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

by Michael Pollan

All of a sudden the absence from their story of that word seemed weirdly conspicuous. As the literary critics would say, the writer seemed to be eliding the whole notion of cows and grass. Indeed, the longer I shopped in Whole Foods, the more I thought that this is a place where the skills of a literary critic might come in handy—those, and perhaps also a journalist’s.

explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is “engaging in authentic experiences” and imaginatively enacting a “return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact.” This sounds a lot like Virgilian pastoral, which also tried to have it both ways.

Indeed, were there any poetic justice in the world, the executives at Whole Foods would have long ago erected a commemorative plaque at People’s Park and a booth to give away organic fruits and vegetables. The organic movement, much like environmentalism and feminism, has deep roots in the sixties’ radicalism that briefly flourished on this site; organic is one of several tributaries of the counterculture that ended up disappearing into the American mainstream, but not before significantly altering its course.

As Belasco points out, the word “organic” had enjoyed a currency among nineteenth-century English social critics, who contrasted the social fragmentation and atomism wrought by the Industrial Revolution with the ideal of a lost organic society, one where the bonds of affection and cooperation still held. Organic stood for everything industrial was not.

Humus is the stuff in a handful of soil that gives it its blackish cast and characteristic smell. It’s hard to say exactly what humus is because it is so many things. Humus is what’s left of organic matter after it has been broken down by the billions of big and small organisms that inhabit a spoonful of earth—the bacteria, phages, fungi, and earthworms responsible for decomposition.

But providing a buffet of nutrients to plants is not the only thing humus does: It also serves as the glue that binds the minute mineral particles in soil together into airy crumbs and holds water in suspension so that rainfall remains available to plant roots instead of instantly seeping away.

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the

hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. 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.

He linked the health of the soil to the health of all the creatures that depended on it, an idea that, once upon a time before the advent of industrial agriculture, was in fact a commonplace, discussed by Plato and Thomas Jefferson,

He’s telling us we don’t need to understand how humus works or what compost does in order to make good use of it. Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don’t know—even a sense of mystery—keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets.

The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he’s put in play—that the ducks and fish are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so.

Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composted soils; 1 such plants are more vulnerable to diseases and insect pests; 2 polycultures are more productive and less prone to disease than monocultures; 3 and that in fact the health of the soil, plant, animal, human, and even nation are, as Howard claimed, connected along lines we can now begin to draw with empirical confidence. We may not be prepared to act on this knowledge, but we know that civilizations that abuse their soil eventually collapse.

Indeed, baby lettuce is one crop that may well be easier to grow organically than conventionally: Harsh chemicals can scorch young leaves, and nitrogen fertilizers render lettuces more vulnerable to insects. It seems the bugs are attracted to the free nitrogen in their leaves, and because of the more rapid growth of chemically nourished plants, insects find their leaves easier to pierce.

The better for what? question about my organic meal can of course be answered in a much less selfish way: 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. To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker’s bloodstream,

no nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written. 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.

subsidized water and electricity in California. The two-hundred-thousand-square-foot refrigerated processing plant where my salad was washed pays half as much for its electricity as it would were Earthbound not classified as a “farm enterprise.”

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

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.

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.

These intense but brief stays completely change the animals’ interaction with the grass and the soil. They eat down just about everything in the paddock, and then they move on, giving the grasses a chance to recover. Native grasses evolved to thrive under precisely such grazing patterns; indeed, they depend on them for their reproductive success. Not only do ruminants spread and fertilize seed with their manure, but their hoofprints create shady little pockets of exposed soil where water collects—ideal conditions for germinating a grass seed.

Chances are Budger has also chosen exactly which grasses to eat first, depending on whatever minerals her body craves that day; some species supply her more magnesium, others more potassium. (If she’s feeling ill she might go for the plantain, a forb whose leaves contain antibiotic compounds; grazing cattle instinctively use the diversity of the salad bar to medicate themselves.)

This productivity means Joel’s pastures will, like his woodlots, remove thousands of pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year; instead of sequestering all that carbon in trees, however, grasslands store most of it underground, in the form of soil humus.

For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road.

ALL OF WHICH begs a rather large question: Why did we ever turn away from this free lunch in favor of a biologically ruinous meal based on corn? Why in the world did Americans ever take ruminants off the grass? And how could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil fuel actually costs less than a burger produced from grass and sunlight?

a polyculture of grass, with its wide diversity of photosynthesizers exploiting every inch of land as well as every moment of growing season, captures more solar energy and therefore produces more biomass than a cornfield; also, only the kernels are harvested from a cornfield, whereas virtually all the grass grown in a pasture finds its way into the rumen.

To help dispose of the rising mountain of cheap corn farmers were now producing, the government did everything it could to help wean cattle off grass and onto corn, by subsidizing the building of feedlots (through tax breaks) and promoting a grading system based on marbling that favored corn-fed over grass-fed beef.

The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost—to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare

Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale. Everything about corn meshes smoothly with the gears of this great machine; grass doesn’t.

harder to believe that farming such a damaged landscape so intensively, rather than just letting it be, could restore it to health and yield this beauty. This is not the environmentalist’s standard prescription. But Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place by cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone.

To achieve the efficiency represented by turning cow manure into chicken eggs and producing beef without chemicals you need at least two species (cows and chickens), but actually several more as well, including the larvae in the manure and the grasses in the pasture and the bacteria in the cows’ rumens. To measure the efficiency of such a complex system you need to count not only all the products it produces (meat, chicken, eggs) but also all the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, paraciticides, and fertilizers.

A holon (from the Greek holos, or whole, and the suffix on, as in proton, suggesting a particle) is an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part. A body organ like the liver is a holon; so is an Eggmobile.

And at seventy percent you get much healthier birds and grapevines than you would at one hundred percent. That’s the beauty of stacking.” By industry standards, the turkey and grape holons are each less than 100 percent efficient; together, however, they produce more than either enterprise would yield if fully stocked, and they do so without fertilizer, weeding, or pesticide.

Yet Joel and Daniel plainly relish their work, partly because it is so varied from day to day and even hour to hour, and partly because they find it endlessly interesting. Wendell Berry has written eloquently about the intellectual work that goes into farming well, especially into solving the novel problems that inevitably crop up in a natural system as complex as a farm. You don’t see much of this sort of problem-solving in agriculture today, not when so many solutions come ready-made in plastic bottles.

“Part of the problem is, you’ve got a lot of D students left on the farm today,” Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. “The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There’s been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the farm and put them to work in Dilbert’s cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems.” This isn’t just the farmer’s problem, either. “It’s a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.”

“We’re growing carbon in the woods for the rest of the farm—not just the firewood to keep us warm in the winter, but also the woodchips that go into making our compost.” Making good compost depends on the proper ratio of carbon to nitrogen; the carbon is needed to lock down the more volatile nitrogen. It takes a lot of woodchips to compost chicken or rabbit waste. So the carbon from the woodlots feeds the fields, finding its way into the grass and, from there, into the beef. Which it turns out is not only grass fed but tree fed as well.

I said this link was “unavoidable,” but of course most of us, including most of the farmers who raise food animals, do our very best to avoid thinking about, let alone having anything directly to do with, their slaughter. “You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Joel clapped me on the back for having taken my turn at the killing cones. I told him killing chickens wasn’t something I would want to do every day. “Nobody should,” Joel said. “That’s why in the Bible the priests drew lots to determine who would conduct the ritual slaughter, and they rotated the job every month. Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it every day.”

Polyface’s customers know to come after noon on a chicken day, but there’s nothing to prevent them from showing up earlier and watching their dinner being killed—indeed, customers are welcome to watch, and occasionally one does. More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they’re buying has been humanely and cleanly processed.

Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology. It is a compelling idea. Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface’s—if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls—the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth—would simply have to stop.

The compost pile repulsed me, but what did that say? Beyond the stench in my nostrils (which, believe me, was not so easy to get beyond), the pile offered an inescapable reminder of all that eating chicken involves—the killing, the bleeding, the evisceration. And no matter how well it is masked or how far it is hidden away, this death smell—and the reality that gives rise to it—shadows the eating of any meat, industrial, organic, or whatever, is part and parcel of even this grassy pastoral food chain whose beauty had so impressed me. I wondered whether my disgust didn’t cover a certain shame I was feeling about the morning’s work. Just at the moment, I wasn’t sure I could imagine eating chicken again any time soon.

I was hearing, in other words, the same stew of food fears and food pleasures (and memories) that has driven the growth of the organic food industry over the past twenty years—that and the satisfaction many Polyface customers clearly take in spending a little time on a farm, porch chatting with the Salatins, and taking a beautiful drive in the country to get here. For some people, reconnecting with the source of their food is a powerful idea. For the farmer, these on-farm sales allow him to recapture the ninety-two cents of a consumer’s food dollar that now typically winds up in the pockets of processors, middlemen, and retailers.

don’t accept the premise. First off, those weren’t any elitists you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, 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.”

As a society we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves—about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.

Why should food, of all things, be the linchpin of that rebellion? Perhaps because food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity.

why should a nation produce its own food when others can produce it more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven Blanks of the world—and they are legion—are quick to dismiss as sentimental. I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge that farmers bring to a community; the satisfactions of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey.

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control—what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we’re going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.

“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.

The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock. The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails—when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away—we’ll still have a way to feed ourselves. It is because some of those failures are already in view that the salesroom at Polyface Farm is buzzing with activity this afternoon, and why farmer’s markets in towns and cities all across America are buzzing this afternoon, too.

One of the reasons we cook meat (besides making it tastier and easier to digest) is to civilize, or sublimate, what is at bottom a fairly brutal transaction between animals. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh of the animals that eat that grass. (It’s the carotenoids that give these egg yolks their carroty color.) That flesh will also have considerably less fat in it than the flesh of animals fed exclusively on grain—also no surprise, in light of what we know about diets high in carbohydrates. (And about exercise, something pastured animals actually get.) But all fats are not created equal—polyunsaturated fats are better for us than saturated ones, and certain unsaturated fats are better than others. As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat.