The Omnivore's Dilemma

It had been far too long since I'd read a nonfiction book; my last such logging took place back in April when I read Angela's Ashes. My last science-y book was Malcolm Gladwell's Blink last November. And my last truly science-based book was Fearful Symmetry, way back in June of 2010. Clearly, I was overdue to enrich my mind a bit with some concentrated knowledge. Now, this isn't the first book about food that I've read, or even the first one I've posted about. But it certainly taught me a lot more about food and the 21st century American diet in general than Fast Food Nation did. Let me start off by explaining the title. Herbivores eat plants and carnivores eat meat. Neither needs to fret about what's on the menu on any given night because their diets are so specific, for the most part, and not very diverse. But omnivores have options. And human beings living in the modern day supermarket era have literally thousands of choices when it comes to what to eat for any given meal. The book's author, Michael Pollan, posits that especially here in America, where food is plentiful and diverse (unlike in third world countries) and where we have no real national cuisine (unlike, say, the French or the Italians), we have what appears to be a nation-wide eating disorder; nutritionists are constantly changing their minds over the right things to eat, and when and how to eat them, while new diet crazes spring up and fade away year after year. So what exactly is it that we should and shouldn't be eating? Pollan never really answers the question directly, but goes on to spend the majority of the book explaining in fascinating detail just where our food comes from. It should be no secret, of course, that most of our beef, chicken, and pork comes not from pastoral farms but from industrial meat factories of sorts which pump animals full of hormones to make them grow meatier in a shorter amount of time. But what actually surprised me is just how unnatural the very food these animals eat is. It's corn. Cows aren't supposed to eat corn, having evolved to get their nutrients from grass instead. They have a specialized organ called a rumen that allows grass to sit for a while and ferment into sugar for sustenance. Corn, already loaded with sugar, ferments into alcohol inside the rumen, and by the time most cows (70%) in the industrial food chain go to slaughter, their livers are failing. So 70% of our country's beef has come from terminally ill cows. I'm not particularly shocked or disgusted by this fact, but it's eye-opening all the same. They're fed corn because it gets them fatter faster than grass would, which increases meat output and turnaround time, and by extension, of course, profits on the bottom line. Plus, there's too much corn not to feed them corn; we're making way too much corn as a nation, and someone or something has to consume all of that corn! The book goes into great detail about corn itself, and its journey from very humble origins (a few tiny terrible-tasting kernels, unhusked, on an inches-high blade of grass) to backbone of the agriculture and economy of the world's only superpower, all via domestication and cross-breeding rather than natural selection. Corn is an ingredient (via high fructose corn syrup or xanthan gum or several hundred other derivatives) in nearly every processed food item in our diets. A typical meal at McDonald's is more "corn" than "not," with the soda's caloric source being 100% corn, the hamburger's being 50%, and the chicken nuggets' being 60%. Corn and soybeans (the former for carbohydrates, the latter for proteins) are two of the only crops being grown by most industrialized farms in America today. Again, kind of eye-opening. Or at least I thought so. So, what do you do to avoid eating tons of corn? And chemical fertilizer-grown pollution-causing corn, at that? You eat "organic." But Pollan spends just as much time pulling back the curtain on the organic "food chain" as he does showing us the unnatural mechanization of the corn-based industrial one. "Organic" is just a term owned and defined by the FDA, and you can still put certain amounts of artificial flavoring and synthetic additives into food and still call it organic. "Organic" just means, more or less, "not chemically fertilized or hormonally injected." That organic meat - grass-fed beef and free range chicken eggs - is better for human consumption than corn-fattened sick animal meat is hard to argue against. But is "organic" better for the environment? Maybe not. Because of factors like seasonal availability and ingredient rarity, you often need to truck animal feed halfway across the country just to make sure it comes from organic sources. And this, of course, pollutes the air with diesel exhaust. By the time I was finished reading the section on this "industrial-organic" food chain, it was clear to me that Whole Foods wasn't nearly as different from McDonald's as I had previously believed. For the third section of four, Pollan travels to a pastoral (ie, grass-based) farm in Virginia, where a hard-wrking family maintains a delicate but very natural balance of plants and animals, earning the admiration and recognition of locals and regional restaurants. But that's part of the problem with truly organic, old-fashioned farming. It's seasonal and regional. If it weren't for supermarkets and industrial farming, or at least lengthy transport routes, we couldn't eat red meat in the summer time or citrus fruits in New England. So while pastoral organic farming is great on a small scale level for certain parts of the country, it's clearly not an adequate solution for our current "national eating disorder." Finally, Pollan goes way old school and tries to create a meal like a hunter-gatherer would, killing a boar and gathering some edible mushrooms from the woods. He admits that it's just far too much work, not to mention entirely impractical; there's not enough fungi and wild game in the country to feed even a fraction of its populace. Pollan does spend a whole lot of space talking about how good and wholesome it felt to eat an entirely self-made meal, though. Ultimately, he has no answer for the titular dilemma. The industrial food chain is bad for people, animals, and the environment; the organic one is impractical for a nation as large as ours is; and the hunter-gatherer method is far too antiquated and ill-suited for 21st century America. But the lack of a definitive answer to the problem doesn't come off as pessimistic. Instead, I enjoyed the various things I'd just learned about the food I eat every day, where it comes from, and how I could (if I wanted to) take steps to improve my eating habits for my own health as well as that of my environment. Yeah, it's a bit cliche to take so simple a message away from a 400-page book about food economics, but at least it was an enjoyable read. Unlike the McDonald's-hating author of Fast Food Nation, Pollan never seems to be pushing an agenda or judging people for their dietary decisions. He admits to being a vegetarian, but still takes part in killing animals in the book both on the farm and in the wild; clearly, he's to trying to come off as "holier than thou"or food-snobby at all. Inspired by readers complaining that he'd never actually come up with any solutions on what middle Americans can do to improve their diets, Pollan wrote a follow-up book (do nonfictional works have "sequels?") called In Defense of Food that I'd like to try out sometime. But I've still got 32 unread books on my backlog, so... not yet. Not yet.