THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, BY MICHAEL POLLAN

Whoa! A current book! Am I finally Cool? If you suck from the teat of the liberal media conspiracy like I do, it’s been hard to avoid Pollan over the past month. I hadn’t even heard about him until I read this excerpt from his book in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. I found his thoughts on killing and eating a boar fascinating, and tried to talk about them with others, but did a pretty poor job conveying his ideas. Purple monkey dishwasher. Anyway, since I’m going to be eating my way across American and back next month, I thought I’d pick up this treatise on how Americans eat in this day and age. Looking forward to it.

Done

Excellent book. I guess it’s hard to imagine me not enjoying a book about two of my favorite things in life: nature and food. As in the best of non-fiction, Pollan provides a perfect mixture of investigative journalism, scientific explanation, personal anecdote, and thoughtful analysis to keep every page fascinating, engaging, and thought-provoking. The self-righteousness that often irks me in some environmental writing is completely absent, which is not to say that issues of morality in eating (especially meat) are not addressed.

For the unaware, Pollan is a journalism professor at UC Berkeley, as well as a contributing editor to my beloved New York Times Magazine (he also did his undergrad at Bennington College, mere miles from my own alma mater). In this book he examines the food chains that sustain us by tracing the sources in each of four meals back to the plants that first harvested the energy from the sun. He begins with take-out from McDonalds, eaten on a highway, which leads him down the long and twisted path of industrial agriculture. As one might imagine, industrial feedlots packed with drugged up, force fed cows aren’t difficult to criticize, but more interesting is the next rung down the energetic ladder: corn. By Pollan’s accounting, corn underlies almost all the energy in the industrial food chain. Cows eat it, even though it requires numerous additives since their digestive systems are highly specialized to process grass. We eat it in the form of countless additives, most notably (in my mind) high fructose corn syrup. Apparently, since corn tends to have a different carbon isotope ratio that other plants, you can actually estimate how much carbon in your body comes from corn, and some mass spec work Pollan had done at Berkeley suggested that we are mostly corn. Kind of disturbing.

The history of why corn has come to dominate industrial agriculture is fascinating, and Pollan explores the biological, cultural, economic, and politcal reasonings. I admit some of the economics were a bit befuddling, but still quite amazing. Serious consequences for personal health and the larger environment abound.

The middle section of the book deals with improvements on the industrial model, namely the organic and local movements. His major organic conclusion is that organic food (as represented by Whole Foods) more closely resembles the industrial food chain than the pastoral ideal presented on the packaging. Organic milk doesn’t necessarily come from happy cows on green pasture, and organic chickens may have the opportunity to range freely, but rarely do. Pollan suggests that Big Organic is ultimately an improvement over conventional industrial ag on both the health and environmental fronts, but it is by no means an unqualified “good.”

In search of something a little closer to the original organic ideals he finds Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms, a fascinating operation in Virgina where the energy flow is more closely modeled on an ecosystem rather than a factory. Grass feeds cows, parasites in cow dung feeds chickens, chicken and cow dung fertilize grass, the grazing is highly managed to maximize gras growth and diversity, etc., resulting a system that makes eggs, chicken, beef, rabbits, and some veggies, and the only inputs are corn feed for the chickens and sunlight. Never has a farm seemed more interesting to me. Gives the impression that the best food (to eat and to think, as the book would say) is made by people you know. Possibly not viable in all situations, but CSAs and farmer’s markets seem like good starts.

His final meal is one he prepares with ingredients he himself grows, gathers, or hunts. He gather morels and chanterelles, picks lettuce and herbs from his garden, and shoots a boar. Plenty of interesting consideration of the ethics of eating meat, killing to eat, and hunting. One particularly interesting idea was the distinction between animal rights, animal welfare, and species “rights,” such as they are. Pollan approaches the various moral arguments against carnivory, and though he finds them difficult to refute, ultimately decides they are inadequate when confronted with the reality of nature. I could go on and on here, and maybe I will later, but suffice it to say that it’s a very interesting dissection of the morality of eating.

My only caveats in this book are a few scientific liberties he takes for the sake of colorful metaphors, and his tendency to rely on the objective “reality” of scientific proof for some arguments while attacking the deleterious effects of scientific reductionism in others. Science itself is not necessarily reductionist, just certain scientists.

On a personal level, I found his descriptions of the meals somewhat wrenching. They all seem somewhat effortless, and are attended by close friends and family. Being at home at the moment I get to experience that again at family dinners (which we’ve always had every night at home), but it isn’t something I’ve created for myself in my new, independent life. I do get to eat with my friends, but it seems it’s always around a TV, or a rare treat. Something I need to work on, I guess.

So finally, has this book changed the way I eat? We’ll see when I get back. It certainly has changed the way I think about animal products and where they come from. I think all the dairy products and meat in my diet now deserve some closer inspection. Maybe I’ll actually try and hunt down some Clover cows…