Book Review by Marina Schauffler
© Marina Schauffler 2007
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2006)
In his fascinating and disturbing book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan challenges us to be more attentive to what we eat, where it came from, and what it cost the world at large. “The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world,” he observes, and in the U.S., that relationship has degenerated into a “national eating disorder.” Confronted with relentless advertising and a dizzying array of food choices, Americans succumb readily to food fads and marketing ploys–often eating with little knowledge of their meals’ origins, processing, or broader societal impacts.
Pollan, the author of Second Nature and The Botany of Desire, traces the roots of four very different meals (ranging from McDonald’s fare to foods he has hunted and foraged). Along the way, he provides behind-the-scenes tours of a 37,000-cow feedlot; a warehouse crammed with 20,000 “organic, free-range” chickens; industrial enterprises like Earthbound Farm (which produces more than 70 percent of the organic lettuce sold in this country.); a diversified local farm that claims to be “beyond organic”; and the paradoxical world of a Whole Foods supermarket. It’s an eye-opening journey that just may change the way you eat–even if you’re already gardening, supporting local growers, and boycotting fast food.
The opening chapters trace how petroleum and a quietly revolutionary plant – zea mays (a.k.a. corn)—are the driving powers behind agribusiness. Surplus corn fuels the meat industry and surfaces in countless processed foods (as high fructose corn syrup, corn oil, emulsifiers and other additives). “There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket,” Pollan writes, “and more than a quarter of them contain corn.” Corn accounts for more than 3/4ths of the calories consumed by feedlot cattle, despite the fact that cows evolved to eat grass and the corn sickens them.
Pollan picks apart what he terms “Supermarket Pastoral,” the heartwarming prose and bucolic imagery typically found on packages of organic, “humanely raised and “natural” products. Few of those products come from the family farms and grass-fed animals pictured. Most hail from vast industries that may adhere to federal organic standards, yet are energy-intensive and polluting monocultures. With its move into mainstream culture, organic production has drifted perilously far from its emphasis on diversity and sustainable regional production. “As soon as your business involves stocking the frozen food case or produce section at a national chain…,” Pollan writes, “the sheer quantities of organic produce you need makes it imperative to buy from farms operating on the same industrial scale as you are.” So consumers end up with ultra-pasteurized organic milk from feedlot cows; 80 calories worth of lettuce that took 4,600 calories of fossil fuel to ship cross-country; and “free-range, organic” chickens that never get outdoors during their 7-week lives.
The ugly underside of our industrial food system surfaces – not just in our inhumane treatment of animals (conventional and organic) – but in our indifference to the repercussions of growing food in this manner. Pollan suggests that most Americans turn a blind eye to the fossil fuel consumption, overpackaging and waste, dangerous additives and antibiotics, industrial-scale erosion and water pollution, and the other high costs of agribusiness that aren’t reflected on register receipts.
Pollan is skeptical that small-scale, organic agriculture can feed the masses, and he fails to offer any societal solutions to the “omnivore’s dilemma” he so vividly portrays. Nevertheless, his book may spark valuable change by encouraging us to eat more conscientiously, and keep the food chains to our plates short enough that we can see where our meals began.
