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

by Michael Pollan

“It’s all connected. This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn’t do very well.” Joel likes to quote from an old agricultural textbook he dug out of the stacks at Virginia Tech many years ago. The book, which was published in 1941 by a Cornell Ag professor, offers a stark conclusion that, depending on your point of view, will sound either hopelessly quaint or arresting in its gnomic wisdom: “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.”

By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence—by definition the very opposite of simplification. To achieve the efficiency represented by turning cow manure into chicken eggs and producing beef without chemicals you need at least two species (cows and chickens), but actually several more as well, including the larvae in the manure and the grasses in the pasture and the bacteria in the cows’ rumens. To measure the efficiency of such a complex system you need to count not only all the products it produces (meat, chicken, eggs) but also all the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, paraciticides, and fertilizers. Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. In effect, Joel is farming in time as well as in space—in four dimensions rather than three. He calls this intricate layering “stacking” and points out that “it is exactly the model God used in building nature.” The idea is not to slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species “fully express their physiological distinctiveness.”

Joel calls each of his stacked farm enterprises a “holon,” a word I’d never encountered before. He told me he picked it up from Allan Nation; when I asked Nation about it, he pointed me to Arthur Koestler, who coined the term in The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler felt English lacked a word to express the complex relationship of parts and wholes in a biological or social system. A holon (from the Greek holos, or whole, and the suffix on, as in proton, suggesting a particle) is an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part. A body organ like the liver is a holon; so is an Eggmobile.

“There’s not a spreadsheet in the world that can measure the value of maintaining forest on the northern slopes of a farm. Start with those trees easing the swirling of the air in the pastures. That might not seem like a big deal, but it reduces evaporation in the fields—which means more water for the grass. Plus, a grass plant burns up fifteen percent of its calories just defying gravity, so if you can stop it from being wind whipped, you greatly reduce the energy it uses keeping its photovoltaic array pointed toward the sun. More grass for the cows. That’s the efficiency of a hedgerow surrounding a small field, something every farmer used to understand before ‘fencerow to fencerow’ became USDA mantra.”

“The first rule of chicken killing is that if you ever feel anything on your lip, you don’t want to lick it off.”

The viscera were unexpectedly beautiful, glistening in a whole palette of slightly electric colors, from the steely blue striations of the heart muscle to the sleek milk chocolate liver to the dull mustard of the gallbladder. I was curious to see the gizzard, the stomachlike organ where a chicken uses bits of ingested grit to crush its food after it’s passed down the gullet. I slit open the tight, hard nut of gizzard and there inside found tiny pieces of stone and a blade of bright green grass folded like an accordion. I couldn’t make out any insects in the gizzard, but its contents recapitulated the Polyface food chain: pasture on its way to becoming meat.

“You can’t regulate integrity,” Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer’s relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom “to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government’s business.” Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology. It is a compelling idea. Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface’s—if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls—the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth—would simply have to stop.

Beside the old pile Joel dumped a few yards of fresh woodchips, which Galen and I raked into a broad rectangular mound about the size of a double bed, leaving a slight depression in the middle. Into this dip we spilled the buckets of guts, forming a glistening, parti-colored stew. On top of this we added the pillowy piles of feathers, and finally the blood, which now had the consistency of house paint. By now Joel was back with another load of chips, which he proceeded to dump onto the top of the pile. Galen climbed up onto the mass of woodchips with his rake, and I followed him with mine. The top layer of woodchips was dry, but you could feel the viscera sliding around underfoot; it felt like walking on a mattress filled with Jell-O. We raked the pile level and got out of there. The compost pile repulsed me, but what did that say? Beyond the stench in my nostrils (which, believe me, was not so easy to get beyond), the pile offered an inescapable reminder of all that eating chicken involves—the killing, the bleeding, the evisceration. And no matter how well it is masked or how far it is hidden away, this death smell—and the reality that gives rise to it—shadows the eating of any meat, industrial, organic, or whatever, is part and parcel of even this grassy pastoral food chain whose beauty had so impressed me. I wondered whether my disgust didn’t cover a certain shame I was feeling about the morning’s work.

A chicken—or steak, or ham, or carton of eggs—can find its way from Polyface Farm to an eater’s plate by five possible routes: direct sales at the farm store, farmer’s markets, metropolitan buying clubs, a handful of small shops in Staunton, and Joel’s brother Art’s panel truck, which makes deliveries to area restaurants every Thursday. Each of these outlets seems quite modest in itself, yet taken together they comprise the arteries of a burgeoning local food economy that Joel believes is indispensable to the survival of his kind of agriculture (and community), not to mention to the reform of the entire global food system.

our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.”

recent column by Allan Nation in Stockman Grass Farmer about “artisanal economics.” Drawing on the theories of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, Nation had distinguished between industrial and artisanal enterprises to demonstrate why attempts to blend the two modes seldom succeed. Industrial farmers are in the business of selling commodities, he explained, a business where the only viable competitive strategy is to be the least-cost producer. The classic way any industrial producer lowers the costs of his product is by substituting capital—new technologies and fossil-fuel energy—for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does. Nation contrasted this industrial model with its polar opposite, what he calls “artisanal production,” where the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producer of a commodity. Stressing that “productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts,” Nation suggests that even a small producer can be profitable so long as he’s selling an exceptional product and keeping his expenses down. Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn’t attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect. It must not try to replace skilled labor with capital; it must not grow for the ...

grass diet that gave the eggs their color, indicating lots of beta-carotene.

Joel told me that when he first began selling eggs to chefs, he found himself apologizing for their pallid hue in winter; the yolks would lose their rich orange color when the chickens came in off the pasture in November. Then he met a chef who told him not to worry about it. The chef explained that in cooking school in Switzerland he’d been taught recipes that specifically called for April eggs, August eggs, and December eggs. Some seasons produce better yolks, others better whites, and chefs would adjust their menus accordingly. Both Joel and Art evinced the deepest respect for their chefs, who not only seldom argued price and wrote checks right on the spot, but clearly appreciated their work and, very often, acknowledged it right on their menus: “Polyface Farm Chicken” is something I saw on menus and specials boards all over Charlottesville.

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. Whether Polyface’s customers spend their food dollars here in Swoope or in the Whole Foods in Charlottesville will have a large bearing on whether this lovely valley—this undulating checkerboard of fields and forests—will endure, or whether the total economy will find a “higher use” for it. “Eat your view!” is a bumper sticker often seen in Europe these days; as it implies, the decision to eat locally is an act of conservation, too, one that is probably more effective (and sustainable) than writing checks to environmental organizations.

The omnivore’s dilemma is replayed every time we decide whether or not to ingest a wild mushroom, but it also figures in our less primordial encounters with the putatively edible: when we’re deliberating the nutritional claims on the boxes in the cereal aisle; when we’re settling on a weight-loss regimen (low fat or low carb?); or deciding whether to sample McDonald’s’ newly reformulated chicken nugget; or weighing the costs and benefits of buying the organic strawberries over the conventional ones; or choosing to observe (or flout) kosher or halal rules; or determining whether or not it is ethically defensible to eat meat—that is, whether meat, or any other of these things, is not only good to eat, but good to think as well.

curative properties of salicylic acid in willows (the active ingredient in aspirin)

A potential for savagery lurks in a creature capable of eating anything. If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all the various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture. There is a short and direct path from the omnivore’s dilemma to the astounding number of ethical rules with which people have sought to regulate eating for as long as they have been living in groups.

“The question is not Can they reason? Or Can they talk? But Can they suffer?” Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the “argument from marginal cases,” or AMC for short. It goes like this: There are humans—infants, the severely retarded, the demented—whose mental function does not rise to the level of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions (obey the golden rule, etc.) we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee?

Well, right here is where you run smack into the AMC: the moral status of the retarded and the insane, the two-day-old infant and the advanced Alzheimer’s patient. These people (“marginal cases,” in the detestable language of modern moral philosophy) cannot participate in ethical decision making any more than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights. Yes, I respond, for the obvious reason: They’re one of us. Isn’t it natural to give special consideration to one’s kind? Only if you’re a speciesist, the animal rightist replies. Not so long ago many white people said the same thing about being white: We look out for our kind. Still, I would argue that there is a nonarbitrary reason we protect the rights of human “marginal” cases: We’re willing to make them part of our moral community because we all have been and will probably once again be marginal cases ourselves. What’s more, these people have fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their welfare deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most intelligent ape. A utilitarian like Singer would agree that the feelings of relatives should count for something in our moral calculus, but the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphaned child and a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain.

one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else. Egg operations are the worst, from everything I’ve read; I haven’t managed to actually get into one of these places since journalists are unwelcome there. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they are bred for such swift and breast-heavy growth they can barely walk, at least don’t spend their lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral “vices” that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding. (This is the chief reason broilers get a pass on caged life; to scar so much high-v...

For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character—its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle talked about each creature’s “characteristic form of life.” At least for the domestic animal (the wild animal is a different case) the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn’t exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans—apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where the animal rightists betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species. 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. Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and—yes—their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the new relationship: The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild (natural selection tends to dispense with unneeded trait...

The crucial moral difference between a CAFO and a good farm is that the CAFO systematically deprives the animals in it of their “characteristic form of life.”

The fight over the pigs at Santa Cruz Island suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It’s very good for that. 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? Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we’ve decided it should be in human society? We simply may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights seem to suit us and serve our purposes today.

The farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a “serious clash of interests” with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone. The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places.

apropos of nothing,

Grandin described what steer 534 experienced after passing through the blue door: “The animal goes into the chute single file. The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he’s straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a twenty-degree angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground, and he’s being carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can’t look down and see he’s off the ground. That would panic him.” I had been wondering what 534 would be feeling as he neared his end. Would he have any inkling—a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line—that this was no ordinary day? Would he, in other words, suffer? Grandin anticipated my question. “Does the animal know it’s going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them going into the squeeze chutes on the feedlot, getting their shots, and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die you’d see much more agitated behavior. “Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a pneumatic-powered ‘gun’ that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it’s done correctly it will kill the animal on the first sho...

My own wager is that there might still be another way open to us, and that finding it will begin with looking once again—at the animals we eat, and at their deaths. People will see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer: a being without a soul, a “subject of a life” entitled to rights, a receptacle of pleasure and pain, an unambiguously tasty lunch.

Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look. No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers willing to raise and kill their animals transparently. Such farms exist; so do a handful of small processing plants willing to let customers onto the kill floor, including one—Lorentz Meats, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota—that is so confident of their treatment of animals that they have walled their abattoir in glass. The industrialization—and brutalization—of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an ...

Later it occurred to me that this mental state, which I quite liked, in many ways resembled the one induced by smoking marijuana: the way one’s senses feel especially acute and the mind seems to forget everything outside the scope of its present focus, including physical discomfort and the passing of time. One of the more interesting areas of research in the neurosciences today is the study of the brain’s “cannabinoid network,” a set of receptors in the nervous system that are activated by a group of unusual compounds called cannabinoids. One of these compounds is THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; another is anandamide, a recently discovered neurotransmitter manufactured in the brain (and named by its discoverer for the Sanskrit word for inner bliss). Whether made by the plant or the brain, cannabinoids have the effect of intensifying sensory experience, disabling short-term memory, and stimulating appetite. Scientists still aren’t certain what the evolutionary utility of such a system might be. Some researchers hypothesize that the cannabinoids, like the opiates, play a role in the brain’s pain relief and reward system; others that they help regulate appetite, or emotion.

Ortega believed that in hunting we returned to nature because “hunting is the generic way of being a man” and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us. This is atavism pure and simple—the recovery of an earlier mode of being human—and that for Ortega is the supreme, and the exclusive, value of hunting. For perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such return available to us—we can’t ever, as he points out, go back to being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once history begins it is irreversible. So how is it we can still go back to being Paleolithic? Because our identity as hunters is literally prehistoric—is in fact inscribed by evolution in the architecture of our bodies and brains. (Of course, the same might be said about gathering, too, which Ortega doesn’t address; my guess is that that way of being in nature is insufficiently dramatic or masculine for the Spaniard’s taste.)

The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing a big shit-eating grin that might have been winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin—there’s no other word for it—obscene. I felt as though I had stumbled on some stranger’s pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this. What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? I couldn’t for the life of me explain what could have inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If I didn’t know better I would have said that the man in the picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, captured in the throes of some sort of Dionysian intoxication, the “bloodlust” that Ortega says will sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned p...

Perhaps there is a more generous light in which to regard the hunter’s joy. Perhaps it is the joy of a creature succeeding at something he has discovered his nature has superbly equipped him to do, an action that is less a perversion of that nature, his “creaturely character,” than a fulfillment of it. But what of the animal in the picture? Well, the animal too has had the chance to fulfill its wild nature, has lived, and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its creaturely character. Hers is, by the standards of animal death, a good one.

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. So which view of me the hunter is the right one, the shame at the photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for a more complete transcendence. The hunter—or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter—recognizes the truths disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust. The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don’t come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I’ve learned anything about hunting and eating meat it’s that it’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing that the sheer force of human will can...

Playing at self-reliance takes different forms in different people, and you can probably tell a lot about a person by his choice of atavism: whether he’s drawn to the patient and solitary attentiveness of fishing, the strict mathematical syntax of building, the emotional drama of the hunt, or the mostly comic dialogue with other species that unfolds in the garden. Most of us have a pretty good idea which of these jobs we’d try for if somehow a time machine were to plunk us down in the Pleistocene or Neolithic.

The chanterelle is a mycorrhizal species, which means it lives in association with the roots of plants—oak trees, in the chanterelle’s case, and usually oak trees of a venerable age.

Part of the problem is simply that fungi are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger and essentially invisible organism that lives most of its life underground. The mushroom is the “fruiting body” of a subterranean network of microscopic hyphae, improbably long rootlike cells that thread themselves through the soil like neurons. Bunched like cables, the hyphae form webs of (still microscopic) mycelium. Mycologists can’t dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelia are too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintegrating. Hard as it may be to see a mushroom—the most visible and tangible part!—to see the whole organism of which it is merely a component may simply be impossible. Fungi also lack the comprehensible syntax of plants, the orderly and visible chronology of seed and vegetative growth, flower, fruit, and seed again. The fungi surely have a syntax of their own, but we don’t know all its rules, especially the ones that govern the creation of a mushroom, which can take three years or thirty, depending. On what? We don’t really know. All of which makes mushrooms seem autochthonous, arising seemingly from nowhere, seemingly without cause. Fungi, lacking chlorophyll, differ from plants in that they can’t manufacture food energy from the sun. Like animals, they feed on organic matter made by plants, or by plant eaters. Most of the fungi we eat obtain their energy by one o...

We don’t have the scientific tools to measure or even account for these fungi’s unusual powers. Weil speculates that their energies derive from the moon rather than the sun, that mushrooms contain, instead of calories of solar origin, prodigious amounts of lunar energy.

It was deeply satisfying when the morels appeared, a phenomenon you could swear was as much under their control as yours. I became, perforce, a student of the “pop-out effect,” a term I’d first heard from mushroomers but subsequently learned is used by psychologists studying visual perception. To reliably distinguish a given object in a chaotic or monochromatic visual field is a daunting perceptual task, one so complex that researchers in artificial intelligence have struggled to teach it to computers. Yet when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we’re hoping to spot—whether its color or pattern or shape—it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command. To get your eyes on is to have this narrow visual filter installed and functioning. That’s why Ben had me practice on his finds, to fix in my mind’s eye the pattern of morels as seen against the forest’s layer of duff.

Whichever it was, here was the warm sun of fortune smiling on me, this sudden shower of forest flesh, and I felt, again, the gratitude I’d felt in that other forest, the moment that wild pig first appeared to me on the top of that ridge. Oh, it can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but in the end it isn’t really the work that produces the food you’re after, this effort for that result, for there’s no sure correlation between effort and result. And no deserving of this: I felt none of the sense of achievement you feel at the end of a season in the garden, when all your work has paid off in the bounty of the harvest. No, this felt more like something for nothing, a wondrous and unaccountable gift.

wild yeast, thereby introducing a second species of foraged fungus into the proceedings. I found a recipe (in an excellent cookbook called Bread Alone) that gave instructions for gathering wild yeast, in a process that took several days but didn’t sound too difficult.

The Romans called it “usufruct,” which the dictionary defines as “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.”

Gathering wild yeast turns out to be no big deal. The spores of various yeasts are floating in the air just about everywhere; collecting them is a matter of giving them a place to rest and something to eat. Some species of yeast taste better than others, however, and this is where geography and luck enter in. The Bay Area has a reputation for its sourdough bread, so I figured the air outside my house would be an excellent hunting ground for wild yeast. I made a thick soup of organic flour and spring water (the idea is to avoid any chemicals that might harm your yeast); then, after briefly exposing the mixture to the air on a windowsill, I sealed it in an airtight container and left it out on the kitchen counter overnight. By the following morning the surface of the chef, as it’s called, was bubbling like pancake batter on a hot griddle, a good sign. Each day, you’re supposed to feed fresh water and flour to the young colony of microbes, and sniff it. The chef should smell slightly alcoholic, sour, and yeasty—a bit like beer. The absence of bubbles is a bad sign. So is the presence of off odors or colorful scums, which indicate you’ve probably snared wilder and weirder microbes than you want; throw out the chef and start over. I counted myself lucky that by the second day my chef already smelled promisingly beery and breadlike.

Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it. By grilling one cut of my pig and braising the other, I was drawing on the two most elemental techniques people have devised for transforming raw meat into something not only more digestible but also more human: that is, cooking meat directly over a fire and, with liquid, in a pot. Both techniques promise to turn the flesh of animals into something good to eat and good to think, but each reflects a slightly different stance toward the animal. The second proposes a more “civilized” method of cooking meat, since it achieves a more complete transcendence or (take your pick) sublimation of the animal, and perhaps the animal in us, than the first. It leaves no trace of blood, which suits some meat eaters more than others, but it seemed to me I should give both approaches to the pig their due.

Such storied food can feed us both body and soul, the threads of narrative knitting us together as a group, and knitting the group into the larger fabric of the given world.

There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any luck, you realize everything’s going to be okay. The food and the company having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness or disaster, and the host can allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of the evening and actually begin to enjoy himself.

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. The cost of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future. Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers—outliers of a real life. Or better yet, preserve them but purely as ritual, for the lessons they have to teach us about the different uses to which the world can be put. 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.