“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and America’s National Eating Disorder

A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan after having it recommended to me by several people. I will never look at food the same way again.

I know people make flippant remarks like that all the time, coming out of “Super Size Me” exclaiming with enraged gusto, “I’ll never eat another Big Mac!” In fact, I’m almost hesitant to make a comment like the aforementioned lest it cheapen a shift in my thinking that is actually quite real and startling even to myself.  I’m being honest when I say that Pollan shook my worldview and forced me to confront an industrial food system of which I had been willfully ignorant, partaking in its cheap delicacies without understanding the repercussions. I mean, its just food right? Maybe not.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.  There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

There was a ton of information packed away in the pages of this book, but I want to highlight two main points, discussed in the opening chapters of the book that really caused me to pause:

We are a nation of corn-eaters

“But I rarely eat corn!” you say.  Do you eat any of the following:

• steak (corn is what feeds the steer)
• chicken, pork, turkey, lamb (all corn-fed)
• catfish, tilapia, salmon (all increasingly trained to eat corn)
• eggs, milk, cheese yogurt (once came from dairy cows raised on grass, now Holsteins tethered to machines, eating corn)
• soda and many juices (high-fructose corn syrup)
• beer (alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn)
• any processed food with starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, absorbic acid, lecithin, dextrose, lactic acid and lystine, maltose, MSG, caramel color, xanthan gum (all corn)
• Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, canned fruit, ketchup, frozen waffles, syrups, mayonnaise, mustard, hot dogs, salad dressing

As Pollan explains, “…the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five throusand different items of SKUs…in the supermarket…represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”

So, you and I eat a lot of corn without even realizing it, but why?  Because its cheap.  And why is it cheap?  Because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the corn industry.  As Pollan explains,

America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food – far more than Americans could afford to buy.

This system changed, however with the 1973 farm bill which replaced,

…the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payment to farmers…Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any proice, since the government would make up the difference.

The history of American farm policy is vital in understanding our country’s food culture.  While the free market advocate in me has always abhorred the idea of agricultural subsidies, the discussion presented by Pollan shows the various factors which make the debate more than just a black and white issue.  However, regardless of the economic implications of paying our farmers to produce mountains of cheap corn, the fact is we end up subsidizing the most unhealthy calories in the supermarket.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

For one of the fattest nations on earth, this isn’t welcome news.

We also eat a lot of oil

For some, the idea that we end up indirectly eating gallons of oil each year may be an even bigger leap than acknowledging the prominence of corn in our diets, but the unsettling truth is that we’ve built our modern-industrial food system on a foundation of cheap oil. From the chemical fertilizers that cause many of the crops to grow quicker and bigger, to the pesticides that keep insects away, to the gasoline used by tractors to harvest the crops and trucks to transport them thousands of miles across the country and finally to the packaging used to keep the food from spoiling — each link in the chain requires us to further rely on non-renewable resource.

How much oil is used? 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn, 1/3 gallon per bushel. “Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food…”

These costs are largely hidden to the consumer, but they remain nonetheless. What makes this scary is what will happen when a barrel of oil goes back to costing $150 or more and doesn’t mercifully come back down as it did a couple years ago. For a food system that relies on large amounts of oil to produce and transport its products, this spells huge increases in the price of food.  Unless we choose to opt out, which of course is what a large section of the book is devoted to teaching the reader how to do.

Pollan goes much deeper into the food system than just corn and oil.  He looks at the repercussions of feeding animals food they weren’t naturally made to eat, the treatment and quality of life of those animals, the somewhat disappointing realities of the big organic movement and why Whole Foods isn’t necessarily the answer, the vegetarian debate, the history of the modern food industry and even the challenges and unexpected pleasures of hunting and foraging for food in the modern world.

It would be hard to do this book justice without going on for another few thousand words.  So I won’t.  Instead, read this book and really chew it over (no pun intended…ok, maybe it was).  You, like me, may end up surprised at how much your answer changes regarding the question of, “what’s for dinner?”

“We’ve become a culture of technicians.  We’re all into the how of it and nobody’s stepping back and saying ‘But Why?’.”  – Joel Salatin, Farmer (my new hero)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Related posts:

1. Not Just A Vegetable Garden
2. What I’ve Been Reading (9.28.09)
3. C.S. Lewis on Equality
4. The State as a Substitute for God

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.