The Omnivore's Dilemma

What you eat and how it gets from the field to your plate is the subject of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

I picked up Pollan's hefty tome after reading this review by Amanda on Pandagon.

Maybe it's growing up a city kid or maybe it's just living in Texas, but I've always been fascinated with the whole self-sustaining farmer/rancher thing. The Omnivore's Dilemma makes it plain that such romanticized views of the food industry are both naive and passe. With six billion people to feed, our methods are far less transparent or charitable.

The book is divided into three (or four, depending on your viewpoint) sections, ending with a meal derived from each farming method.

The first section discusses your typical industrial ("Big Agra") farm, complete with feedlots and pesticides. For me, this was the most distressing, depressing, and eye-opening part of the book. I've always rather pooh-poohed the organic movement as just another fad, but after reading what fertilizers do to food and what cows are fed to "beef 'em up" so quickly, I can't eat that way anymore (at least, I choose to eat that way as little as possible).

The problem for me was two-fold: concerns about what pesticides, anti-biotics, and hormones will do to me and my family, but also concerns about raising cattle, chickens, and pigs in such horrific conditions. I love a good steak, but I don't want the animal to live in hell for me to get that steak. Pollan does a good job explaining the chemical and biological processes involved in a big industrial farm and why they would do things the way they do.

Much of the industrial farm model is based on cheap corn. Anyone who was over the age of about five in the 1970s will remember how expensive food used to be. My 80-year-old father tells stories of hunting possums and squirrels with his dad because it was the only meat they would have (how much meat do you get from a squirrel to feed a family of 8???). The theory behind the "cheap corn" policy of the 1970s came from Earl Butz, who realized that making food cheaper would probably irradicate malnutrition in this country. In a way, I can see why this policy seemed like a good idea at the time. Food was expensive and so were other household items (like gas for cars). Making food less expensive seemed like a good idea.

The problem is that food doesn't work the same way that other goods in a capitalist system do. We made the food cheaper, so farmers had to make more food just to keep up, which made prices drop even more. The result is that most farmers grow corn and the corn gets stuffed into every corner of the system, from food to varnish to even my shampoo. And while corn may be good for some things, animals like cows aren't designed to eat it. This is why industrial feedlots, which cram as many cows-per-square-inch as they can into every pen, have to use so many antibiotics.; when you feed an animal what it isn't designed to eat, there are problems.

As I said, this was the most disturbing part of the book for me and has forever changed the way I will look at a rump roast or bunch of chicken breasts. The section ends with a meal of ubiquitous chicken nuggets and fries.

The second section could be called "Big Organic," for many of the same methods are used. These farms have grown from the original organic movement of the 1960s. Just as the people who said they couldn't trust anyone over 30 traded in their Birkenstocks for three-piece suits, they traded in the small organic farms for large, sprawling organice monstrosities. In fact, there are farms that have regular ol' lettuce raised with fertilizers and pesticides next to a field of organic lettuce. Pollan has a problem with the big organic, largely because the methods they must go through to produce, package, and ship the goods all over the U.S. can use every bit as much fossil fuel as the industrial farm. And the animals in these conglomerations aren't treated any better. They just don't use the antibiotics or hormones on them. So, you get meat without the chemicals, but the animals themselves don't seem to be any better off.

The third system (and the one Pollan seems to advocate) is exemplified by Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm. It is, in many ways, the kind of farm most of us learned about in first grade while singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Salatin's farm has livestock and vegetables and is as close to self-sustaining as one is likely to get these days. The intriguing part about Polyface Farm is its philosophy of allowing each animal to behave in the way it is supposed to, then using those traits in some way or other to produce better crops or animals. I won't go into the details of that statement (and believe me, Pollan does...in great detail), but Salatin uses a rotational system where he moves the animals from spot to spot following each other so the grass and soil don't get worn out by overgrazing.

Salatin is an old-fashioned Christian libertarian and has produced many books and does a lot of speaking about his farming philosophy. I will say I agreed whole-heartedly with his outlook on farming (that we are to be stewards of God's land and use it in ways that don't harm it) as well as slaughtering livestock. Salatin believes in transparency and has as much of that as is possible (he does slaughter chickens on the property, but is prevented from killing cows or pigs because of USDA regulations).

The end result of Salatin's work is food which, according to Pollan, tastes better and fresher than most anything we can buy in the store. Indeed, Pollan seemed to have more respect for the chicken that was the centerpiece of this dinner because he had helped kill and prepare it.

The final meal revolved around our hunter/gatherer past and consisted of hunting and killing a pig, gathering mushrooms, and growing vegetables for the meal. Mainly what this section showed is how impossible it would be to return to our hunter/gatherer roots simply because there aren't enough wild things left for us to hunt and/or gather.

All-in-all, The Omnivore's Dilemma was an intriguing read that has changed my view of what I put on my (and my family's plate). I'm now trying to buy more organic food and I am much more concerned how the meat was treated while still on the hoof. But my adventures in gathering organic food is best left for another post.