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

by Michael Pollan

Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals. Pastured animals also contain conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatty acid that some recent studies indicate may help reduce weight and prevent cancer, and which is absent from feedlot animals.

Researchers report that pregnant women who receive supplements of omega-3s give birth to babies with higher IQs; children with diets low in omega-3s exhibit more behavioral and learning problems at school; and puppies eating diets high in omega-3s prove easier to train. (All these claims come from papers presented at a 2004 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids.)

Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-inflammatory.)

Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat—long associated with cardiovascular disease—may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal’s diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.)

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. Foraging for wild plants and animals is, after all, the way the human species has fed itself for 99 percent of its time on earth; this is precisely the food chain natural selection designed us for.

“We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,” he wrote in Walden. “He is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.” That pitiable, uneducated boy was me.

Disgust turns out to be another valuable tool for negotiating the omnivore’s dilemma. Though the emotion has long since attached itself to a great many objects having nothing to do with food, food is where and why it began,

Rozin, who has written or coauthored several fascinating articles about disgust, defines it as the fear of incorporating offending substances into one’s body. Much of what people deem disgusting is culturally determined, but there are certain things that apparently disgust us all,

Humans also learned to overcome plant defenses by cooking or otherwise processing foods to remove their bitter toxins. Native Americans, for example, figured out that if they ground, soaked, and roasted acorns they could unlock the rich source of nutrients in the bitter nuts. Humans also discovered that the roots of the cassava, which effectively defends itself against most eaters by producing cyanide, could be made edible by cooking. By learning to cook cassava humans unlocked a fabulously rich source of carbohydrate energy, one that, just as important, they had all to themselves,

the human omnivore entered a new kind of ecological niche in nature, one that some anthropologists have labeled “the cognitive niche.”

Since “everything that is edible is at the mercy of his vast appetite,” Brillat-Savarin writes, “the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection in man,” making “man the only gourmand in the whole of nature.” Taste in this more cultivated sense brings people together, not only in small groups at the table but as communities. For a community’s food preferences—the strikingly short list of foods and preparations it regards as good to eat and think—represent one of the strongest social glues we have. Historically, national cuisines have been remarkably stable, and resistant to change, which is why the immigrant’s refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation.

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.

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.

Guided by no natural instinct, the prodigious and open-ended human appetite is liable to get us into all sorts of trouble, well beyond the stomachache. For if nature is silent what’s to stop the human omnivore from eating anything—including, most alarmingly, other human omnivores? A potential for savagery lurks in a creature capable of eating anything.

Rozin doesn’t say as much, but all the customs and rules culture has devised to mediate the clash of human appetite and society probably bring greater comfort to us as eaters than as sexual beings. Freud and others lay the blame for many of our sexual neuroses at the door of an overly repressive culture, but that doesn’t appear to be the principal culprit in our neurotic eating. To the contrary, it seems as though our eating tends to grow more tortured as our culture’s power to manage our relationship to food weakens.

One article in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 almost single-handedly set off the recent spasm of carbophobia in America. But the basic pattern was fixed decades earlier, and suggests 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.

We Americans are amazed to learn that some of the cultures that set their culinary course by the lights of habit and pleasure rather than nutritional science and marketing are actually healthier than we are—that is, suffer a lower incidence of diet-related health troubles.

Several years ago, in a book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, sociologist Daniel Bell called attention to the tendency of capitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, to erode the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization. The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest such casualty of capitalism.

And yet most of the animals we eat lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham.

Bentham is writing in 1789, after the French had freed their black slaves and granted them fundamental rights, but before the British or Americans had acted. “The day may come,” Bentham wrote, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights.” Bentham then asks what characteristics entitle any being to moral consideration. “Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse?” Bentham asks. “But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversational animal, than an infant.” “The question is not Can they reason? Or Can they talk? But Can they suffer?”

Many scientists and animal rights philosophers (Peter Singer included) draw the line of sentience at a point just north of scallop. No one knows for absolute certain if this is right, but I’m joining many dedicated animal people in giving myself the benefit of the doubt.

granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.)

The offending argument, which does not seem unreasonable to me, is that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we can draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals obviously experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a handful of animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

Which brings us—reluctantly, necessarily—to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions promptly turn to dust. It’s not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, indeed where everything we’ve learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply…put aside. To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else.

this is what can happen to you when…you look. And what you see when you look is the cruelty—and the blindness to cruelty—required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen.

A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism—the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society.

To many animal people even Polyface Farm is a “death camp”—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is. In the same way we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and during my week on the farm I saw it in abundance.

For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character—its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle talked about each creature’s “characteristic form of life.” At least for the domestic animal (the wild animal is a different case) the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn’t exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans—apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where the animal rightists betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature. 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.

Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and—yes—their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the new relationship: The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild (natural selection tends to dispense with unneeded traits) and the humans traded their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled lives of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as the ability to digest lactose as adults.)

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.) Nor does the loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as means rather than ends, yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a means to human ends. Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. (Which might explain the contempt many animal people display toward domesticated species.) To

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.

In a sense, the “good life” for deer, and even their creaturely character, which has been forged in the crucible of predation, depends on the existence of the wolf. In a similar way chickens depend for their well-being on the existence of their human predators. Not the individual chicken, perhaps, but Chicken—the species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the species would be to grant chickens a right to life.

Ancient man regarded animals much more as a modern ecologist would than an animal philosopher—as a species, that is, rather than a collection of individuals. In the ancient view “they were mortal and immortal,” John Berger writes in “Looking at Animals.” “An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox.” Which, when you think about it, is probably pretty much how any species in nature regards another.

Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature? Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat?

just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature? Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we’ve decided it should be in human society? We simply may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights seem to suit us and serve our purposes today.

To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development), and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged. “In

That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility—in the form of manures—would be in short supply. 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.

Native Americans and other hunter-gatherers give thanks to the animal for giving up its life so the eater might live. The practice sounds a little like saying grace, a ceremony hardly anyone bothers with anymore. In biblical times the rules governing ritual slaughter stipulated a rotation, so that no individual would have to kill animals every day, lest he become dulled to the gravity of the act.

I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the ground—a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture of respect. So it is for Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, who writes in his Meditations on Hunting that “the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them.” Please.