I just finished reading this and recommend it wholeheartedly. Books about food are always interesting to me: I’m curious about the basic stuff like prep and combinations or additions I hadn’t considered, as well as history. But this book is an examination of the cultural history of food, specifically in America, but with references to the human history of eating.
The book is loosely draped over a framework of four meals he either eats or prepares, with a detailed analysis of the ingredients. I never knew so much about corn, not the kind we eat directly, but grade B kernels that go into almost everything for sale in today’s supermarket. From sweeteners to coatings and extenders, corn is a kind of alchemical base from which many — too many — things are made. The less an item looks like food — think Twinkie — the more profitable it is likely to be and at the same time less natural/healthy. Too many of the foods produced by manufacturers are designed to stimulate demand rather than answer a need.
Pollan takes the reader from McDonalds, where most of the meal items are based on corn, even the beef and chicken and the milkshake(!), to a corn producer in Iowa, where he learns about the history of agribusiness and how farming is more like manufacturing but with a generous support system of subsidies. Literally, the more corn and soybeans produced, the more a producer gets paid. And the ever-increasing quantities find their way into just about everything.
The most interesting section of the book was his time spent working on a small integrated farm in Virginia. Neither the author or the farmer would have used the work organic to describe Polyface Farm, but the definition I found fits perfectly:
or·gan·ic (ôr-găn’Äk) adj.
1. Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms: organic matter.
2. Of, relating to, or affecting a bodily organ: an organic disease.
1. a. Of, marked by, or involving the use of fertilizers or pesticides that are strictly of animal or vegetable origin: organic vegetables; an organic farm.
2. b. Raised or conducted without the use of drugs, hormones, or synthetic chemicals: organic chicken; organic cattle farming.
c. Serving organic food: an organic restaurant
d. Simple, healthful, and close to nature: an organic lifestyle.
3. Having properties associated with living organisms.
4. Resembling a living organism in organization or development; interconnected: society as an organic whole.
5. Constituting an integral part of a whole; fundamental.
Every aspect of the farm in inter-related and interdependent. The only crop he grows is grass. And the only inputs — fertilizers, seeds, etc. — he buys are chicken feed. On the other hand, he sells:
- beef
- chicken
- eggs
- rabbits
- pigs
The systems are not all that complex individually but the cumulative effect is quite impressive. I don’t have the book in front of me to cite numbers or specifics, but the word organic seems apropos when you consider definitions 4 and 5 above.
The remaining section of the book, while philosophically interesting, especially as a vegetarian, was sometimes hard to get through. Essentially, it explores the ideas of animal rights as the author wrestles with the issues of eating the foods he likes, while being conscious of where they come from.
The underlying principle of animal rights is that if animals are capable of suffering, it is morally wrong to eat them. From the descriptions of feedlot cattle, forced to eat corn-based slurries to fatten them, in contradiction to their completely capable ruminant nature, slaughtered before their antibiotic fortified organs fail, pigs, the intelligent superior to the dog, having their tails docked to stop them from chewing on them but not so much that other pigs can nip at them, how battery hens are driven to lay eggs (Did you know that broiler chickens are slaughtered at 7 weeks, and the “free-range” chicken might only have access to the great outdoors for the final 2? With no exposure in the first 5, most never attempt to walk in the sun, choosing to stay in the familiar confines they have known their whole brief lives), it underscores my feelings about eating other animals. I didn’t realize how bad it was, and I need to buy more agreeably produced eggs in future.
Pollan decides, after all he has seen and experiences, that his conscience requires he no longer look away from the process of how his food gets to his plate. He decides he will supply a full meal by hunting and foraging. The process of tracking and killing a feral pig is about as appealing as you might expect: much as I miss the texture and flavor of prosciutto I’m not prepared to hunt for it. I do respect the idea that if someone is prepared to go to that length, they are entitled to eat their kill with a clear conscience.
I guess I just don’t like/miss meat that much. And Pollan, for all his determination not to look away, misses one aspect of the omnivore’s dilemma. The title stems from the predicament shared by many land mammals: we can eat a wide variety of things, unlike the specialist koala or panda. But underlying that is the choice not to eat some things. He finds vegetarianism — he does try it, out of scholarly interest — to be limiting. Puzzling, to me. As I have explained before, when people ask me what we eat for Thanksgiving without turkey, I remind them that it is only one dish out of many, and I just get more of those.
The feral pig Pollan kills and eats does not suffer a tightly circumscribed life in a production line, and lives with all the joy a pig can ask for. Sunlight, fresh air, all the acorns it can find, and the end, when it came, was quite swift and reasonably painless. No artificial inputs or lucrative subsidies were used to create the meat and organs harvested. So to answer the animal rights argument, it did not suffer. It lived the life of a pig. Not that a farm-raised pig is aware it’s missing anything, but if you had to chose one, the wild one would likely win, for ethical and culinary/taste reasons.
Could everyone who likes a juicy burger kill to get one? Could they even watch? It’s the abstraction of meat’s provenance that Pollan objects to, and I share that. If people knew what was in their food and where it came from, how it was produced, would they make the same choices?
All in all, an essential book. It doesn’t argue or push an agenda, rather it records the explorations of our relationship to food and the food industry. It explains how the lack of a unifying culture of food — how else to explain how the low-carb diet with the fundamental changes it wrought on American eating — has made us ignorant of the basic facts about food and created an upside-down value system, where processed or manufactured foods are subsidized at the same time Type II diabetes, formerly called adult-onset before that became inaccurate, is becoming increasingly common.