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TO ONE DEGREE or another, the question of what to have for dinner assails every omnivore, and always has.
It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.
(“The whole of nature,”wrote the English author William Ralph Inge, “is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.”)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer.
One is that there exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, at least as it is presently organized.
By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented.
Another theme, or premise really, is that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.
Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world i...
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To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.
I realized that the straightforward question “What should I eat?” could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: “What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?” Not very long ago an eater didn’t need a journalist to answer these questions. The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.
There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.
The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything—not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted.
Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant.
Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.
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.
In nature, the population of a species explodes until it exhausts its supply of food; then it crashes. In the market, an oversupply of a commodity depresses prices until either the surplus is consumed or it no longer makes sense to produce any more of it. In corn’s case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can.
One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do (to paraphrase Wendell Berry) is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all).
Wet milling is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.
The farm, being vulnerable to the vicissitudes of weather and pests, is prone to crises of over- and underproduction, both of which can hurt business. Rising raw material prices cut into profits, obviously enough. Yet the potential boon of falling raw material prices—which should allow you to sell a lot more of your product at a lower price—can’t be realized in the case of food because of the special nature of your consumer, who can eat only so much food, no matter how cheap it gets. (Food industry executives used to call this the problem of the “fixed stomach”; economists speak of “inelastic
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When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat.
Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.
Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated by Homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly—has colonized more acres and bodies—than Zea mays, the grass that domesticated its domesticator.
We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.”
Just how well does Supermarket Pastoral hold up under close reading and journalistic scrutiny? ABOUT AS WELL as you would expect anything genuinely pastoral to hold up in the belly of an $11 billion industry, which is to say not very well at all.
When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.
The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.
So there are a great many reasons American cattle came off the grass and into the feedlot, and yet all of them finally come down to the same one: Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines.
“Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die.”
“It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.”
Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology.
In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does.
The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.
“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
Thus dissolute men abandon themselves to the excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind depraves the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent.
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; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food successfully negotiates the omnivore’s dilemma, allowing the French to enjoy their meals without ruining their health.
Several years ago, in a book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, sociologist Daniel Bell called attention to the tendency of capitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, to erode the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization.
well.”The great advantage of being a “reasonable creature,” Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.
What’s wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle.
What this suggests to me is that people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless—for animal welfare, in others words, rather than rights.
The tourist in nature achieves no such immersion or connection; all he sees is a landscape, which is something made by history (and rather recently at that). His gaze conditioned by art and expectation, the tourist remains a spectator to a scene, unable to get outside himself or history, since the landscape he beholds is as much the product of his civilization as of nature.
Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don’t give it nearly as much thought as we do.
What shames at least some of us about hunting is the same thing that shames us about every other reminder of our origins: that is, the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature.
The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us.
If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion.
But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted.
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.
