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

by Michael Pollan

A study by University of California–Davis researchers published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry in 2003 described an experiment in which identical varieties of corn, strawberries, and blackberries grown in neighboring plots using different methods (including organically and conventionally)

The Davis researchers found that organic and otherwise sustainably grown fruits and vegetables contained significantly higher levels of both ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and a wide range of polyphenols.

the fatal mistake of thinking that what we knew about nourishing plants and people was all we needed to know

It’s a mistake we’ll probably keep repeating until we develop a deeper respect for the complexity of food and soil back to the polyphenols, which may hint at the nature of that link. two suggestive theories. The reason plants produce these compounds in the first place is to defend themselves against pests and diseases; Who would have guessed that humans evolved to profit from a diet of these plant pesticides? A second explanation (one that subsequent research seems to support) may be that the radically simplified soils in which chemically fertilized plants grow don’t supply all the raw ingredients needed to synthesize these compounds,

It would also be a mistake to assume that the word “organic” on a label automatically signifies healthfulness, especially when that label appears on heavily processed and long-distance foods that have probably had much of their nutritional value, not to mention flavor, beaten out of them long before they arrive on our tables.

Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

Grass farmers grow animals—for meat, eggs, milk, and wool—but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species,

Joel calls this optimal grazing rhythm “pulsing the pastures” and says that at Polyface it has boosted the number of cow days to as much as four hundred per acre; the county average is seventy. “In effect we’ve bought a whole new farm for the price of some portable fencing and a lot of management.”

Grass farming done well depends almost entirely on a wealth of nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite: on the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines.

The grasses in the new paddock were thigh-high and lush, and the cattle plainly couldn’t wait to get at them. The moment arrived. Looking more like a maître d’ than a rancher, Joel opened the gate between the two paddocks, removed his straw hat and swept it grandly in the direction of the fresh salad bar, and called his cows to their dinner.

The last time I had stood watching a herd of cattle eat their supper I was standing up to my ankles in cow manure in Poky Feeders pen number 43 in Garden City, Kansas. The difference between these two bovine dining scenes could not have been starker.

Joel Salatin’s farm makes the case for a very different sort of efficiency—the one found in natural systems, with their coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops.

Salatin reached down deep where his pigs were happily rooting and brought a handful of fresh compost right up to my nose. What had been cow manure and woodchips just a few weeks before now smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime, a miracle of transubstantiation.

It isn’t hard to see why there isn’t much institutional support for the sort of low-capital, thought-intensive farming Joel Salatin practices: He buys next to nothing.

Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn’t easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Indeed, that’s why these chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing.

“One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

Following the corn-based industrial food chain had taken me on a journey of several thousand miles, from George Naylor’s Iowa fields to the feedlots and packing plants of Kansas, through any number of far-flung food processors before ending up in a Marin County McDonald’s. After that, it didn’t surprise me to read that the typical item of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.

EcoFriendly Foods, is a second route along which Polyface food finds its way to eaters. Eggleston, a former herb and livestock farmer who discovered he had a greater gift for marketing food than producing it, sells Polyface meat and eggs from his booths at farmer’s markets in the Washington, D.C., area.

Eatwild.com,

Joel Salatin and his customers want to be somewhere that that juggernaut can’t go, and it may be that by elevating local above organic, they have found exactly that place. By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace.

Shopping in the organic supermarket underwrites important values on the farm; shopping locally underwrites a whole set of other values as well. That’s because farms produce a lot more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.

The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.

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 it happens, the koala’s brain is so small it doesn’t even begin to fill up its skull. Zoologists theorize that the koala once ate a more varied and mentally taxing diet than it does now, and that as it evolved toward its present, highly circumscribed concept of lunch, its underemployed brain actually shrank. (Food faddists take note.)

So instead of genes to write our menus omnivores evolved a complicated set of sensory and mental tools to help us sort everything out.

still others straddle the blurry line between natural selection and cultural invention.

(The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate. Food faddists take note two.)

The meso-American practice of cooking corn with lime and serving it with beans, like the Asian practice of fermenting soy and serving it with rice, turn out to render these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would be.

unless corn is cooked with an alkali like lime its niacin is unavailable, leading to the nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance is restored. Similarly, a dish that combines fermented soy with rice is nutritionally balanced.

Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham.

We tolerate this schizophrenia because the life of the pig has moved out of view; when’s the last time you saw a pig in person?

Animal Liberation

Singer’s argument is disarmingly simple and, provided you accept its premises, difficult to refute. “Equality is a moral idea,” Singer points out, “not an assertion of fact.” The moral idea is that everyone’s interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of “what they are like or what abilities they have.” (Not true… why do-we have laws? Do we accept the views of racists or mass murders? What about the folks tha srormed the capital? NO) Singer asks us to imagine a hypothetical society that discriminates on the basis of something nontrivial—intelligence, say. (Ah… we do that now.. much of the right wing base comes from that group. Joined but the Harvard educated rich folks that exploit them or folks that don’t want to help them)

To many animal people even Polyface Farm is a “death camp”—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is. In the same way we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and during my week on the farm I saw it in abundance.

To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—

Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans somehow imposed on animals some ten thousand years ago. Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished. (There are ten thousand wolves left in North America and fifty million dogs.)

A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals’ animality, too.

But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature?

To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development),

I sautéed the chanterelles as Angelo had recommended, first in a dry frying pan to sweat out their water, which was copious, and then with butter and shallots.

That the fungi are so steeped in death might account for much of their mystery and our mycophobia. They stand on the threshold between the living and the dead, breaking the dead down into food for the living, a process on which no one likes to dwell.

Because they don’t supply many calories, nutritionists don’t regard mushrooms as an important source of nutrition. (They do provide some minerals and vitamins, as well as a few essential amino acids, which are what give some species their meaty flavor.)

Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) can digest a pile of petrochemical sludge in a fortnight, transforming the toxic waste into edible protein.

To compare my transcendently slow meal to the fast-food meal I “served” my family at that McDonald’s in Marin,

The two meals stand at the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating—of the different ways we have to engage the world that sustains us. The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance. The diversity of the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry, especially its ability to tease a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape: a monoculture of corn. Going to McDonald’s would be something that happens once a year, a kind of Thanksgiving in reverse, and so would a meal like mine, as slow and storied as the Passover seder.

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

Big Food is snapping up artisanal companies that positioned themselves as ethical alternatives. At the same time, the practice of “farm-washing,” in which highly industrialized food products are marketed as if they came from small farms, is popping up both in the supermarket and fast food outlet. These days Big Food is certainly talking a good game—promising to improve the welfare and diet of the animals, drop the antibiotics, simplify their products, and support farmers and ranchers—but whether such promises will actually be kept is questionable.

So far at least, Big Food retains its grip on the levers of government that determine agricultural policy in this country and, in turn, the rules of the game that determines our food choices.