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

by Michael Pollan

Ben and Anthony had a slew of these mushroom-hunting adages and I collected them over the course of the day. “Seeing is boleting” means you never see any mushrooms until someone else has demonstrated their presence by finding one. “Mushroom frustration” is what you feel when everyone around you is seeing them and you’re still blind—until, that is, you find your first, thereby breaking your “mushroom virginity.” Then there’s the “cluster fuck,” when your eyes are on and other hunters crowd you, hoping your good fortune will rub off. Cluster fucking, I was given to understand, was bad manners. And then there was the “screen saver”—the fact that after several hours interrogating the ground for little brown dunce caps, their images will be burned on your retinas. “You’ll see. When you get into bed tonight,” Ben said, “you’ll shut your eyes and there they’ll be again—wall-to-wall morels.”

Mycologists I talked to later confirmed Anthony’s hunch. The current thinking is that the morels found in pine forests are a mycorrhizal species for whom the death of their pine associates represents a crisis: Suddenly there are no more roots supplying them with food. So the fungus fruits, sending up morels to release trillions of spores that the wind will loft far from this blasted forest. In effect, the morels fruit in order to escape the burn, dispatching their genes to colonize new pine lands before the organism starves to death. Humans don’t figure in their plans, though it may be that animals like us that eat morels do help them disperse their spores as we move them around on the way to our plates. Does hunting morels hurt the organism? Probably no more than picking apples hurts the tree, and because the morels do such a good job of hiding from us, there will always be plenty that escape our notice, each capable of releasing literally billions of spores.

I had no idea where I was or where I was going: I was following the trail of mushrooms like a desultory train of thought, heedless of anything else. Including, as it turned out, property lines: I ran into a forester who told me I was on his company’s land. But that was okay with him, just so long as I promised to tell people that logging companies aren’t always evil. Logging companies aren’t always evil.

No, in reality the day was a blizzard of harried labors, missing ingredients, unscheduled spills and dropped pots, unscheduled trips to the store, unscheduled pangs of doubt, and throes of second-guessing.

In The Hungry Soul Leon Kass calls this the great paradox of eating: “that to preserve their life and form living things necessarily destroy life and form.” If there is any shame in that destruction, only we humans seem to feel it, and then only on occasion.

Within minutes Angelo appeared at my side, with an offer of help; I think he was a little worried I was in over my head. While we waited for the pasta water to come to a boil, I asked him to taste the morels. “It’s good, but maybe it needs a little more butter.” I handed him a stick and he dropped the whole thing in the pan. (So that’s how the professionals do it!)

Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers—outliers of a real life. Or better yet, preserve them but purely as ritual, for the lessons they have to teach us about the different uses to which the world can be put. Going to McDonald’s would be something that happens once a year, a kind of Thanksgiving in reverse, and so would a meal like mine, as slow and storied as the Passover seder.

Consider for example our French fries. The first of the quote-unquote farms I visited consisted of ten thousand acres in the Magic Valley of Idaho, divided into several dozen 135-acre crop circles—those green coins you see pressed into the dun-colored desert as you cross the American West at 35,000 feet. Each circle resembled the green face of a tremendous clock with a slowly rotating second hand. That sweeping second hand was the irrigation pivot, a perforated pipe more than a thousand feet long that delivered a steady rain of water, fertilizer, and pesticide to the emerald-green potato plants. The whole farm was managed from a bank of computers in a cinderblock control room. From the control room, the farmer could adjust the chemicals and water each circle received without ever stepping outside.

one of the chemicals sprayed from the sweeping second hand was a particularly nasty pesticide called Monitor. This chemical is so toxic to the brain that the farmer stayed out of his fields for four or five days after spraying it. If an irrigation pivot broke down during that period, the farmer would sooner let the entire 135-acre field of potatoes wither and die than send a field man out to fix it. Naturally I was curious to learn why a farmer would use such a toxic chemical and his answer, I gradually came to see, was like a thread that, when pulled, began to unravel the whole complicated fabric of the American food system. I spray Monitor to control aphids. What’s wrong with aphids? Aphids are a vector for a viral disease called “net necrosis.” You know those brown lines or spots you occasionally see in a French fry? That’s net necrosis. What’s so terrible about a few brown spots? Nothing. It’s strictly a cosmetic defect, but McDonald’s will reject any potatoes that have it. And McDonald’s buys 7 percent of the entire U.S. potato crop, so its standard becomes the industry’s standard. Is there any other way to control net necrosis? Sure. Grow a different kind of potato—net necrosis is really only a problem in Russet Burbanks. So . . . ? McDonald’s will only buy Russets. Why’s that? Because they give you the longest spud, and we Americans like a really long French fry.

The warehouse was easily the size of an airplane hangar, and there in the middle of it rose a dusty brown pyramid of Russet Burbank potatoes as big as, well, one of the pyramids. It was a most impressive pile of potatoes. When I asked the farmer why he stored his potatoes here rather than take them directly to market, he explained that, at harvest, the spuds are so full of systemic pesticides that they can’t be eaten right away. You have to wait six weeks for them to off-gas all the chemicals. Sort of like a new carpet. Only then can they be safely turned into French fries.

I had to drive on for three more miles before the source of the odor became clear: when the golden California hills filling my windshield all at once turned completely black. I-5 was passing through the Harris Ranch, the big cattle feedlot in Coalinga, and the first I’d ever laid eyes on. Only later did I learn that the ranch’s local nickname is Cowschwitz.

Between these two farms, I now knew exactly where a McDonald’s Happy Meal ultimately comes from, and this was a place—a new kind of landscape—that not many Americans had ever visited, or had the slightest idea even existed. The idea of writing a book that would trace a small number of meals back to their source—a book of food detective stories, basically—began to take shape, and the simple question of where our food comes from began to obsess me.