Book Review: "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan


 

My review

  rating: 4 of 5 stars
    “What should we have for dinner?” Pollan asks of us in The Omnivores Dilemma. In a triad of analysis he attempts to answer or at least probe this question from three different arenas; the industrial food chain, organic/local non-industrial food making, and foraging. Ultimately Pollan finds none of these routes to the dinner table to be “perfect,” but an intellectualized meal at least allows us to not go ethically or morally blind to the food before us. Between the covers there is nothing surprising, Pollan simply expands those things we all suspect about our food and our food choices. I may be biased in this intuition since I inhabit the same physical and intellectual space as the author, but I’ve found many people from Montana, to DC, to Berlin who I believe have the same general instinct towards these things.

    Corn is the basis for America’s industrial food chain. The biologically successful plant feeds more people in more ways than one can enumerate. Everything from corn on the cob, to xanthum gum, to meat, to other industrialized derivatives finds its way into more pieces of every American meal than anyone can imagine, except for maybe Cargil or some of the other companies whose inventiveness have engineered the industrial food system we currently operate off of and which our government highly subsidizes. We find that most of or food comes into origin ultimately because of the coupling of the sun’s energy with corn’s C4 photosynthetic leaves, years of domestic selection followed by years of plant engineering, and the Haber-Bosch process that allows us to make immense amounts of nitrogen fertilizers from petrol. In the end this system is extremely efficient, simple, but limited because the inputs- especially nitrogen is a limiting reagent over time for this process.

    I’ve recently found many people who claim they are anti-corn. I’m sure many of them have read this book or other similar books like Fast Food Nation or other criticisms of the American industrial food chain. I find these reactionary responses ironic, because these people find it easy to blame a tool instead of the system that uses the tool. It’s the same sort of logic that argues that guns kill people, when really its people using guns that kill people. Corn I believe is simply one of the most successful organisms on the planet, it found a sort of symbiosis with humans that allowed it to spread all over the world. The symbiosis being so strong that humans have cleared away other competing species (forests and grass lands), so that corn may grow. Corn is a great grain. It stores well. Has lots of calories by weight and a decent amount of nutrients. There is also a minimal amount of people with allergies to it, unlike wheat and other major grains. So please instead of hating corn, please take up issue with the way we use it.

    With Organics Pollan finds, not unsurprisingly, that the word organic in diction has become a changeling under the control of government regulation. Organic use to embody concepts of locality, non-chemical based techniques, and thus alluded to a sort of non-industrial food system. However, due to consumer demand and scalability organic has become “big organic” or “industrial-organic” under the un-constraints of USDA labeling. Ultimately organic just means the inputs are just a little different from the normal conventional systems. Instead of chemical herbicides you may apply bacterial based herbicides, instead of storing greens with chemicals to keep them fresh you may just store the greens in bags pumped full of nitrogen gas to keep them fresh. The system looks the same, but the techniques are more complex and a bit more sustainable. Organic is a step in the right direction, but its not the end all. Think about the last organic piece of produce you bought. Where did it come from? How far away did it come from? How much petrol was spent bringing that food too you? Industrial organic has just cut down on the petrol from the fertilizer side of the equation, but has not pulled it off the transportation, so ultimately is also has the same risk as normal industrial food – the risk of oil.

    The contrast Pollan brings into industrial organic is a farm called Polyface on the east coast. The farm arguably works at holding together something beyond organic; the concept of a farm that works like an ecosystem, feeds locals, is transparent unlike the industrial food system and a farm that is connected to its consumers and vice versa. Ultimately the farm boils down to growing grass. Grass in this case does not mean a monoculture, but a mix of native grasses. Grass feeds the cows that are moved constantly from field to field so as to maximize the feeding capacity of the grass, chickens follow the cows in the pasture by a few days – they eat the bugs from the cow shit which sterilizes the fields from pathogens, chicken shit and cow shit can then be used to fertilize the fields to grow more grass or grains of interest. The farm is ultimately a complex system of nitrogen and carbon cycling with the only input being sunlight at the outputs being very diverse. Farms like this use to exist everywhere when the US was first forming, but due to the industrial nature of our current farming model most of these farms have disappeared and become monoculture growers and not complex-culture growers.

    The last section of the book is dedicated to finding food in the natural world; foraging and hunting. At a grand scale, the scale of the number of people on this planet this is not a sustainable form of feeding people, but Pollan does it to remind himself of where we have come from. I believe the most important thing here is the reality check of how amazing culture is in preserving the knowledge of what we can eat from the natural world and all of the preparations (rituals) we must do around food to make it edible. At the same time foraging and hunting are more spiritually rich than the industrial food system, organic or even the ecosystem-farm, because one must confront continually the possibility of a mistake equaling death and also for the omnivore that the death of something else means life for oneself. A higher degree of honor and connection comes from hunting and foraging, because we must extend out beyond our human walls of cultivation and dip ourselves into the wild where we are not the ones in control, but simply dealing with what the universe presents us with. It is the difference in being an engineer and being a biologist. One attempts to create the world around them while the other is willing to roll with the punches.

    A thread that runs through the essays which I’m surprised Pollan did not break out into its own essay book is the use of animals and the ethical implications of their use in our food systems. In the industrial system Pollan bought a beef cow that is then slaughtered in an industrial factory, at Polyface farms he helps slaughter chickens, and in the final section he hunts and kills a wild pig in northern California. He attempts to confront Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” but I feel he never completely answers up to Singer’s points, partly because Singer’s logic is extremely well crafted given the system of industrial animal raising coupled with Christian influenced anthropomorphic tendencies of American rhetoric.

I feel a better way of rebutting Singer is to step outside his rhetorical context and go to the rhetoric of science. If you were a vegetarian ask yourself where taxonomically your cut off is. What defines eating an animal? I know many vegetarians and the variants are high. Some eat fish, some eat only animals without a face, some eat mollusks, and the list goes on. Ultimately all vegetarianism (for me) boils down to some sort of anthropomorphism. Some of us don’t eat animals, because they remind of us of how much of an animal we are. Eating animals reminds us that we may just as easily eat each other or at least slaughter each other. Pythagoras, a strict vegetarian concluded humans had no hope of escaping killing each other if we were not able to keep ourselves from killing animals. I agree with Pythagoras in the logic but diverge in the practicality of the logic. I don’t think humans have the ability to “escape” the animalism of our nature, thus we shall kill each other and animals in infinitum. I don’t mean to be a downer here, but I’m just going upon history; simple deductive logic of all written history appears to point to the reality of humans as a whole not being able to leave behind killing and maybe we shouldn’t…? I’ve slaughtered a few animals in my life; many a fish, a chicken, a cow, rattlesnake, etc. The act of killing in order for the preparation of food brings many things into focus that no other experience can possibly encapsulate. It reminds one directly of our own mortality, that everything given a long enough time perishes by force or by fault. It also reminds us of our strangeness in relation to other creatures; the mere fact that we can think about our position in this system and not simply be oblivious to it. There is much more to decompact in this topic, but unfortunately I feel it would take a separate essay to organize it effectively, so I shall save that for another time.