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

by Michael Pollan

Since 1985, an American’s annual consumption of HFCS has gone from forty-five pounds to sixty-six pounds.

we’re eating and drinking all that high-fructose corn syrup on top of the sugars we were already consuming.

since 1985 our consumption of all added sugars—cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever—has climbed from 128 pounds to 158 pounds per person.

So began the transformation of the svelte eight-ounce Coke bottle into the chubby twenty-ouncer dispensed by most soda machines today.

people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise.

Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.

Type II diabetes and obesity are exactly what you would expect to see in a mammal whose environment has overwhelmed its metabolism with energy-dense foods.

Why is there so little education on this? It feels like I’ve heard about Diabetes here and there but there should be mandated nutrition classes in school, alongside math and English.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

(For most American children today, it is no longer such a treat: One in three of them eat fast food every single day.)

“All flesh is grass.”

It’s only in our own time, after we began raising our food animals on grain in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (following the dubious new equation, All flesh is corn), that our ancient engagement with grass could be overlooked.

NAYLOR FARM POLYFACE FARM Industrial Pastoral Annual species Perennial species Monoculture Polyculture Fossil energy Solar energy Global market Local market Specialized Diversified Mechanical Biological

Imported fertility Local fertility Myriad inputs Chicken feed

J. I. Rodale. Sir Albert Howard. Aldo Leopold. Wes Jackson. Wendell Berry. Louis Bromfield. The classic texts of organic agriculture and American agrarianism.

“Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians—we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians ever wanted—to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn’t care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can’t bear an opt-out option. We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.” Whew…

mellifluous

farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.

By now we may know better than to believe this too simple story, but not much better, and the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.

That’s because Whole Foods in recent years has adopted the grocery industry’s standard regional distribution system, which makes supporting small farms impractical.

Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. In the case of artificial manures—

Howard put it this way: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Howard and his allies were convinced that “history will condemn [chemical fertilizer] as one of the greatest misfortunes to have befallen agriculture and mankind.”

Some of its organic certifiers have complained that “access to pasture” is so vague as to be meaningless—and therefore unenforceable. It’s hard to argue with them.

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy

for every calorie of food.

“We may have to give up on the word ‘organic,’ leave it to the Gene Kahns of the world. To be honest, I’m not sure I want that association,

Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good: They get a few more square inches of living space per bird (though it was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly), and because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth, they get to live a few days longer. Though under the circumstances it’s not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon.

Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option.

The space that has been provided to her for that purpose is, I realized, not unlike the typical American front lawn it resembles—it’s a kind of ritual space, intended not so much for the use of the local residents as a symbolic offering to the larger community.

Asparagus is one of a dwindling number

of foods still firmly linked in our minds to the seasonal calendar.

atrazine (as European governments have done),

But in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential.

Now it’s the polyphenols in plants that we’re learning play a critical role in keeping us healthy. (And which might explain why diets heavy in processed food fortified with vitamins still aren’t as nutritious as fresh foods.)

The Davis authors hypothesize that plants being defended by man-made pesticides don’t need to work as hard to make their own polyphenol pesticides. Coddled by us and our chemicals, the plants see no reason to invest their resources in mounting a strong defense.

the radically simplified soils in which chemically fertilized plants grow don’t supply all the raw ingredients needed to synthesize these compounds, leaving the plants more vulnerable to attack,

Is it better for the environment? Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public health? For the taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an (almost) unqualified yes.

If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic

terms, like a real bargain.

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do).

All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, according to David Pimentel, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.

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. And so, today, the organic food industry finds itself in a most unexpected, uncomfortable, and, yes, unsustainable position: floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.

“There are only two efficient ways to do this,” he wrote in his column. “One is for you to walk out in your garden, pull a carrot and eat it. This is a direct transfer of solar energy to human energy. The second most efficient way is for you to send an animal out to gather this free solar food and then you eat the animal.

‘Ranching is a very simple business. The really hard part is keeping it simple.’”

The reason environmentalists in the western United States take such a dim view of grazing is that most ranchers practice continuous grazing, degrading the land by flouting the law of the second bite.

Joel calls this optimal grazing rhythm “pulsing the pastures” and says that at Polyface it has boosted the number of cow days to as much as four hundred per acre;

So is this sort of low-tech pastoralism simply a throwback to preindustrial agriculture? Salatin adamantly begged to differ: “It might not look that way, but this is all information-age stuff we’re doing here. Polyface Farm is a postindustrial enterprise. You’ll see.”

The mob-and-move routine also helps to keep the ruminants healthy. “Short-duration stays allow the animals to follow their instinct to seek fresh ground that hasn’t been fouled by their own droppings, which are incubators for parasites.”

The difference between these two bovine dining scenes could not have been starker. The single most obvious difference was that these cows were harvesting their own feed instead of waiting for a dump truck to deliver a total mixed ration of corn that had been grown hundreds of miles away and then blended by animal nutritionists with urea, antibiotics, minerals, and the fat of other cattle in a feedlot laboratory. Here we’d brought the cattle to the food rather than the other way around, and at the end of their meal there’d be nothing left for us to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good.