It made me start really read­ing food labels and try­ing to elim­i­nate arti­fi­cial addi­tives from my diet. I went on a cru­sade against high-fructose corn syrup, elim­i­nat­ing it from my apart­ment entirely — not for health rea­sons, but in moral oppo­si­tion to the poli­cies and processes that have made highly processed HFCS cheaper than nat­ural cane sugar in the U.S. I changed my gro­cery shop­ping habits, and read­ing this book influ­enced, at least indi­rectly, Veronica’s and my deci­sion to join a CSA farm this summer.

Aside from being very inter­est­ing and infor­ma­tive, Pollan’s writ­ing is clear and his style is enjoy­able. My only com­plaint about the book relates to his dis­cus­sions of evo­lu­tion early in the text. He writes of corn’s “act of evo­lu­tion­ary faith,” plants “hav[ing] always known… one of the surest paths to evo­lu­tion­ary suc­cess,” and recasts agri­cul­ture as “a bril­liant (if uncon­scious) evo­lu­tion­ary strat­egy on the part of the plants and ani­mals involved to get us to advance their inter­ests.” Evo­lu­tion doesn’t work that way; there is no plan­ning, and there are no evo­lu­tion­ary goals as such, beyond the prop­a­ga­tion of genetic mate­r­ial. That quib­ble aside, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great thought-provoking book, and I’d rec­om­mend it to anyone.