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

by Michael Pollan

I realized that the straightforward question “What should I eat?” could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: “What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?” Not very long ago an eater didn’t need a journalist to answer these questions.

not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress.

As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”

This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process (Carl Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber’s idea) for fixing nitrogen is the most important invention of the twentieth century.

Haber’s story embodies the paradoxes of science: the double edge to our manipulations of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but the same knowledge. Haber brought a vital new source of fertility and an awful new weapon into the world; as his biographer wrote, “[I]t’s the same science and the same man doing both.” Yet this dualism dividing the benefactor of agriculture from the chemical weapons maker is far too pat, for even Haber’s benefaction has proven decidedly to be a mixed blessing.

On the day in the 1950s that George Naylor’s father spread his first load of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the ecology of his farm underwent a quiet revolution. What had been a local, sun-driven cycle of fertility, in which the legumes fed the corn which fed the livestock which in turn (with their manure) fed the corn, was now broken. Now he could plant corn every year and on as much of his acreage as he chose, since he had no need for the legumes or the animal manure. He could buy fertility in a bag, fertility that had originally been produced a billion years ago halfway around the world.

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.

corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn.

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.

But what happens to the one hundred pounds of synthetic nitrogen that Naylor’s corn plants don’t take up? Some of it evaporates into the air, where it acidifies the rain and contributes to global warming. (Ammonium nitrate is transformed into nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas.)

The nitrates in the water convert to nitrite, which binds to hemoglobin, compromising the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain. So I guess I was wrong to suggest we don’t sip fossil fuels directly; sometimes we do.

More than half of the world’s supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made.

These days the price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar beneath the true cost of growing it, a boon for everyone but the corn farmer.

But in Iowa, bragging rights go to the man with the biggest yield, even if it’s bankrupting him.

Thoreau’s line: “Men have become

the tools of their tools.”

In corn’s case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can.

these federal payments account for nearly half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer and represent roughly a quarter of the $19 billion U.S. taxpayers spend each year on payments to farmers.

Such is the protean, paradoxical nature of the corn in that pile that getting rid of it could contribute to obesity and to hunger both.

Enlisting the cow in this undertaking has required particularly heroic efforts, since the cow is by nature not a corn eater. But Nature abhors a surplus, and the corn must be consumed. Enter the corn-fed American steer.

it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day.

when animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist; what you have instead is a closed ecological loop—what in retrospect you might call a solution.

Gar Precision’s only contact with 9534 came by way of a fifteen-dollar mail-order straw of his semen.

Apart from the trauma of the Saturday in April when he was branded and castrated, one could imagine 534 looking back on those six months as the good old days. It might be foolish for us to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say that a calf grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been supremely well suited by evolution to do. Oddly enough, though, eating grass is something that after October my steer will never have the opportunity to do again.

What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

it has succeeded in making beef everyday fare for millions of people for whom it once represented a luxury. And yet the further you follow it, the more likely you are to begin wondering if that rational logic might not also be completely mad.

The only reason contemporary animal cities aren’t as plague-ridden or pestilential as their medieval human counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.

Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass.

(Modern-day hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don’t have our rates of heart disease.)

(Or perhaps from Argentina, where excellent steaks are produced on nothing but grass.)

my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he’s heading to in June. (“Fat is fat,” the feedlot manager shrugged, when I raised an eyebrow.)

how surprised I’d been to learn cattle were eating cattle,

The species is evolving, in other words, to help absorb the excess biomass coming off America’s cornfields.

CAFOs like Poky transform what at the proper scale would be a precious source of fertility—cow manure—into toxic waste.

thirty-five gallons of oil—nearly a barrel.

Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic

act of not knowing or, now, forgetting.

And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

we are, or have evolved into, that supremely adapted creature: the eater of processed food.

cereals group generates higher profits for General Mills than any other division.

The executive patiently explained that selling

unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods will always be a fool’s game, since the price of agricultural commodities tends to fall over time, whether they’re organic or not. More food coming off the farm leads to either falling profits—or more processing.

The news of TreeTop’s breakthrough came in a recent Food Technology trend story titled “Getting More Fruits and Vegetables into Food.” I had thought fruits and vegetables were already foods, and so didn’t need to be gotten into them, but I guess that just shows I’m stuck in the food past.

Natural ingredients, the company pointed out rather scarily, are a “wild mixture of substances created by plants and animals for completely non-food purposes—their survival and reproduction.” These dubious substances “came to be consumed by humans at their own risk.” Now, thanks to the ingenuity

(“Natural raspberry flavor” doesn’t mean the flavor came from a raspberry; it may well have been derived from corn, just not from something synthetic.)

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.

The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children.

the number of people suffering from overnutrition—a billion—had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition—800 million.

When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat.