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

by Michael Pollan

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.

Deciding whether that future should more closely resemble Joel’s radically local vision or Whole Foods’ industrial organic matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside. We may need a great many different alternative food chains, organic and local, biodynamic and slow, and others yet undreamed of.

As our diet—and the diet of the animals we eat—shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health.

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. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to -3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef.) The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.

I certainly hadn’t forgotten the time she’d wrinkled her nose and pushed away a Polyface steak I’d served her. Grass-fed beef is flavored by the pastures it grows on, usually but not always for the best. It had tasted fine to me.

It’s not as though the forager food chain represents a viable way for us to eat at this point in history; it doesn’t. For one thing, there is not enough game left to feed us all, and probably not enough wild plants and mushrooms either.

So though a hunter-gatherer food chain still exists here and there to one degree or another, it seems to me its chief value for us at this point is not so much economic or practical as it is didactic. Like other important forms of play, it promises to teach us something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives.

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. I realized that this had been the ultimate destination of the journey I’d been on since traveling to an Iowa cornfield: to look as far into the food chains that support us as I could look, and recover the fundamental biological realities that the complexities of modern industrialized eating keep from our view.

My encounter with the chanterelle—or was it a false chanterelle?—put me in touch with one of the most elemental facts about human eating: It can be dangerous, and even when it isn’t dangerous, it is fraught. The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.

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 concept of the omnivore’s dilemma helps unlock not only simple food-selection behaviors in animals, but much more complex “biocultural” adaptations in primates (humans included) as well as a wide range of otherwise baffling cultural practices in humans, the species for whom, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said, food must be “not only good to eat, but also good to think.”

Our teeth are omnicompetent—designed for tearing animal flesh as well as grinding plants. So are our jaws, which we can move in the manner of a carnivore, a rodent, or an herbivore, depending on the dish. Our stomachs produce an enzyme specifically designed to break down elastin, a type of protein found in meat and nowhere else. Our metabolism requires specific chemical compounds that, in nature, can be gotten only from plants (like vitamin C) and others that can be gotten only from animals (like vitamin B-12). More than just the spice of human life, variety for us appears to be a biological necessity.

There does seem to be an evolutionary trade-off between big brains and big guts—two very different evolutionary strategies for dealing with the question of food selection.

More important to the koala than brains is a gut big enough to break down all those fibrous leaves. By the same token, the digestive tract of primates like us has grown progressively shorter as we’ve evolved to eat a more varied, higher quality diet.

For the omnivore a tremendous amount of mental wiring must be devoted to sensory and cognitive tools for figuring out which of all these questionable nutrients it is safe to eat.

That set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine, for example, specifies combinations of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties. 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. When not fermented, soy contains an antitrypsin factor that blocks the absorption of protein, rendering the bean indigestible; 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.

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.

just how vulnerable the lack of stable culinary traditions leaves us to the omnivore’s anxiety, and the companies and quacks who would prey on it. So every few decades some new scientific research comes along to challenge the prevailing nutritional orthodoxy; some nutrient that Americans have been happily chomping for decades is suddenly found to be lethal; another nutrient is elevated to the status of health food; the industry throws its weight behind it; and the American way of dietary life undergoes yet another revolution.

Food marketing in particular thrives on dietary instability and so tends to exacerbate it.

Indian hunters and bison lived in a symbiotic relationship, the bison feeding and clothing the hunters while the hunters, by culling the herds and forcing them to move frequently, helped keep the grasslands in good health. Predation is deeply woven into the fabric of nature,

From the point of view of the individual prey animal predation is a horror, but from the point of view of the group—and of its gene pool—it is indispensable.

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.

To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain.

Indeed, it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. 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.

What’s wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle.

Angelo worked with a small cigar clamped between his teeth; the smoke discouraged the flies and yellow jackets, which had taken an avid interest in the dead animal.

For there was the oak tree standing in the sun, light which it had transformed into the acorns that littered the ground and fed the pig that the man in the picture was turning into food. The man had done nothing to create this food chain, only stepped into a role prepared long ago for the Predator. And whatever of this Prey the man left behind the other animals here, the Scavengers, would in due course fold back into the earth, nourishing the oak so that it might in turn nourish another pig. Sun-soil-oak-pig-human: There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life on earth for a million years made visible in a single frame, one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what is.

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 of two means: saprophytically, by decomposing dead vegetable matter, and mycorrhizally, by associating with the roots of living plants.

If the special genius of plants is photosynthesis, the ability of chlorophyll to transform sunlight and water and soil minerals into carbohydrates, the special genius of fungi is the ability to break down organic molecules and minerals into simple molecules and atoms through the action of their powerful enzymes.

The network of hyphae vastly extends the effective reach and surface area of a plant’s root system, and while trees can survive without their fungal associates, they seldom thrive. It is thought that the fungi may also protect their plant hosts from bacterial and fungal diseases.

“But you must never forget the final theory, the theory of all theories,” Ben warned near the end of my morning tutorial. “We call it TPITP: The Proof Is in the Pudding.” In other words, when hunting mushrooms you should be prepared to jettison all previous theories and go with whatever seems to be working in this particular place, at this particular time. Mushrooms behave unpredictably, and theories can go only so far in pushing back their mystery.

Yet at the same time the morels are trying to escape the dying forest, they also play a role in its renewal. The slightly sulfurous, meaty odor of morels attracts flies, which lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom’s hollow stalk. Larvae emerge and feed on the flesh of the morels; birds then return to the forest to feed on the larvae, in the process dropping seeds that sprout on the forest floor. Mushrooms are hinges in nature, now turning toward death, now toward new life.

I was talking to them, cheering on their every appearance, and they were talking to me, or so it seemed. I exulted at their sudden ubiquity, which I took, weirdly, as evidence of some new connection between us. It sounds crazy, but there is something reciprocal about the transaction, the looking and the appearing, as if we were each doing our part, throwing a line of affiliation across the gulf of wildness.

For the stock I used bones from both my pig and, because I’d never heard of a pure pork stock, from a grass-fed steer. A neighbor had recently bought a quarter of a beeve that arrived with a big bag of bones she didn’t know what to do with, so I asked if I could forage them from her freezer. Similarly, I foraged from the depths of the produce bin in my refrigerator some past-due vegetables.

Funny - I appreciate the thought

For a quick lunch I’d picked up a takeaway plastic tray of sushi—Japanese fast food—and, you know, it tasted just great. So how much better could I reasonably expect this dinner—this daylong (indeed, months-long) extravaganza, this extremely slow food feast—to taste?

Really appreciate and understand this sentiment

Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we’re eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them.

Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.

It was a long day of such transformations, as one after another the raw stuffs of nature—chunks of meat, piles of wild fungi, the leaves and pods of plants, and piles of pulverized grain—took on whole new forms, many of them wondrous. Bread dough magically rose and crisped; desiccated mushrooms came back to fleshy life; meat turned brown and caramelized; indigestible beans softened and sweetened; the leaves of herbs inflected whatever they touched; and all these unprepossessing parts of things combined into what promised to be greater and more delectable wholes.

The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to then create from them a new order. We butcher, grind, chop, grate, mince, and liquefy raw ingredients, breaking down formerly living things so that we might recombine them in new, more cultivated forms. When you think about it, this is the same rhythm, once removed, that governs all eating in nature, which invariably entails the destruction of certain living things, by chewing and then digestion, in order to sustain other living things. In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: “that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.”

The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace. But as the conversation at the table unfurled like a sail amid the happy clatter of silver, tacking from stories of hunting to mother lodes of mushrooms to abalone adventures, I realized that in this particular case words of grace were unnecessary. Why? Because that’s what the meal itself had become, for me certainly, but I suspect for some of the others, too: a wordless way of saying grace.

It occurred to me that the making of this meal, by acquainting me with these particular people, landscapes, and species, had succeeded in attaching me to Northern California, its nature and its culture both, as nothing I’d done before or since. Eating’s not a bad way to get to know a place.

it had taken many hands to bring this meal to the table. The fact that just about all of those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about the food on that table could be told in the first person.

Perhaps the perfect meal is one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted.

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.