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

by Michael Pollan

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.

only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around. At least in terms of the fuel burned to get it from the farm to my table, there’s little reason to think my Cascadian Farm TV dinner or Earthbound Farm spring mix salad is any more sustainable than a conventional TV dinner or salad would have been.

“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.

“The important thing to know about any grass is that its growth follows a sigmoid, or S, curve,” Joel explained. He grabbed my pen and notebook and began drawing a graph, based on one that appears in Voisin’s book. “This vertical axis here is the height of our grass plant, okay? And the horizontal axis is time: the number of days since this paddock was last grazed.” He started tracing a big S on the page, beginning in the lower left-hand corner where the two axes met. “See, the growth starts out real slow like this, but then after a few days it begins to zoom. That’s called ‘the blaze of growth,’ when the grass has recovered from the first bite, rebuilt its reserves and root mass, and really taken off. But after a while”—the curve leveled out at around day fourteen or so—“it slows down again, as the grass gets ready to flower and seed. It’s entering its period of senescence, when the grass begins to lignify [get woody] and becomes less palatable to the cow. “What you want to do is graze a pasture right at this point here”—he tapped my pad sharply—“at the very top of the blaze of growth. But what you never, ever want to do is violate the law of the second bite. You can’t let your cows take a second bite of a grass before it has had a chance to fully recover.”

The moment Budger shears the clump of grass, she sets into motion a sequence of events that will confer a measurable benefit on this square foot of pasture. The shorn grass plant, endeavoring to restore the rough balance between its roots and leaves, will proceed to shed as much root mass as it’s just lost in leaf mass. When the discarded roots die, the soil’s resident population of bacteria, fungi, and earthworms will get to work breaking them down into rich brown humus. What had been the grass plant’s root runs will become channels through which worms, air, and rainwater will move through the earth, stimulating the process by which new topsoil is formed.

and Budger’s bite subtly alters the composition of this community. The shearing of the tallest grasses exposes the pasture’s shorter plants to sunlight, stimulating their growth. This is why a well-grazed pasture will see its population of ground-hugging clovers increase, a boon to grasses and grazers alike. These legumes fix nitrogen in the soil, fertilizing the neighboring grasses from below while supplying nitrogen to the grazers above; the bacteria living in the animal’s rumen will use the nitrogen in these clover leaves to construct new molecules of protein.

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. In fact, grassing over that portion of the world’s cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably. 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. We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.

It’s true that prodigious amounts of food energy are wasted every time an animal eats another animal—nine calories for every one we consume. But if all that energy has been drawn from the boundless storehouse of the sun, as in the case of eating meat off this pasture, that meal comes as close to a free lunch as we can hope to get.

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 of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. If not for this sort of blind-man’s accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does.

“So instead of building bankruptcy tubes”—farmer lingo for silos—“he

Joel likes to quote from an old agricultural textbook he dug out of the stacks at Virginia Tech many years ago. The book, which was published in 1941 by a Cornell Ag professor, offers a stark conclusion that, depending on your point of view, will sound either hopelessly quaint or arresting in its gnomic wisdom: “Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die.”

“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.”

50 beeves (representing 25,000 pounds of beef)

Plus, a grass plant burns up fifteen percent of its calories just defying gravity, so if you can stop it from being wind whipped, you greatly reduce the energy it uses keeping its photovoltaic array pointed toward the sun.

“You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

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. After all, it isn’t only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones (now owned by more than half the U. S. population, children included) or television, which close to 90 percent of all U.S. households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?

I realized with a bit of a jolt that his pastoral, or agrarian, outlook doesn’t adequately deal with the fact that so many of us now live in big cities far removed from the places where our food is grown and from opportunities for relationship marketing. When I asked how a place like New York City fit into his vision of a local food economy he startled me with his answer: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?”

When I told him what I’d been up to on the farm all week he cautioned me that “trying to follow Joel around will give you carpool tunnels and oldtimer’s disease.”

Joel had told me Bev is a born salesman (“He could sell a hat rack to a moose”),

The iron law of competitive advantage dictates that if another country can grow something more efficiently—whether because its land or labor is cheaper or its environmental laws more lax—we will no longer grow it here. What’s more, under the global economic dispensation, this is an outcome to be wished for, since it will free our land for more productive uses—more houses, say. Since land in the United States is relatively expensive, and our tolerance for agricultural pollution and animal cruelty is wearing thin, in the future all our food may come from elsewhere. This argument has been made by, among others, economist Steven Blank, in a book rather bloodlessly titled The End of Agriculture in the American Portfolio.

“We don’t have to beat them,” Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse—we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

“An alternative food system is rising up on the margins,” Joel continued. “One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren’t as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?”

Golden Bantam, the corn in question, is an heirloom variety introduced in 1902, long before the hybridizers figured out how to amp up the sweetness in sweet corn. This momentous change in the genetics of our corn is an artifact of an industrial food chain, which demands that vegetables be able to endure a cross-country road trip after picking so that they might be available everywhere the year round. This was a particular problem for corn, the sugars of which begin turning to starch the moment it is picked. So in the early sixties the breeders figured out a way to breed in extra copies of the genes responsible for producing sugars. But something was lost in the translation from local to cosmopolitan corn: The kernels lost much of their creaminess, and the specific taste of corn was overwhelmed by a generic, one-dimensional sweetness.

As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat. This is no accident. Taking the long view of human nutrition, we evolved to eat the sort of foods available to hunter-gatherers, most of whose genes we’ve inherited and whose bodies we still (more or less) inhabit. Humans have had less than ten thousand years—an evolutionary blink—to accustom our bodies to agricultural food, and as far as our bodies are concerned, industrial agricultural food—a diet based largely on a small handful of staple grains, like corn—is still a biological novelty.

One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In fact, there’s research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts.) 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.) 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.

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.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with the predictable result that their omega-3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) 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.

The browning of the chicken skin and the corn looked similar but in fact it owed to completely different chemical reactions, reactions that were contributing to their flavors and smells. The corn was caramelizing, as its sugars broke apart under the heat and formed into hundreds of more complicated aromatic compounds, giving a smoky dimension to the corny sweetness. Meanwhile, the chicken skin was undergoing what chemists called the Maillard reaction, in which carbohydrates in the chicken react in dry heat with certain amino acids to create an even larger and more complicated set of compounds that, because they include atoms of sulfur and nitrogen, give a richer, meatier aroma and taste to the meat than it would otherwise possess.

Soufflé, “to blow,” comes from the Latin word for breath, of course, in recognition of the air that a soufflé mostly is. But soufflé has a spiritual sense, too, as in the breath of life (in English the word “spirit” comes from breath), which seems fitting, for isn’t the soufflé as close as cookery ever comes to elevating matter into spirit?

All winter long her beach plum jelly summoned memories of summer vacation: August on toast.

Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren’t). Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

What time of year do the mushrooms mushroom around here, and where?

The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet. 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.

A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose (the only type of energy the brain can use), or at least it once did, when sources of sugar were few and far between. (The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.

Pregnant women are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, probably an adaptation to protect the developing fetus against even the mild plant toxins found in foods like broccoli.

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, as the etymology of the word indicates. (It comes from the Middle French verb desgouster, to taste.)

(Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn’t disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you’d be willing to share.)

In this sense learning to cook cassava roots or disseminate the hard-won knowledge of safe mushrooms is not all that different from recruiting rumenal bacteria to nourish oneself. The cow depends on the ingenious adaptation of the rumen to turn an exclusive diet of grasses into a balanced meal; we depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to cook cassava or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information. The same process of natural selection came up with both strategies; one just happens to rely on cognition, the other goes with the gut.

Anthropologists argue over whether all these rules make biological sense—some, like the kosher rules, are probably designed more to enforce group identity than to protect health.

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. As Rozin writes, “[C]uisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food.” Often when one culture imports another’s food species without importing the associated cuisine, and its embodied wisdom, they make themselves sick.

The French eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: They eat small portions and don’t go back for seconds; they don’t snack; they seldom eat alone; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food successfully negotiates the omnivore’s dilemma, allowing the French to enjoy their meals without ruining their health.

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.

nowadays it seems we either look away or become vegetarians.

The great advantage of being a “reasonable creature,” Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.

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.

I’d violated the Chekhovian dramatic rule: Having introduced a loaded gun in Act One, the curtain can’t come down until it is fired.

Playing at self-reliance takes different forms in different people, and you can probably tell a lot about a person by his choice of atavism: whether he’s drawn to the patient and solitary attentiveness of fishing, the strict mathematical syntax of building, the emotional drama of the hunt, or the mostly comic dialogue with other species that unfolds in the garden. Most of us have a pretty good idea which of these jobs we’d try for if somehow a time machine were to plunk us down in the Pleistocene or Neolithic.

The talent of fungi for decomposing and recycling organic matter is what makes them indispensable, not only to trees but to all life on earth. If the soil is the earth’s stomach, fungi supply its digestive enzymes—literally. Without fungi to break things down, the earth would long ago have suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter created by plants; the dead would pile up without end, the carbon cycle would cease to function, and living things would run out of things to eat. We tend to train our attention and science on life and growth, but of course death and decomposition are no less important to nature’s operations, and the fungi are the undisputed rulers of this realm.

The dose makes the poison, as they say, and the same mushroom toxins that can kill can also, in smaller doses, produce astonishing mental effects, ranging from the ecstatic to the horrific.

The psilocybes can alter the texture of human consciousness and inspire visions;

that the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms by the higher primates spurred the rapid evolution of the human brain (Terence McKenna);