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

by Michael Pollan

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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?

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. More grass for the cows. That’s the efficiency of a hedgerow surrounding a small field, something every farmer used to understand before ‘fencerow to fencerow’ became USDA mantra.”

Then there is the water-holding capacity of trees, he explained, which on a north slope literally pumps water uphill. Next was all the ways a forest multiples a farm’s biodiversity. More birds on a farm mean fewer insects, but most birds won’t venture more than a couple hundred yards from the safety of cover. Like many species, their preferred habitat is the edge between forest and field. The biodiversity of the forest edge also helps control predators. As long as the weasels and coyotes have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, they’re less likely to venture out and prey on the chickens.

These woods represented a whole other order of complexity that I had failed to take into account. I realized that Joel didn’t look at this land the same way I did, or had before this afternoon: as a hundred acres of productive grassland patchworked into four hundred and fifty acres of unproductive forest. It was all of a biological piece, the trees and the grasses and the animals, the wild and the domestic, all part of a single ecological system. By any conventional accounting, the forests here represented a waste of land that could be put to productive use. But if Joel were to cut down the trees to graze more cattle, as any conventional accounting would recommend, the system would no longer be quite as whole or as healthy as it is. You can’t just do one thing.

So I cut each of the two birds into eight pieces and immersed them in a bath consisting of water, kosher salt, sugar, a bay leaf, a splash of soy sauce, a garlic clove, and a small handful of peppercorns and coriander seeds. My plan was to slow roast the chicken pieces on a wood fire, and brining—which causes meat to absorb moisture and breaks down the proteins that can toughen it on the grill—would keep the chicken from drying out.

…nature does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a beast cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous to do so, and a man deviates from it often to his detriment. Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a basin filled with the best meats, and a cat upon heaps of fruits or grain, although each could very well nourish itself on the food it disdains if it made up its mind to try some. Thus dissolute men abandon themselves to the excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind depraves the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent. Guided by no natural instinct, the prodigious and open-ended

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“Without virtue” to govern his appetites, Aristotle wrote, man of all the animals “is most unholy and savage, and worst in regard to sex and eating.” Paul Rozin has suggested, only partly in jest, that Freud would have done well to build his psychology around our appetite for food