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

by Michael Pollan

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 demand.”) Nature has cursed the companies working the middle of the food chain with a recipe for falling rates of profits. The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products—CDs, say, or shoes—there’s a natural limit to how much food we can each consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year—1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is that won’t tolerate such an anemic rate of growth. This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald’s with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of foo...