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

by Michael Pollan

By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

We haven’t yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly.

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat, when all went well, was something less than 50:1. (At a time when land was abundant and labor scarce, agricultural yields were calculated on a per-seed-sown basis.)

Had maize failed to find favor among the conquerors, it would have risked extinction, because without humans to plant it every spring, corn would have disappeared from the earth in a matter of a few years. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them.

Yet because those seeds are now trapped in a tough husk, the plant has lost its ability to reproduce itself—hence the catastrophe in teosinte’s sex change. A mutation this freakish and maladaptive would have swiftly brought the plant to an evolutionary dead end had one of these freaks not happened to catch the eye of a human somewhere in Central America who, looking for something to eat, peeled open the husk to free the seeds. What would have been an unheralded botanical catastrophe in a world without humans became an incalculable evolutionary boon. If

If, as has sometimes been said, the discovery of agriculture represented the first fall of man from the state of nature, then the discovery of synthetic fertility is surely a second precipitous fall.

Resistant starch, the last novelty on that list of ingredients, has the corn refiners particularly excited today. They’ve figured out how to tease a new starch from corn that is virtually indigestible. You would not think this is a particularly good thing for a food to be, unless of course your goal is to somehow get around the biological limit on how much each of us can eat in a year. Since the body can’t break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track without ever turning into calories of glucose—a particular boon, we’re told, for diabetics. When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last have overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach: whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate—the utterly elastic!—industrial eater.

Corn whiskey, suddenly superabundant and cheap, became the drink of choice, and in 1820 the typical American was putting away half a pint of the stuff every day. That comes to more than five gallons of spirits a year for every man, woman, and child in America. The figure today is less than one. As the historian W. J. Rorabaugh tells the story in The Alcoholic Republic, we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, before work and after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called “the elevenses.” (Just to pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday morning in church, Americans simply did not gather—whether for a barn raising or quilting bee, corn husking or political rally—without passing the whiskey jug.

The Alcoholic Republic has long since given way to the Republic of Fat; we’re eating today much the way we drank then, and for some of the same reasons. According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children.

As the story is told in John Love’s official history of McDonald’s, Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales—two-for-one deals, matinee specials—but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish. Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda—a lot more—as long as it came in a single gigantic serving.

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. You have to wonder why we Americans don’t worship this plant as fervently as the Aztecs; like they once did, we make extraordinary sacrifices to it.

“Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Earthbound Farm’s growth exploded after Costco placed an order in 1993. “Costco wanted our prewashed spring mix, but they didn’t want organic,” Myra told me. “To them, organic sent the wrong message: high price and low quality.” At the time, organic was still recovering from the boom and bust following the Alar episode. But the Goodmans were committed to organic farming practices, so they decided to sell Costco their organically grown lettuce without calling it that.

One of the principles of modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible farmers should rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured every day by photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum.

In time the cattle themselves changed, as the industry selected for animals that did well on corn; these animals, generally much bigger, had trouble getting all the energy they needed from grass. In dairy, farmers moved to superproductive breeds like the Holstein, whose energy requirements were so great they could barely survive on a diet of grass.

I can remember when the Arab oil embargo hit in 1974, Dad rode his bicycle thirty-five miles back and forth to work every day because he refused to buy another drop of imported oil. He would have been a wonderful tent dweller, always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.”

(Wes Jackson calls our species “homo the homogenizer.”)

Temple Grandin, the animal-handling expert who’s helped design many slaughterhouses, has written that it is not uncommon for full-time slaughterhouse workers to become sadistic.

whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with 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.”

is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?

“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.

rats and humans require a wider range of nutrients and so must eat a wider range of foods, some of them questionable. Whenever they encounter a potential new food they find themselves torn between two conflicting emotions unknown to the specialist eater, each with its own biological rationale: neophobia, a sensible fear of ingesting anything new, and neophilia, a risky but necessary openness to new tastes.

The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee posed precisely that question in a lecture at Princeton not long ago; he answered it in the affirmative. If the animal rightists are right, then “a crime of stupendous proportions” (in Coetzee’s words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

I’m mindful of Ben Franklin’s definition of a reasonable creature as one who can come up with reasons for whatever he wants to 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.

I wasn’t quite sure if picking cherries from a neighbor’s tree was exactly kosher, either by my lights or the law. But isn’t there some old legal principle that confers the right to pick fruit from trees overhanging your property? I did a little research and discovered that indeed there is. 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.” Bingo! Here was a venerable legal principle that spoke to the very soul of foraging.*