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

by Michael Pollan

In many ways the mysteries of nutrition at the eating end of the food chain closely mirror the mysteries of fertility at the growing end: The two realms are like wildernesses that we keep convincing ourselves our chemistry has mapped, at least until the next level of complexity comes into view.

All carrots are not created equal, they believed; how we grow it, the soil we grow it in, what we feed that soil all contribute qualities to a carrot, qualities that may yet escape the explanatory net of our chemistry.

In a word: terroir

To a remarkable extent, farmers succeeded in creating the new food chain on their farms; the trouble began when they encountered the expectations of the supermarket. As in so many other realms, nature’s logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism, one in which cheap energy has always been a given.

A diverse enough polyculture of grasses can withstand virtually any shock and in some places will produce in a year nearly as much total biomass as a forest receiving the same amount of rainfall.

We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.

“When you’re trying to finish cattle,” Allan Nation pointed out, “corn covers a multitude of sins.”

What is the opposite of zero-sum? I’m not sure, but this is it.

As soon as the cows head out to pasture in the spring, several dozen pigs come in, proceeding systematically to turn and aerate the compost in their quest for kernels of alcoholic corn.

Pig happiness is simply the by-product of treating a pig as a pig rather than as “a protein machine with flaws”—flaws such as pigtails and a tendency, when emiserated, to get stressed.

“In nature health is the default,” he pointed out. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.”

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

USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don’t set thresholds for food-borne pathogens.

“Make no mistake, we’re in a war with the bureaucrats, who would like nothing better than to put us out of business.” I couldn’t tell whether Joel wasn’t perhaps being a tad paranoid on this point; the pastoral idyll has always felt itself besieged by malign outside forces, and on this farm that role is played by the government and the big processing companies whose interests they serve.

This is the moment the chickens passed over from looking like dead animals to looking like food.

Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner.

When I asked how a place like New York City fit into his vision of a local food economy he startled me with his answer: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?”

DEEP SIGH

For my own part, this taut little exchange made me appreciate what a deep gulf of culture and experience separates me from Joel—and yet at the same time, what a sturdy bridge caring about food can sometimes provide.

The specifications and costly technologies implicitly assume that the animals being processed have been living in filth and eating corn rather than grass.

Re: slaughterhouses

A global food market, which brings us New Zealand lamb in the spring, Chilean asparagus in December, and fresh tomatoes the year round, has smudged the bright colors of the seasonal food calendar we all once knew by heart.

This informal alliance of small farmers and local chefs is something you find in many cities these days.

It took capitalism less than a quarter century to turn even something as ephemeral as bagged salads of cut and washed organic mesclun, of all things, into a cheap international commodity retailed in a new organic supermarket.

For one thing, it is much less likely to rely on monoculture, the original sin from which almost every other problem of our food system flows.

Even connoisseurship can have a politics,

It’s all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock.

In fact, even the most fervent eat-local types say it’s okay for a “foodshed” (a term for a regional food chain, meant to liken it to a watershed) to trade for goods it can’t produce locally—coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate—a practice that predates the globalization of our food chain by a few thousand years.

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

all of them tasting almost flamboyantly themselves, their flavors forming a bright sequence of primary colors.

In his chapter Brillat-Savarin draws a sharp distinction between the pleasures of eating—“the actual and direct sensation of a need being satisfied,” a sensation we share with the animals—and the uniquely human “pleasures of the table.” These consist of “considered sensations born of the various circumstances of fact, things, and persons accompanying the meal”—and comprise for him one of the brightest fruits of civilization.

Mushroom hunting seems to me the very soul of foraging, throwing both the risks and rewards of eating from the wild into the sharpest possible relief.

The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended.

For most of us today hunting and gathering and growing our own food is by and large a form of play.

My wager in undertaking this experiment is that hunting and gathering (and growing) a meal would perforce teach me things about the ecology and ethics of eating that I could not get in a supermarket or fast-food chain or even on a farm.

And this, I suppose, points to what I was really after in taking up hunting and gathering: to see what it’d be like to prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of what was involved.

It was almost as if I had donned a new pair of glasses that divided the natural world into the possibly good to eat and the probably not.

Rozin, who has written or coauthored several fascinating articles about disgust, defines it as the fear of incorporating offending substances into one’s body.

Anthropologists argue over whether all these rules make biological sense—some, like the kosher rules, are probably designed more to enforce group identity than to protect health.

Interesting -- would have thought the opposite

But food is more important than sex, Rozin contends. Sex we can live without (at least as individuals), and it occurs with far less frequency than eating. Since we also do rather more of our eating in public there has been “a more elaborate cultural transformation of our relationship to food than there is to sex.”

The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.

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.

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.)

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.”

For, brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence or chicken coop. (Pigs, which often can survive in the wild, are the exception that proves the rule.)

And now I'm thinking of Margaret Atwood's pigoons.

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. They would like nothing better than to airlift us out from nature’s “intrinsic evil”—and then take the animals with us. You begin to wonder if their quarrel isn’t really with nature itself.

If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

Irony—the outside perspective—easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout.

Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter.

As Ortega writes in his Meditations, hunting plunges us into the intertwined enigmas of death and animals, enigmas that admit of no easy answers or resolution.

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.