Book Review

By Lynne Pledger

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press, 2006

This book is by one of our favorite authors who is also a long-time friend of the Bakewell Repro Center. As fans of Michael Pollan know, he brings a fresh perspective to the often complex topic of what we eat. Below we present our own book review, by Lynne Pledger.

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma could be a revolution-maker. In one engaging, comprehensive volume, Pollan reveals more than any of us knew about the way industrial agriculture, backed by government policies, erodes our health, environment, and quality of life. But he also addresses alternatives — notably the grass-fed meat movement — leaving us with hope that the situation can be righted

In light of the abundance of food, varieties of food and conflicting advice about food in our culture, the book asks, What should we eat? and then follows with a critical companion question, What are we eating now?

In a disarmingly earnest quest, Pollan leads us up and down the food chain to consider all the implications — health, environmental, ethical — of food he consumes as we read. These meals include take-out from McDonald's, a chicken dinner from Joel Salatin’s family farm, and a “personal” meal that the author hunts, gathers, grows and prepares himself. In the hands of a lesser writer -- or less thoughtful human being — this documentation might be a tedious tome or an evangelical diatribe. But Pollan is provocative, moving, and humorous, serving up fresh insight with every page.

Appropriately, the book starts with a beleaguered American farmer, George Naylor, who we join in his Iowa cornfield where he is planting yet another subsidized crop of that already over-abundant, cheap commodity fertilized by fossil fuels. Following the trail of kernels from cornfield to grain elevator, and then on to a feedlot and a maze of food processing, we end up at a McDonald's, where Pollan and his wife and son purchase three meals to go.

Pollan takes his research down to the level of the atom, utilizing a laboratory spectrometer that identifies the corn atoms, to find out how much of the carbon in McDonald’s various offerings comes from corn. The results: soda , 100% (high fructose corn syrup), milk shake, 78%, salad dressing, 65%, chicken nuggets, 56%, cheeseburger, 52%, French fries, 23%. Even those of us who eschew McDonalds are likely to be corn-fed without realizing it. Corn-derived substances are in many processed foods. And a great deal of corn passes through a steer on its way to being beef at the supermarket or steak house.

A central point is that cattle are ruminants, and ruminants have evolved to eat grass, not corn, which makes them sick, requiring medication to live long enough to be slaughtered. For those who think feedlots are an advance of modern agriculture, Pollan offers this chilling analogy:

“A feedlot is very much a premodern city …teeming and filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads, and choking air rendered visible by dust…. As in fourteenth-century London, say, the workings of the metropolitan digestion remain vividly on display, the foodstuffs coming in, the streams of waste going out. The crowding into tight quarters of recent arrivals from all over, together with the lack of sanitation has always been a recipe for disease. The only reason contemporary animal cities aren’t as plague-ridden or pestilential as their medieval human counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.”

In Chapter 9, Big Organic, Pollan buys an organic TV dinner at Whole Foods. The meal turns out to be,

“… a highly industrialized organic product, involving a choreography of thirty-one ingredients assembled from far-flung farms, laboratories, and processing plants scattered over a half-dozen states and two countries, and containing such mysteries of modern food technology as high-oleic safflower oil, guar and zanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, and ‘natural grill flavor’… Several of these ingredients are synthetic additives permitted under federal organic rules. So much for ‘whole’ foods.”

He also purchases a “free-range” chicken and subsequently investigates its provenance:

“The last stop on my tour of California industrial organic farming took me to Petuluma, where I tried without success to find the picturesque farmstead, with its red barn, cornfield, and farmhouse, depicted on the package in which the organic roasting chicken I bought at Whole Foods had been wrapped.”

Instead he finds the chickens crowded into “barracks,” with fans on either end; not caged, but not ranging freely either.

Pollan’s week at Joel Salatin’s “beyond organic” grass-based operation is the author’s crucible for testing the wisdom of organic agriculture’s heroes such as Sir Albert Howard, who wrote (in 1943), “Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion …” At Salatin’s Polyface farm, Pollan finds that both the theories and the food can take the heat.

A key observation of the book is that while agriculture has always been the business of capturing free solar energy for human use by growing plants or raising plant-eating animals, industrial agriculture has made a fundamental shift in this relationship by relying on a finite resource—fossil fuel-- for fertilizing, processing, and transporting food. The products may have a cheap price tag, but the cost to our society is incalculable.

Fed up with the system? Buy The Omnivore’s Dilemma for your family, friends, and elected representatives. Better yet: buy grass-fed meat and dairy, and pastured pork, poultry and eggs — and vote with your food.

Lynne Pledger