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

by Michael Pollan

In the case of laboratory testing of animals, all but the most radical animal people are willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That’s because the unique qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain: Human pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal’s because we understand what death is in a way that they don’t. So the argument around animal testing is in the details: Is that particular animal experiment really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it’s not.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat to survive, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal?

The concept of a food system helps to connect all the far-flung dots behind our meals, in this case between the unconscious preferences of the consumer for a nice long fry with the purchasing policies of big food companies with the practices of farmers working the land. A monoculture of preference in the society dictates a monoculture of potatoes in the field, which in turn dictates the use of a poison like Monitor.

When I wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics had already helped pique the curiosity of Americans about the system that fed them. Yet in general all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves. (Or as one of my mentors once explained, “Journalists are at best short-term visionaries. Any more than that, no one would read them.”)

Some remarkable changes have taken place in the food and farming landscape since this book was published in 2006. Consider this handful of statistics, each in its own way an artifact of the “where-does-my-food-come-from” question: There are now more than eight thousand farmers markets in America, an increase of 180 percent since 2006. More than four thousand school districts now have farm-to-school programs, a 430 percent increase since 2006, and the percentage of elementary school with gardens has doubled, to 26 percent. During that period sales of soda have plummeted, falling 14 percent between 2004 and 2014. The food industry is rushing to reformulate hundreds of products to remove high fructose corn syrup and other processed-food ingredients that consumers have made clear they will no longer tolerate. Sales of organic food have more than doubled since 2006, from $16.7 billion in 2006 to more than $40 billion today. The kind of grass-finished beef and pastured eggs that Joel Salatin produces at Polyface Farm were so exotic in 2006 that national sales figures for them didn’t exist; now, you can find these foods in many supermarkets, and both categories are growing by double digit percentages each year. (Carl’s Junior, the fast food chain, introduced a grass-fed hamburger in 2014.) From California to Georgia, there are now hundreds of farms modeled on Polyface’s intricate choreography of animals. And Joel Salatin himself has become an international celebrity farmer, a soc...