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

by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. Different as they are, all three food chains are systems for doing more or less the same thing: linking us, through what we eat, to the fertility of the earth and the energy of the sun.

Each of this book’s three parts follows one of the principal human food chains from beginning to end: from a plant, or group of plants, photosynthesizing calories in the sun, all the way to a meal at the dinner end of that food chain.

Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us.

But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

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.

what the wet mill does to a bushel of corn is to turn it into the building blocks from which companies like General Mills, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola assemble our processed foods.

The names of many of these compounds will be familiar to anyone who’s studied the ingredient label on a package of processed food: citric and lactic acid; glucose, fructose, and maltodextrin; ethanol (for alcoholic beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, and xanthan gum; modified and unmodified starches; as well as dextrins and cyclodextrins and MSG, to name only a few.

the two companies who wet mill most of America’s corn (Cargill and ADM) declined to let me watch them do it.

the industrial food chain goes underground, in effect, as it passes through these factories on its path to our plates.

The closest I got to following corn through a mill was at the Center for Crops Utilization Research at Iowa State University,

The Center for Crops Utilization Research is charged with developing new uses for America’s corn and soybean surplus, and to this end operates a scaled-down wet milling operation,

“First we separate the corn into its botanical parts—embryo, endosperm, fiber—and then into its chemical parts,”

When a shipment of corn arrives at the mill, it is steeped for thirty-six hours in a bath of water containing a small amount of sulphur dioxide.

the germ floats off. After it’s dried, we squeeze it for corn oil.” Corn oil can be used as a cooking or salad oil, or hydrogenated for use in margarine and other processed foods:

“mill starch.”

The extracted protein, called gluten, is used in animal feed.

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.

At this point the process has yielded a white slurry that’s poured out onto a stainless steel table and dried to a fine, superwhite powder—cornstarch.

At first the laundry business was its biggest customer, but cooks and early food processors soon began adding cornstarch to as many recipes

By 1866, corn refiners had learned how to use acids to break down cornstarch into glucose, and sweeteners quickly became—as they remain today—the industry’s most important product. Corn syrup (which is mostly glucose or dextrose—the terms are interchangeable) became the first cheap domestic substitute for cane sugar. By the 1970s the process of refining corn into fructose had been perfected, and high-fructose corn syrup—which is a blend of 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose that tastes exactly as sweet as sucrose—came onto the market. Today it is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields thirty-three pounds of fructose.) The starch itself is capable of being modified into spherical, crystalline, or highly branched molecules, each suitable for a different use: adhesives, coatings, sizings, and plastics for industry; stabilizers, thickeners, gels, and “viscosity-control agents” for food.

Now what’s left of the dextrose stream is piped into a fermentation tank, where yeasts or amino acids go to work eating the sugars, in several hours yielding an alcoholic brew.

The fermented brew can also be refined into a dozen different organic and amino acids for use in food processing or the manufacture of plastic.

Just about everything we eat sooner or later winds up in the blood as molecules of glucose, but sugars and simple starches turn to glucose faster than anything else. Type II diabetes and obesity are exactly what you would expect to see in a mammal whose environment has overwhelmed its metabolism with energy-dense foods.

Think high glycemic foods as the quickest to put weight on.

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.

The researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories.

While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald’s meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant. It is hard to believe that the identity of the atoms in a cheeseburger or a Coke is preserved from farm field to fast-food counter, but the atomic signature of those carbon isotopes is indestructible, and still legible to the mass spectrometer.

In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala.

In the long run, however, the eater pays a high price for these cheap calories: obesity, Type II diabetes, heart disease.

the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories the three of us had for lunch stand tens of thousand of corn calories that could have fed a great many hungry people.

As it happened, the reason I found my way to Polyface Farm in the first place had everything to do with Joel Salatin’s unusually strict construction of the word sustainable.

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.”

I spent several weeks touring the organic empire to see if Salatin’s criticisms, which had taken me by surprise, were just.

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced,

The question is, what about the farms themselves? How well do they match the stories told about them?

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 (four words I never expected to see conjoined) stacked in the frozen food case. How’s that for having it both ways?

And I learned about the making of the aforementioned organic TV dinner, a microwaveable bowl of “rice, vegetables, and grilled chicken breast with a savory herb sauce.” Country Herb, as the entrée is called, turns out to be a highly industrialized organic product, involving a choreography of thirty-one ingredients assembled from far-flung farms, laboratories, and processing plants scattered over a half-dozen states and two countries, and containing such mysteries of modern food technology as high-oleic safflower oil, guar and xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, and “natural grill flavor.” Several of these ingredients are synthetic additives permitted under federal organic rules. So much for “whole” foods.

The organic movement, as it was once called, has come a remarkably long way in the last thirty years, to the point where it now looks considerably less like a movement than a big business.

A handful of these farms—Capay is one example—still sell their produce to Whole Foods, but most are long gone from the produce bins, if not yet the walls.

Whole Foods in recent years has adopted the grocery industry’s standard regional distribution system, which makes supporting small farms impractical. Tremendous warehouses buy produce for dozens of stores at a time, which forces them to deal exclusively with tremendous farms.

Ah, but what about the “free-range” lifestyle promised on the label? True, there’s a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old—for fear they’ll catch something outside—and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later.

In 1971 organic agriculture was in its infancy—a few hundred scattered amateurs learning by trial and error how to grow food without chemicals, an ad hoc grassroots R&D effort for which there was no institutional support. (In fact, the USDA was actively hostile to organic agriculture until recently, viewing it—quite rightly—as a critique of the industrialized agriculture the USDA was promoting.)

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.

in a paragraph at the beginning of An Agricultural Testament that stands as a fair summary of the whole organic ideal:

Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.

as organic agriculture has grown more successful, finding its way into the supermarket and the embrace of agribusiness, organic farming has increasingly come to resemble the industrial system it originally set out to replace.

Was an organic dairy cow entitled to graze on pasture? Did food additives and synthetic chemicals have a place in processed organic food? If the answers to these questions seem like no-brainers, then you too are stuck in an outdated pastoral view of organic. Big Organic won all three arguments.

Greenways Organic, a successful two-thousand-acre organic produce operation tucked into a twenty-four-thousand-acre conventional farm in the Central Valley outside Fresno; the crops, the machines, the crews, the rotations, and the fields were virtually indistinguishable, and yet two different kinds of industrial agriculture are being practiced here side by side.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to farming organically on an industrial scale is controlling weeds without the use of chemical herbicides.

The result is fields that look just as clean as the most herbicide-soaked farmland. But this approach, which I discovered is typical of large-scale organic operations, represents a compromise at best. The heavy tillage—heavier than in a conventional field—destroys the tilth of the soil and reduces its biological activity

Basically this works but is out of balance as a process. In a less disturbed, healthier soil, nitrogen-fixing bacteria would create much of the fertility that industrial organic growers must add in the form of compost, manures, fish emulsion, or Chilean nitrate—

The organic ideal is so exacting—a sustainable system modeled on nature that requires not only no synthetic chemicals

these are not the kinds of farms a big company like Small Planet Foods, or Whole Foods, does business with today. It’s simply more cost-efficient to buy from one thousand-acre farm than ten hundred-acre farms.

As soon as your business involves stocking the frozen food case or produce section at a national chain, whether it be Wal-Mart or Whole Foods, the sheer quantities of organic produce you need makes it imperative to buy from farms operating on the same industrial scale you are. Everything’s connected.

Earthbound Farm’s growth exploded after Costco placed an order in 1993.

thinking about lettuce,

There are few things humans eat that are quite so elemental—a handful of leaves, after all, consumed raw. what do we regard as more wholesome The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance in my refrigerated mind.

Supermarket chains don’t want to deal with dozens of different organic farmers; they want one company to offer them a complete line of fruits and vegetables, every SKU in the produce section.

a gulf between Big and Little Organic and convinced many of the movement’s founders, as well as pioneering farmers like Joel Salatin, that the time has come to move beyond organic—to raise the bar on the American food system once again. Some of these innovating farmers are putting their emphasis on quality, others on labor standards, some on local systems of distribution, and still others on achieving a more thoroughgoing sustainability. A few years ago, at a conference on organic agriculture in California, a corporate organic grower suggested to a small farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic agriculture that “you should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market.” Holding his fury in check, the small farmer replied as levelly as he could manage: “I believe I developed that niche twenty years ago. It’s called ‘organic.’ And now you, sir, are sitting on it.” l others on achieving a more thoroughgoing sustainability.

Petaluma, where I tried without success to find the picturesque farmstead, with its red barn, cornfield, and farmhouse, depicted on the package in which the organic roasting chicken I bought at Whole Foods had been wrapped; nor could I find Rosie herself, at least not outdoors, ranging freely.

When its founder, Allen Shainsky, recognized the threat from integrated national chicken processors like Tyson and Perdue, he decided that the only way to stay in business was through niche marketing. So he started processing, on different days of the week, chickens for the kosher, Asian, natural, and organic markets. Each required a slightly different protocol: to process a kosher bird you needed a rabbi on hand, for example; for an Asian bird you left the head and feet on; for the natural market you sold the same bird minus head and feet, but played up the fact that Rocky, as this product was called, received no antibiotics or animal by-products in its feed, and you provided a little exercise yard outside the shed so Rocky could, at his option, range free. And to call a bird organic, you followed the natural protocol except that you also fed it certified organic feed (corn and soy grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizer) and you processed the bird slightly younger and smaller, so it wouldn’t seem quite so expensive. Philosophy didn’t really enter into it.

(Petaluma Eggs, a nearby egg producer with corporate ties to Petaluma Poultry, pursues a similar niche strategy, offering natural free-range eggs

Judy’s Family Farm, Who could begrudge a farmer named Judy $3.59 for a dozen organic eggs she presumably has to get up at dawn each morning to gather? Just how big and sophisticated an operation Petaluma Eggs really is I was never able to ascertain: The company was too concerned about biosecurity to let a visitor get past the office.)

(Petaluma Eggs, a nearby egg producer with corporate ties to Petaluma Poultry, pursues a similar niche strategy, offering natural free-range eggs

Judy’s Family Who could begrudge a farmer named Judy $3.59 for a dozen organic eggs she presumably has to get up at dawn each morning to gather? Just how big and sophisticated an operation Petaluma Eggs really is I was never able to ascertain: The company was too concerned about biosecurity to let a visitor get past the office.)

Rosie the organic chicken’s

Rosie the organic chicken’s life is little different from that of her kosher and Asian cousins, all of whom are conventional Cornish Cross broilers processed according to state-of-the-art industrial practice. The Cornish Cross represents the pinnacle of industrial chicken breeding. It is the most efficient converter of corn into breast meat ever designed, though this efficiency comes at a high physiological price: The birds grow so rapidly (reaching oven-roaster proportions in seven weeks) that their poor legs cannot keep pace, and frequently fail. The chicken houses don’t resemble a farm so much as a military barracks: Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option.

South American asparagus in January,

had been grown according to organic rules on a farm six thousand miles (and two seasons) away, picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north to a Whole Foods regional distribution center, then put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, to be steamed, by me, Sunday night? The ethical implications of buying such a product are almost too numerous and knotty to sort out:

the Earthbound greens, in their polyethylene bag, stayed crisp right up to the expiration date, a full eighteen days after leaving the field—no small technological

Goodmans had explained to me, owes to the fact that the greens were grown organically. Greenways Organic, which grows both conventional and organic tomatoes, I learned that the organic ones consistently earn higher Brix scores (a measure of sugars) than the same varieties grown conventionally. More sugars means less water and more flavor. It stands to reason the same would hold true for other organic vegetables: slower growth, thicker cell walls, and less water should produce more concentrated flavors.

Whether organic is better and worth it are certainly fair, straightforward questions,

Better for what? is the all-important corollary to that question. If the answer is “taste,” then the answer is, as I’ve suggested, very likely, at least in the case of produce—but not necessarily. Meat is a harder call. Rosie was a tasty bird, yet, truth be told, not quite as tasty as Rocky, her bigger nonorganic brother. That’s probably because Rocky is an older chicken, Better for what? If the answer is “for my health” the answer, again, is probably—but not automatically. What I could prove, with the help of a mass spectrometer, is that it contained little or no pesticide residue—the traces of the carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors now routinely found in conventional produce and meat. What I probably can’t prove is that the low levels of these toxins present in these foods will make us sick—