Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

I just finished Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and this rather lengthy review comes with a caveat: Reading this book will change the way you think about what you eat. Pollan pulls back the curtain on the way food is produced and consumed in America, and the level of detail is perhaps more than some people want to know. There is some gore and muck when the author delves into the Confined Animal Feed Operation (CAFO) facilities that provide a huge percentage of the meat sold and served in America. But Pollan is not Upton Sinclair, and his goal is not to expose the grisly so much as the unsustainable. The real head-scratching comes not because animals are suffering in cages—this is nothing new—but because the industrial food chain is so unnatural and unsustainable that it’s a wonder we got on this road at all.

The beginning of the road is the Iowa corn field, which seems innocuous enough until we learn that the relentless cultivation of a single crop is impossible without liberal application of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide. These elements stay with the corn as it wends its complex journey to beef cattle and literally hundreds of derived chemicals present in everything from carbonated soda to breakfast cereal. The animals fed on this corn are given their own chemical cocktails of growth hormones and antibiotics. The whole thing becomes a kind of agricultural Iron Triangle, with the genetic crop and fertilizer producers, pharmaceutical companies, and the USDA replacing the defense contractors and the Pentagon. What would Eisenhower think?

Okay, but this is all old news. Despite this unpleasantness, I’m not about to sign up with PETA or go vegan. The first shift for me in thinking about food occurred when Pollan described the results of a chemical analysis he had performed on a McDonalds combo-meal. Nearly all of the calories of the meal were derived from corn: Corn sweetener in the soda, corn-fed beef and cheese, and potatoes fried in corn oil. To me this was more like a Soylent Green nightmare than a fast-food meal—“Would you like a side of tasty corn with your corn? How ‘bout washing it all down with some refreshing corn?” Fast-food is not the exception, unfortunately: consulting the ingredients of virtually any processed food product in the grocery store reveals a depressing plurality of corn-based ingredients.

My mantra for food and dieting is “moderation in all good things” which comes from personal experience as well as religious teachings. The corn-based industrial food chain is the antithesis of this; what’s worse, this concentrated corn feast is swimming in a synthetic cocktail of industrial additives. I can see dipping my toe in, but when the majority of my meal is thus doused, I lose my appetite.

The second shift was when Pollan looked at the organic food industry. The problem with organics, he writes, is that the term is so loosely defined as to become almost meaningless. A hole cut in the wall of a massive chicken house leading to a narrow run constitutes “free range”; “organically fed” beef are still fed corn, and the controls on that corn are loose and undefined. Thus the consumer at Whole Foods is, in a way, duped into thinking the extra $2/pound he pays goes to a sustainable, humane industry.

Pollan’s solution to this is to investigate the small but growing culture of local “grass farmers” who utilize a heavily-managed, ever rotating cycle of cattle and chickens in their fields. These folks eschew the industrial corn complex, and so avoid the requisite fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics. Yet this approach has an inherent catch: while it is sustainable, it is not scalable. Until there is a major shift in the way Americans acquire their food, this kind of “grass farming” will remain a niche market.

Overall, Pollan’s book has caused me to hone my instinct for moderation. It’s easy for us to throw a couple of pounds of ground beef in the shopping cart and base three or four meals a week on it. It’s also easy to load up the cart with processed foods (on which I subsisted before I married a wonderful cook). It takes some real thought to form a more balanced diet that is light on processed food and meat. I suspect it will be an ongoing process, but well worth the effort.