The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process (Carl Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber’s idea) for fixing nitrogen is the most important invention of the twentieth century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber’s invention.

Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.

beginning in the 1950s, a campaign to dismantle the New Deal farm programs took root, and with every new farm bill since then another strut was removed from the structure of support. Almost from the start, the policy of supporting prices and limiting production had collected powerful enemies: exponents of laissez-faire economics, who didn’t see why farming should be treated differently than any other economic sector; food processors and grain exporters, who profited from overproduction and low crop prices; and a coalition of political and business leaders who for various reasons thought America had far too many farmers for her (or at least their) own good.

Since a smaller number of farmers could now feed America, the moment had come to “rationalize” agriculture by letting the market force prices down and farmers off the land. So Wall Street and Washington sought changes in farm policies that would loose “a plague of cheap corn” (in the words of George Naylor, a man very much in the old rural-populist mold) on the nation, the effects of which are all around us—indeed, in us.

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control—what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we’re going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.

shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.)

changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization—cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.—that have long been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.

Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef.

As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers,

The price of this dietary flexibility is much more complex and metabolically expensive brain circuitry. For the omnivore a tremendous amount of mental wiring must be devoted to sensory and cognitive tools for figuring out which of all these questionable nutrients it is safe to eat.

“Disgust is intuitive microbiology.”

The cow depends on the ingenious adaptation of the rumen to turn an exclusive diet of grasses into a balanced meal; we depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to cook cassava or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information. The same process of natural selection came up with both strategies; one just happens to rely on cognition, the other goes with the gut.

“Without virtue” to govern his appetites, Aristotle wrote, man of all the animals “is most unholy and savage, and worst in regard to sex and eating.”

The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest such casualty of capitalism. These rules and rituals stood in the way of the food industry’s need to sell a well-fed population more food through ingenious new ways of processing, packaging, and marketing it.

Instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of a cuisine, or even on the wisdom of our senses, we rely on expert opinion, advertising, government food pyramids, and diet books, and we place our faith in science to sort out for us what culture once did with rather more success.

The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.

Here in these wretched places life itself is redefined—as “protein production”—and with it “suffering.” That venerable word becomes “stress,” an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution such as clipping the beaks of chickens or docking the tails of pigs or, in the industry’s latest initiative, simply engineering the “stress gene” out of pigs and chickens.

it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

We no longer have any rituals governing either the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps explain why we find ourselves in this dilemma, in a place where we feel our only choice is either to look away or give up meat.

The industrialization—and brutalization—of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

The mushroom is the “fruiting body” of a subterranean network of microscopic hyphae, improbably long rootlike cells that thread themselves through the soil like neurons. Bunched like cables, the hyphae form webs of (still microscopic) mycelium. Mycologists can’t dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelia are too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintegrating.

Fungi, lacking chlorophyll, differ from plants in that they can’t manufacture food energy from the sun. Like animals, they feed on organic matter made by plants, or by plant eaters. Most of the fungi we eat obtain their energy by one of two means: saprophytically, by decomposing dead vegetable matter, and mycorrhizally, by associating with the roots of living plants.

To hunt for mushrooms makes you appreciate what a crucial evolutionary adaptation the pop-out effect is for a creature that forages for food in a forest—especially when that food doesn’t want to be found. Without the pop-out effect, finding one’s dinner would depend on chance encounters with edible species and, of course, on fruit, the only important food source in nature that actually tries to pop out.

Since the evolutionary strategy of fruiting plants is to recruit animals to transport their seeds, they’ve evolved to get themselves noticed, attracting us with their bright colors. In the case of the fruits and flowers, the pop-out effect is, in effect, collaborative. But just about everything else you might want to eat in the forest is hiding.

The current thinking is that the morels found in pine forests are a mycorrhizal species for whom the death of their pine associates represents a crisis: Suddenly there are no more roots supplying them with food. So the fungus fruits, sending up morels to release trillions of spores that the wind will loft far from this blasted forest. In effect, the morels fruit in order to escape the burn, dispatching their genes to colonize new pine lands before the organism starves to death.

Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter—this quantity of sacrificed life—just before the body takes its first destructive bite.

usufruct, which was a fact of nature long before it became an axiom of law.

For countless generations eating was something that took place in the steadying context of a family and a culture, where the full consciousness of what was involved did not need to be rehearsed at every meal because it was stored away, like the good silver, in a set of rituals and habits, manners and recipes. I wonder if it isn’t because so much of that context has been lost that I felt the need, this one time, to start again from scratch.