Thought for Food: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Review by Bruce Collier May 3, 2007 Issue

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is subtitled, “A Natural History of Four Meals.” The chapter headings only list three, so go figure. Pollan actually eats a lot of meals in the course of the book. On the way, he offers a highly personal, though carefully documented, analysis of the modern American way of eating. It’s well written, gently witty, and a little scary — not The Jungle scary, just thought provoking scary. You might never want to eat corn again, though, as Pollan says, you’re sure as heck eating it now.

The first section of the book, “Industrial,” chronicles the rise of corn (Zea Mays) from just another Central American grass to world domination. According to Pollan, corn took maximum advantage of the rise and spread of humans and their domesticated livestock, feeding both, while in turn adapting itself to become the highest-yielding cereal crop. From there, he says, came the apparently endless line of corn-based products and derivatives, which can be found in nearly all modern processed food. He writes, for example, “[o]f the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn....” And it’s not just fast food. Pollan adds that nearly everything edible one buys at a supermarket is processed food, one way or another.

He next visits an industrial-sized corn farm in Iowa, and then follows some of its product to a cattle feedlot in Kansas. Cattle are ruminants, meaning they are designed to be nourished by grass. Getting them to eat corn-based feed mixtures requires an extensive amount of tampering, including antibiotics, to keep their food from making them sick. The average lifespan of feedlot cattle is 150 days. One feedlot veterinarian estimated that keeping them any longer on such a misfit diet would probably “blow out their livers.” So much for “corn-fed beef.”

Lest the reader think that Pollan is mounting an argument for a nationwide return to “natural” food, part two of the book, “Pastoral,” paints a picture of what he calls Big Organic. Far from being a case of sprouts and tofu produced by barefooted hippies and Caucasian Buddhists, it’s a highly sophisticated, market-savvy industry. Like me, you may also be surprised to read just how elastic a term “organic” is in regulatory circles.

Pollan compares the relative efficiencies of the high industrial, big organic, and “artisanal production” modes of food supply. Of particular interest was his analysis of the amount of energy, supplied by fossil fuels, required to grow, ship, and process grain, meat, and produce. A meal for three at a well-known fast food restaurant, 4,510 calories in all, “took at least ten times as many calories of fossil energy, the equivalent of 1.3 gallons of oil.” That’s not counting the gasoline consumed by the car in which Pollan and his family rode while they ate.

The book’s concluding section is “Personal,” in which Pollan assumes the role of hunter/gatherer. He assembles a “perfect meal” through hunting wild pigs and foraging for fruit, greens, and edible fungi. He also bakes bread using make-it-yourself yeast. To do all this requires the help of friends, one a hunter, another a mycologist. Without their expertise, Pollan might still be chasing pork in the Sonoma hills, or six feet under from Amanita muscaria, an ironical ‘shroom that kills by digesting its consumer’s liver.

Obviously, one of the principal reasons we eat the way we do nowadays is because there are so many of us. Few of us live where we can raise, hunt, or gather our own food. Even fewer of us would know what to do with it once we harvested, killed, or pocketed it, anyway. Pollan is not arguing for wholesale food industry reform — though the national trend toward obesity troubles him. Our corn-based diet is fattening more than the livestock, he observes. The people he interviews — big and small farmers, meat processors, market executives, food eccentrics — each have their own agendas, some of them just plain selfish.

Pollan balances his fast food meal with his handcrafted meal, calling both “equally unsustainable.” Both were costly, one in energy, the other “physically, intellectually, and emotionally.” He marvels at a system that can accommodate both extremes. “The pleasures of one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance.” The solution, if one is needed, seems to him to be to put more thought into what we eat, while we eat it. In closing, Pollan suggests:

“But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.”

With all the labor saving devices we have, you’d think we could. Unless, of course, our national diet is itself just another labor saving device. Don’t Bogart those Doritos, Elsie....

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 464 pages, Penguin Press. Available at libraries, bookstores and online booksellers.

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