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

by Michael Pollan

This goes for the nonfood items as well—everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to

Corn is the most efficient way to produce energy, soybeans the most efficient way to produce protein.”The

“You are what you eat” is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too.

But it is in soft drinks that we consume most of our sixty-six pounds of high-fructose corn syrup, and to the red-letter dates in the natural history of Zea mays—right up there with teosinte’s catastrophic sexual mutation, Columbus’s introduction of maize to the court of Queen Isabella in 1493, and Henry Wallace’s first F-1 hybrid seed in 1927—we must now add the year 1980. That was the year corn first became an ingredient in Coca-Cola. By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched over entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Why?

This begs the question of why the problem has gotten so much worse in recent years. It turns out the price of a calorie of sugar or fat has plummeted since the 1970s. One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie.

Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary experience, too. That’s not to take anything away from the food, which is generally of high quality, much of it “certified organic” or “humanely raised” or “free range.” But right there, that’s the point: It’s the evocative prose as much as anything else that makes this food really special, elevating an egg or chicken breast or bag of arugula from the realm of ordinary protein and carbohydrates into a much headier experience, one with complex aesthetic, emotional, and even political dimensions.

In keeping with the pastoral tradition, Whole Foods offers what Marx terms “a landscape of reconciliation” between the realms of nature and culture, a place where, as the marketing consultant put it, “people will come together through organic foods to get back to the origin of things”—perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwaveable organic TV dinners

The French eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: They eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone;

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.