The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan explores the question of where our food comes from, and how the growth, processing, marketing, and distribution of food affects our health, animal welfare, and the environment.
This book, published in 2006, was the first of several influential books critical of the post-World War II industrialization of food production by our government and big business. As explained in an Afterword added in 2016, the book helped to raise awareness of healthier alternatives and boost an incipient “food movement” that has continued to change what we eat and how it’s produced.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma refers to the age-old human dilemma of deciding what to eat. Because we’re omnivores, and biologically designed to eat plants, animals and fungi, we have wide-ranging options compared to “specialized eaters” like koala bears or monarch butterflies that can eat only one thing. In the early days of human evolution, deciding what to eat was a dilemma because some options could sicken or kill us. As a species we learned what to eat through various tools such as memory, recognition, taste, culture, and tradition.
Around the end of World War II, our food system began to change radically. Today we’re again confused and anxious about our food choices due to ignorance about where our food comes from — plus an array of new health concerns. We’re confronting a modern-day Omnivore’s Dilemma about what we should eat.
One hundred years ago, we knew where our food came from — typically a small farm growing a diversity of crops and animals and selling its products locally. This was a traditional, pastoral food chain connected with the land and functioning in accordance with nature.
Nowadays it’s been replaced with an industrialized food chain or system built on factory-based rules of efficiency, mass production, mechanization, and distribution. Consumers no longer know for sure where their food comes from, beyond the huge supermarkets where they bought it.
Most people accepted this until we began experiencing a multitude of problems: an increase in food contamination scares, environmental issues, and health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. This helped spur the growth of an organic movement promoting sustainable, pesticide-free, locally grown food.
Adding to our food uncertainty are diet fads, marketing gimmicks, ever-changing dietary guidelines, research, and media reports. Because the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, we haven’t developed a national food tradition and culture like other countries to help guide our eating habits. So the Omnivore’s Dilemma confronts us again.
To answer the question of what we should eat, Pollan explores four food chains or systems of growing, processing, and distributing food: Industrial, Industrial Organic, True Organic, and Hunter-Gatherer. He created a meal from each food chain, after tracing each to its origins, starting with the one that dominates our food choices today — the Industrial food chain.
The industrial food chain starts with corn, grown on massive industrial farms in the Midwest. The farms are monocultures, meaning they only grow one thing — corn. Thanks to U.S. farm policies driven by the interests of big business, along with the continuing development of higher yield varieties of corn, farmers produce ever greater quantities of corn and we have a constant oversupply. This continually drives down prices for farmers.
The industrialization of food production has several ramifications. The industrial food chain depends on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which lead to pollution and health problems. Because industrial farming is highly mechanized, it doesn’t require many people to grow and harvest corn. Towns in the Midwest are dwindling in population because of farm job losses and bankruptcies.
For the rest of the country, corn is a key ingredient in much of we eat. Out of 45,000 items in a typical supermarket, a quarter are derived from corn. It’s a component of beer, soda, coffee whitener, spreadable cheese, microwaveable dinners, cake mixes, condiments, and hot dogs. Most processed foods contain an array of hard-to-pronounce ingredients derived from corn.
A chicken nugget is entirely dependent on corn: Modified corn starch holds it together, citric acid made from corn keeps it fresh, and lecithin gives it its golden color. In the produce section, there’s even corn in the wax that makes cucumbers shiny. The sweetner high-fructose corn syrup is the most popular corn derivative and main ingredient in soda. It’s contributing to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
Corn overproduction has also given rise to the factory animal farm system. With the abundance of corn for feed it became cheaper and more efficient to fatten animals in huge feedlots or closed buildings, than to raise them on grass on smaller diversified farms. (Cows are ruminants designed to eat grass — and corn makes them sick. But factory farms address this problem with drugs). Corn is the foundation of meat and dairy production:
Holding thousands of animals in close confinement leads to health problems requiring the use of antibiotics and other drugs that get into our food. It’s cruel to the animals because the system thwarts their natural behavior. Also, the toxic waste that is produced creates serious pollution problems.
Further, the industrial corn food chain depends on non-renewable fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, from petrochemical fertilizers to fuel for farm machinery, processing facilities, and long-distance shipping.
An alternative to the Industrial food chain is the industrial organic food chain. This is a hybrid food chain combining elements of both the industrial system and organic system.
The demand for organic products exploded when supermarkets such as Walmart and Whole Foods started selling them. To supply these huge companies, organic farms grew, consolidated, and began relying on traditional fossil fuel-based distribution systems. They still produce food naturally, without using synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics.
But while the food produced by Big Organic operations is generally healthier than food based on industrial corn, it increasingly uses synthetic ingredients to extend shelf life. Thanks to broad government standards written by big agribusinesses, these products can still be labeled as organic.
Large amounts of energy produced by fossil fuels are needed to wash, process, refrigerate, and transport large quantities of organic produce. As a result, this system (like the industrial system) isn’t environmentally sustainable.
The true organic food chain is the simplest and works with nature rather than against it. It’s exemplified by Polyface Farm in Virginia.
The farm run by Joel Salatin encompasses 100 acres of pasture abutting 450 acres of woodland. It raises chickens (broilers and eggs), cows, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits, and it grows tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries.
The foundation of the organic food chain is grass, in the way corn is the basis of the industrial food chain that starts on an Iowa megafarm.
Animals and crops are rotated through the various pastures and benefit in a complementary way. Pastures are grazed twice by beef cattle, followed by hens that eat bugs and parasites in the manure and spread the manure around (acting as a sanitation crew). Chickens also add their own fertilizer. The soil is built up and the grass remains lush, diverse, and nutrient-rich. The farming practices are sustainable because they give back to nature what they take.
Salatin sells his products through a farm store, farmers markets, direct sales to restaurants, and through an urban buyers club. He interacts directly with his customers, educating them and answering their questions about how the food is produced. It’s more expensive than supermarket fare, but it reflects his true costs (unlike that of subsidized corn), and its production doesn’t add to health or environmental costs.
In contrast to the modern food chains operating today, the author also set out to create a meal entirely from foraged ingredients: those he had hunted, grown, and gathered himself. While this isn’t a viable food chain today, Pollan wanted to take conscious responsibility for killing the animals he ate, and to prepare and eat a meal with full awareness of everything it involved.
Before he went hunting, however, Pollan explored the practice and ethics of killing and eating animals, from humans’ earliest days as hunter-gatherers. He concluded that humans are biologically designed to be predators and meat eaters, and that eating meat is an ethical choice when it benefits nature (for example, raising food animals in pastures improves the soil.)
However, humans and animals share certain traits, especially the desire to avoid suffering. This means we have a moral obligation to treat (and kill) animals humanely. Factory farms are cruel to animals in treating them as nothing more than protein-producing machines. These industrial practices must be revealed for what they are and reformed.
Pollan hunted and killed a wild boar in Northern California, foraged for mushrooms, and harvested yeast, vegetables, and fruits from his neighborhood. Although the meal took quite a while to assemble and prepare, benefits included:
What should we have for dinner?
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan explores how modern-day humans answer the age-old question, “What should we eat,” by tracing four types of food chains (or food production systems), from a food’s origin to its final destination, the dinner table.
Although this is a seemingly simple question, answering it turns out to be complicated. The book examines why it’s complicated and who benefits, often to the public’s detriment.
Humans evolved as omnivores. This is reflected in the design of our teeth (we can eat both plants and meat), our brain capacity for observation and memory, and adaptations such as hunting and cooking.
Being an omnivore is an advantage that has enabled humans to survive in many different environments. But it presents a challenge. Because we can eat almost anything, we must continually make choices.
In the early days of human evolution, eating the wrong thing might kill you or make you sick, so the decision was crucial and fraught with anxiety. Besides deciding what was safe, humans also needed to determine which foods provided the most energy.
In contrast, animals that are “specialized eaters” don’t have to think about what to eat because they only eat one thing, For example, a koala eats only eucalyptus leaves. A monarch butterfly eats only milkweed.
We developed some evolutionary tools to help us decide what to eat. They include:
Thirty years ago University of Pennsylvania researcher Paul Rozin came up with the term “Omnivore’s Dilemma” to describe our decision-making process around food.
In spite of the tools we’ve developed to help us decide what to eat, we still have a dilemma today. While we don’t worry as much about accidentally eating something poisonous, we still confront uncertainties about what to eat. Eating the wrong things can still be bad for us, and it’s hard to tell what we’re eating due to the way our industrial food system produces, processes, and labels food.
There are further complications that make it hard for us to make food decisions.
The U.S. lacks a unique, enduring food culture that would help guide us in what to choose, in part because we’re an immigrant nation.
Other countries like France and Italy decide dinner questions on the basis of tradition and pleasure; they eat “unhealthy” foods, yet the French are generally healthier than Americans (this is referred to as the French paradox) because of their culture of eating small meals, and eating slowly to savor them.
Our U.S. paradox is that we’re unhealthy people obsessed with the idea of eating better.
Due to our lack of a stabilizing food culture, we’ve been less able to navigate a big change that occurred in at the end of World War II: the U.S. industrialization of food production.
Figuring out what to eat has come to require expert help (investigative journalism, nutritionists), because the origins of our food are difficult to trace via today’s industrial food chain. Food used to come from local markets and farms, but now it’s mass produced on huge farms and transported long distances; much of it is transformed through processing.
We get ever-changing messages from government, diet books, and media coverage of the latest research, which gives us whiplash.
For example, in 1977 during the Carter administration, a Senate committee issued dietary goals urging reduced consumption of red meat, and people complied. Then Dr. Robert Atkins argued that you could in fact eat meat and even lose weight at the same time, if you cut bread and pasta. A New York Times Magazine cover story asked, “What if fat doesn’t make you fat?”
A shift began toward low-carbohydrate diets, and bread started falling out of favor. Some people developed “carbophobia.” (Shortform Note: Research since this was published in 2006 continues to show the major health problems caused by consuming large amounts of carbohydrates, as well as the benefits of reducing your carb and sugar intake.)
Marketing messages create further confusion. For instance, we confuse sugar-packed “nutrition” bars and so-called food supplements with food, and confuse sugar-loaded cereal that makes health claims with medicine (it’s supposedly heart-healthy).
Furthermore, our food habits and practices are characterized by:
The food industry has reinvented the traditional food chain — from synthetic fertilizers replacing natural growth, to reshaping food through processing. This has implications for human health and the health of nature.
This book is about the three main food chains available to us today — industrial, true organic, and hunter-gatherer — plus a hybrid food chain (industrial organic). A food chain is a system for passing on calories synthesized from the sun by plants.
We used to rely on a traditional food chain: It started with animals and crops raised locally on small farms and sold locally. We prepared it ourselves and very little processing was involved.
Nowadays, the industrialization of the traditional food chain, to the point that food is now mass produced with the aid of chemicals and reshaped through processing, has changed how we eat.
The book’s first section follows a centerpiece of industrialization, corn, from its origin through its transformation into a fast-food meal.
The second and third sections trace two organic-based food chains resulting in two meals:
The last section follows a hunter-gatherer food chain in northern California. The author first had to confront the ethics of killing animals for food. But with this food chain he was able to eat with full knowledge of everything involved in creating and preparing the meal, which consisted of items foods he had grown, gathered, or hunted.
There were several themes common to all the meals, regardless of their food chain:
The supermarket is the pinnacle of our industrial food chain.
It is a man-made environment of many species of plants and animals, organized in familiar categories. You’d think it would be easy to sort out, but the processing, packaging, and labeling obscure the origins and ingredients of many items.
Each item links back to a plant in a specific patch of soil. With produce you can sometimes see on the label where it was grown. With meat it’s more difficult to determine origin: where the animal was born, fattened, and processed; what it ate, and what drugs it received. Among processed foods, it’s hard to trace items such as non-dairy creamer back to the plant where they started.
You can’t intelligently decide what you should eat until you can determine: Exactly what am I eating (what is it?), and where did it come from. Answering those questions for industrial food requires detective work or an expertise that few people possess.
Although a supermarket’s options seem diverse, much of what it offers depends on corn. In fact, of the 45,000 items in the supermarket, a quarter contain corn. Thus, the industrial food chain begins with a farm in the corn belt:
The supermarket has managed to convince us that 45,000 items represent variety, despite how many come from the same plant — corn.
How corn came to dominate our food chain is an evolutionary success story.
Agriculture can be considered an evolutionary strategy by plants to get us to advance their interests. Corn (an edible grass) has been the most successful. Humans have nurtured corn in numerous ways, including turning huge amounts of land into corn-friendly habitat.
Corn’s big expansion began when colonists arrived in the New World. They brought their preferred species, particularly wheat, but found that some of them had difficulty adapting to the new environment, where, in contrast, corn flourished.
Native Americans showed the colonists how to plant and use corn, which turned out to be crucial to the Europeans’ survival in North America as other food crops failed.
Corn was (and continues to be) an extremely productive food source - it creates more organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight, water, and basic elements available to other plants. And it had a variety of other uses. Because it was storable, it could be traded or sold. It could be fed to animals as grain or silage, used for fuel and fiber, and even distilled into whiskey.
While the colonizers ultimately eliminated many local species, they embraced corn. This was good for corn as a species because it needed human help to reproduce itself. Corn can’t propagate without removal of the husk, separation of the kernels, and planting — which it can’t do by itself. This knowledge was passed on to colonists by native Americans, who had also learned to cross-pollinate corn and create new kinds.
Corn lost its ability to propagate itself when it mutated the husked ear, which trapped its seeds (kernels) so they couldn’t couldn’t disperse. Here’s how corn’s complicated reproduction process works:
Corn became a form of intellectual property: Because corn can’t reproduce freely, breeders figured out ways to control corn reproduction and protect seeds from copiers; these processes and results were patented.
Besides helping with propagation, humans helped corn adapt to different environments, from southern Mexico to New England. In turn, corn adapted to industrial consumer capitalism (the supermarket and fast food); this was its biggest evolutionary achievement:
Today most of our food comes from corn-based industrial farms. But in the early 1900s, most farms started out as diverse operations, with corn, fruits/vegetables, oats, hay, chickens, and pigs. One in four Americans lived on a farm.
Beginning in the fifties and sixties the availability and cheap price of corn made it more profitable to fatten livestock on feedlots, and chickens in giant factories. So chickens and cattle moved from farms to industrial areas, creating space for farmers to plant more corn, which made it even cheaper.
By the 1980s, diversified farms had basically disappeared in Iowa and a single crop or monoculture — corn — dominated.
Growing just corn required much less labor than diversified farming, thanks to fertilizer, pesticides, mechanization, and other practices. Monoculture farms got bigger but required fewer people to operate.
Here’s how farming works today. George Naylor is a typical farmer, raising corn and soybeans in Greene County, Iowa. Naylor rotates the two crops. (Soybeans have become the second crop supporting the industrial food system; like corn, they’re fed to livestock and are a component of a majority of processed foods.)
Naylor plants a hybrid corn variety developed by Monsanto, which yields 180 bushels per acre; in 1920 the average was about 120 bushels per acre. The higher yields stem from the fact that the hybrid corn can be planted close together. It has a stronger root system, stands up straight, and is amenable to mechanized harvesting.
Naylor and other midwestern farmers are going nearly broke because the price they get for corn doesn’t cover their costs — and it keeps declining as they get more productive (we’ll explain more about why later). Naylor’s farm, which has been in his family for generations, no longer financially supports the four people who live on it; his wife works off the farm and he depends on a federal subsidy.
The plight of midwestern farmers is a direct result of years of farm policies designed to encourage overproduction to benefit the huge agribusinesses that buy corn, process and sell it, or feed animals on factory farms to produce and process meat.
The price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar less than the cost of growing it. So if the supply is so abundant that the market won’t pay the cost of producing it, why do farmers keep growing more of it?
There are multiple factors involved, but the biggest driver of production is long-standing government farm policies.
American farm policy originally was designed to limit production and support prices to help farmers. Crop surpluses during good years would drive down prices and bankrupt farmers. So New Deal farm programs established a target price for corn. When the market price dropped below the target price, a farmer could get a government loan, with his crop as collateral, and store his grain until prices increased again. At that point, he sold his corn and paid back the loan, or he kept the loan and gave the corn to the government. This kept corn prices from collapsing as yields continued to increase.
Beginning in the fifties a campaign to undercut New Deal programs began, in an effort to let market forces push prices down. It was driven by food processors and exporters, laissez-faire economists, and businessmen upset that farmers aligned themselves with the labor movement.
But the real dismantling was accomplished in the 1970s by Earl Butz, an agricultural economist and Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, who remade farm policy on the basis of cheap corn, to satisfy big business as well as to stem inflation of food prices.
However, subsequent farm bills have continued to lower the target price, and government payments haven’t made up the difference. Since the 1970s farm income has steadily declined along with corn prices, forcing farmers deeper into debt and bankruptcy. Yet farmers produce more corn every year.
The free market doesn’t work in agriculture the way it does in other economic sectors. Typically in manufacturing, when prices fall a factory lays off workers and makes fewer widgets while waiting for the market to stabilize. Or it starts making something else if one market dries up. However when corn prices fall, farmers don’t stop producing corn, and even increase production. This benefits most of the industrial food chain, except for farmers.
In addition to U.S. government farm policy, the development of synthetic fertilizer played a pivotal role in enabling the production of corn on an industrial scale.
Before World War II, German chemist Fritz Haber had invented a synthetic process of nitrogen fixing (making nitrogen from the air usable by plants), which led to the development of chemical fertilizer that adds nitrogen to the soil. (In nature, legumes utilize bacteria to add nitrogen to the soil.)
After the war, this advance was put into action in a big way by the U.S. government, which helped launch the chemical fertilizer industry. Manufacturing plants that had made munitions needed something else to do, so they switched from making explosives to making chemical fertilizer. Both processes used ammonium nitrate (a source of nitrogen, which plants need) — of which the government had a huge surplus.
Synthetic fertilizer use allowed farmers to plant corn every year, without allowing the soil to rest or rebuilding it with legumes. Farms could become monocultures, paving the way for mechanization and economies of scale. Use of hybrid corn skyrocketed because it could consume more fertilizer than any other crop.
Farming could now be managed on industrial principles, turning inputs (chemical fertilizer) into outputs (corn). Corn, in turn, thrives in the industrial system, getting more than half of all the synthetic nitrogen that’s produced.
While it may make economic sense, industrial farming is costly to the environment.
It has led to reliance on fossil fuel rather than the sun for rebuilding soil. Producing synthetic fertilizer takes huge amounts of electricity plus hydrogen supplied by oil, coal, and natural gas. (This energy is not renewable.)
Considering the fossil fuels needed to make fertilizer and pesticides, and harvest, dry, and transport corn, producing a bushel of industrial corn requires a quarter to a third of a gallon of oil (around 50 gallons per acre of corn).
Also, farmers growing hybrid corn tend to use too much fertilizer. This is leading to pollution. When it gets into the water supply during spring runoff it can be harmful to children because it affects the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain. The city of Des Moines issues “blue baby alerts” at times when parents should not give their children tap water due to pollution.
Synthetic nitrogen damages forests and the oceans too. It has killed marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey and still growing. And it adds to global warming.
We have disturbed the global nitrogen balance. More than half the world’s supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made. The consequences are only beginning to become apparent.
Most of the corn harvested is used as a commodity and turned into processed foods. Only a small fraction of it is eaten as actual corn. Here’s what happens to the corn after it’s harvested.
The first stop after harvest for an industrial corn crop is the grain elevator, invented for collecting and storing mass quantities of corn prior to loading it onto railroad cars for distribution. These clustered, concrete towers are the tallest structures in farm country. They’re filled with corn by conveyor belt and drained by a spout into railroad cars.
Most corn is sold as a commodity. It is a different variety — known as No. 2 field corn — from what the corn that we humans eat. It is traded and sold all over the world.
Farmers once sold their corn in burlap sacks bearing their names. They had to be concerned about quality, because buyers knew where their corn came from. With the invention of the grain elevator for storage and railroad cars for transport, corn was no longer packaged in burlap sacks with a farmer’s name. Corn from all sources was mixed, breaking the link between producer and consumer.
In 1865 the Chicago Board of Trade come up with a grading system, and source no longer mattered as long as the corn met standards. Quantity or yield, rather than quality, became the goal.
From the grain elevators, the stream of corn produced by George Naylor and other farmers funnels to a small number of large agribusinesses, who reap profits by controlling its path. They’re the true beneficiaries of the farm subsidies that produce cheap corn.
Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, for instance, buy an estimated one-third of the corn produced in the U.S. They make pesticides and fertilizer; operate the mills, export it, feed and slaughter animals, and make ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup. In addition they help write government policy on corn.
With the abundance of cheap corn, animals were moved from farm pastures to feedlots called CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, where they could be fattened more quickly and efficiently.
One of the largest, Poky Feeders in Garden City, Kansas, shows how factory farms work. It features acres of pens containing 37,000 steers, eight miles of feed troughs, streams, and lagoons of waste, a processing plant, and a feed mill. The mill mixes feed for the cattle consisting of corn, liquified fat, protein, drugs, alfalfa, and silage.
This feed mix helps cattle, which are ruminants designed to eat grass, to eat corn without getting too sick. It isn’t good for them but it offers the cheapest calories, and there’s a huge supply.
Besides fattening animals efficiently, CAFOs have other economic advantages including:
Farms were once a closed ecological loop: You fed cattle waste products of crops, and fed manure from cattle back to the crops. Animal feedlots create two problems by breaking this loop: a need for chemical fertilizer, and a pollution problem. CAFOs produce air and water pollution, toxic waste, and deadly pathogens.
Beef cattle destined for feedlots are typically born on independent ranches in the West because of the large amount of land (10 acres) required to raise a calf. (By contrast, the pork and chicken industries have consolidated the animal’s entire life under one roof.)
Blair Ranch in Vale, South Dakota, a cow-calf operation on 5,500 acres of grass, is typical of how the system works. Ranches like this are the first stage in beef production.
Steers spend their first six months in pastures, eating grass as ruminants are designed to do. Besides benefitting the cattle, grazing benefits the land by preventing the growth of trees and shrubs that block sunlight; the cattle spread grass seed and fertilize it with manure.
There’s some evidence that grazing makes ranges healthier, as long as cattle are moved frequently. The feedlot does greater environmental harm than grazing.
As ruminants, cattle convert grass to high quality protein through their rumen, a digestive organ that acts as a fermentation tank. They can make use of low-quality grasses.
But cows raised on grass take longer than those raised on corn to reach slaughter weight (4-5 years, compared to 14-16 months in corn-fed cows) — so it’s more efficient to feed them corn after a few months on grass at the start of their lives. Getting a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in 14 months takes huge quantities of corn, protein, and fat supplements, as well as drugs (particularly antibiotics).
After weaning at the ranch, calves are confined to a pen for a few months, where they learn to eat from a trough, and get accustomed to eating corn before being sent to a feedlot.
Since cows aren’t designed to digest corn, feeding them only corn leads to all sorts of problems.
The majority of cattle born on western ranches are funneled to four big meatpacking companies (Tyson/IBP, Cargill/Excel, Swith & Co., and National), which slaughter and market four of five beef cattle raised in the U.S.
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations lead to a bevy of problems for humans.
In the past, cows were fed a grisly meal - rendered cow parts and bonemeal. Due to the spread of mad cow disease, the FDA banned feeding cows rendered cow parts in 1997,but it could still be a problem. Rendered cattle meat and bonemeal are still being fed to chickens and pigs. It’s OK by the FDA to feed cows feather meal and chicken litter (bedding, feces, and discarded feed), as well as chicken, fish, and pig meal.
This means that when the cattle are fed chicken and pig meal, from animals that ate rendered cattle parts, infectious prions (the source of mad cow disease) could find their way back into cattle.
Besides the potential for mad cow disease, the industrial production of meat creates other health problems for humans. Corn-fed meat is less healthy for us: it contains more saturated fat and less healthy Omega-3 fatty acids than grass-fed meat.
Research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef (modern-day hunter-gatherers who eat wild meat don’t have our rates of heart disease). In the same way that ruminants are poorly adapted to eating corn, humans may be poorly adapted to eating the ruminants that eat the corn.
Then there’s the problem of toxic waste. Feedlot waste can’t be used as fertilizer, because its nitrogen and phosphorus content is too high, and it contains heavy metals and traces of hormones. So it gets into water supplies downstream, where fish and amphibians develop abnormal sex characteristics. Nitrogen in the Mississippi Is creating a giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Also, bacteria, especially E. coli, from the manure in a feedlot can also get into meat during processing, which can be fatal to humans. Strains of E. coli are developing that can resist human stomach acid. Switching a cow’s diet to grass or hay a few days before slaughter reduces the E. coli in the cow’s gut by 80 percent, but this is considered impractical by the cattle industry. So the preferred solution for killing dangerous bacteria is to irradiate meat. (Shortform note: But this has its own issues - some bacteria are becoming resistant to this process. Also, it may diminish nutrients and taste.)
Another problem of industrial meat production is its consumption of oil, from raising corn, processing it, transporting it and feeding to animals. A steer eating 25 pounds of corn a day and reaching 1,200 pounds will have consumed the equivalent of nearly 35 gallons of oil or about a barrel in its lifetime.
If the corn flowing from midwestern elevators doesn’t end up feeding cattle, it likely goes to a “wet” mill, which is the first stage for processing it into numerous food products. (They’re called wet mills to distinguish them from traditional mills that just grind corn into dry meal.)
We eat less than a bushel of corn per person per year in its original form. Yet we each consume a ton of corn annually, mostly through ingredients in processed products, such as breakfast cereals, condiments, or snacks.
“Wet” mills turn corn into components that companies like General Mills, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola use in processed foods. The wet milling process reduces corn to simple molecules, mostly sugars, forming corn syrup, the first domestic substitute for cane sugar. It was further refined into high-fructose corn syrup in the 1970s, which is now the predominant processed product made from corn and is the main ingredient in soda.
The mill takes apart the corn kernel:
Wet milling, like other industrial food processes, is energy-intensive, requiring fossil fuel.
Processing food to preserve it is an age-old preoccupation. We first learned to salt, dry, cure, and pickle food; then to can, freeze, and vacuum-pack it. These advances freed people from the constraints of location and season, as well as from times of scarcity and plenty.
At the end of World War II, we went beyond preserving, to trying to improve on nature, using technology to create new products and marketing to sell their qualities and convenience. For instance:
Corn became a key component of processed foods. In fact, it’s hard to find a processed food not made with corn or soybeans today.
Food companies are always developing new processed foods, and redesigning current foods to enhance flavor, texture, and packaging. For instance, the Belle Institute, which is the R&D lab for General Mills, is always trying to come up with novel breakfast cereals because the cereals group generates higher profits for GM than any other.
Breakfast cereal exemplifies processed food: It’s a few cents’ worth of corn (corn meal, corn starch, and corn sweetener) morphed into $4 worth of processed food. Vitamins and minerals are added, plus other ingredients for color and taste. Then it’s packaged and branded as having added value.
One advantage processors have is that they can often substitute ingredients without affecting appearance or taste. So if the price of an ingredient like hydrogenated fat from corn goes up, they replace it with fat derived from soy. That’s why labels say: “Contains one or more of the following: corn, soybeans or sunflower oil.”
Processors keep coming up with new ways to package and sell the corn glut. Engineering processed food from corn is supply-driven — no one clamored for synthetic cheese, but consumers bought it once it was invented and marketed.
However, no matter how many new products processors make from corn, humans can eat only so much food (about 1,500 pounds a year) regardless of how cheap it gets. This is referred to as inelastic demand, or the “fixed stomach.”
The challenge for food companies is to keep profits from falling when demand is maxed out. Their profits are growing at about 1 percent a year (the same as the rate of population growth), which is too little by Wall Street standards.
Food companies have to figure out how to get people to spend more for the same amount of food and/or get them to eat more. Part of the answer is to further process or complicate foods to add value.
Further processing a product adds to shelf life, allowing the company to market it globally. It also allows a company to capture more of the money a consumer spends on food. Here’s how that works:
Processors need to sell more than a product itself: They also sell convenience, novelty, and supposed health benefits.
However, a value-added product made from a cheap commodity can itself become a commodity, so a processor has to keep doing more.
Food companies are even trying to add value to whole foods like apples because the price of agricultural commodities keeps declining as more are produced. Also, they seek to differentiate whole foods, like apples or chicken, from another company’s.
In the next era of food processing, designers will aim to produce processed foods that are better than the whole foods they’re based on. We’ll be told we’re better off eating foods specifically designed for us, rather than eating risky foods from nature whose quality and characteristics vary.
The food industry is also overcoming the problem of the fixed stomach by creating fake fats, sugars, and starches that pass through the human digestive system without turning into calories. These are marketed as a benefit to diabetics — you can eat more without gaining weight, becoming the ultimate industrial food consumer.
We are what we eat, which for Americans is mostly processed corn.
This can actually be quantified. A scientist can tell which type of plant — corn, wheat, soy — created a given carbon atom in a human bone, and can therefore determine the composition of a person’s diet by their remains. Carbon atoms created by corn are different, and their presence indicates how much corn was in a person’s diet.
Americans eat more wheat than corn outright — 114 pounds wheat flour a year, versus 11 pounds of corn flour. But Americans, compared to Mexicans, have diets much higher in corn, because of all the processed corn we eat in various forms. (Mexicans eat grass-fed as opposed to corn-fed beef, and use cane sugar instead of corn syrup as a sweetener.)
Our consumption of so much corn in unhealthy forms, especially high-fructose corn syrup, has helped create an epidemic of obesity in the U.S.
There are striking parallels between our obesity problem and the epidemic of alcoholism in 19th century America. The latter was also driven by excess corn, which was turned into cheap corn whiskey.
In the early 19 century American farmers, especially in the fertile Appalachians, were producing too much corn. Transporting it over the mountains to sell more widely was difficult and expensive. Like today, the way to use up the surplus of cheap corn was to process it. They distilled it into alcohol, and corn in this value-added form was easier to transport.
Americans began drinking more than they had before or have since. This created the public health epidemic of its day. The typical American drank more than a half-pint of corn whiskey a day (five gallons of spirits a year, compared to less than one today). The coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break.
The overconsumption resulted in public drunkenness, violence, family breakups, and alcohol-related diseases. Several of the nation’s founders, including George Washington, decried America’s transformation into “The Alcoholic Republic.”
The Alcoholic Republic has been replaced today to The Fat Republic. We’re eating excessively today, as we drank then, for some of the same reasons.
Obesity has become our greatest public health problem:
Since 1977, an American’s average daily consumption of calories has jumped 10 percent. The additional calories came from the farm.
Rising obesity rates started in the 1970s with the advent of the cheap-food farm policy and the elimination of programs to stem overproduction. Since the Nixon administration, farmers have produced 500 additional calories per person per day — up from 3,300, which was already much more than we need.
Today’s parallels with the Alcoholic Republic are:
Corn sweetener or high-fructose corn syrup is to the obesity epidemic what corn whiskey was to the Alcoholic Republic.
High-fructose corn syrup is in many processed foods (including ketchup, breads, hot dogs, and hams), but we consume the most in soft drinks. It first became an ingredient replacing sugar in Coca-Cola in 1980, followed by Pepsi.
High-fructose corn syrup is cheaper than sugar, but rather than cutting consumer prices, soft drink companies began upsizing the bottle and increasing the price.
The concept of supersizing, applied to fast food as well, dramatically increased sales. It was invented by David Wallerstein, who served on the board of McDonald’s. In the fifties and sixties while working in the theater industry, he had discovered that movie-goers would eat more popcorn and drink more soda in larger containers. Later he convinced McDonald’s to supersize its fries and burgers to sell more.
The problem with supersizing is that people don’t stop eating supersized portions when they feel full, researchers found. They eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise.
This behavior made sense in the hunter-gatherer era. Our ancestors feasted whenever they could, to build fat reserves to last through future food shortages. Obesity researchers call this the thrifty gene. It’s useful when food is scarce or unpredictable, but harmful when food is always available.
Because we have a biologically driven preference for energy-dense foods, the added sugar in our food today make matters worse (anything with sugar or fat in it tastes better). In effect, food scientists are pushing our evolutionary buttons to get us to buy and consume more.
Sugars and starches turn to glucose. Consuming too much can wear out the body’s system for managing glucose — and then we get Type II diabetes.
Contributing to the problem: since the 1970s the price per calorie of sugar or fat has plunged, making energy-dense foods cheap as well as neurobiologically appealing. For instance, a dollar can buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 of soda, versus only 250 calories of carrots. The government subsidizes high-fructose corn syrup but not carrots.
The obesity epidemic will only get worse, regardless of warnings from the surgeon general, as long as the president signs farm bills to keep the corn coming — supplying Americans with a surfeit of cheap, unhealthy calories.
The industrial food chain meal consumed for this book began with corn grown on an Iowa farm. At the opposite end of the food chain, it was prepared by McDonald’s and eaten in a car by the author, his wife, and son.
The meal consisted of:
The cost was $14 total for three people, and it was ready in four minutes. It was derived from an estimated six pounds of corn, totaled 4,510 calories, and was eaten in under 10 minutes.
For instance, 13 of 38 ingredients in a chicken nugget are derived from corn, starting with the corn-fed chicken. It also contains completely synthetic ingredients from petroleum or chemicals (a preservative used is derived from butane).
The author had the meal analyzed for corn content via mass spectrometer, which verified corn’s central place in fast food:
Convenience was a central feature of the fast-food meal, and is a key selling point of all fast food (19 percent of American meals are eaten in a car). The chicken nugget is convenient, waste-free, needs no plate or utensils, can be eaten with one hand, and is automobile-friendly (salads are still a challenge).
Fast-food started out as an occasional treat, but today one in three children eat fast food every day.
It has a unique flavor and fragrance unlike that of burgers, chicken nuggets, or fries made at home. Fast foods have been processed to such an extent that they seem like products of our culture rather than of nature.
Fast food is becoming a comfort food with its burst of carbs and fat, which relieves stress and releases feel-good brain chemicals.
In a sense, we’re turning into specialized eaters of corn, to the detriment of our health, environment, and farming heritage.
Consumers have two alternatives to the corn-based industrial food chain — Big Organic and traditional organic. Big Organic is a scaled up version of the traditional small organic farm. It’s scaled up to supply large quantities of food to big companies like Whole Foods, Walmart, and supermarket chains with organic sections.
Like traditional organic, Big Organic operations avoid pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. But they’ve also adopted some practices of the industrial system including mass production, processing, and long-distance distribution. Traditional organic operations oppose processing and long-distance shipping, which use energy, especially fossil fuels. They aim to sell their foods locally or regionally, while they are freshest.
Both of these organic systems sell food that is safer and more nutritious than industrially grown versions, but Big Organic is less sustainable than traditional organic, since much of the energy it uses is non-renewable.
Organic agriculture has its roots in the sixties, when “agrarian reformers” sought to grow “uncontaminated food.” This led to the commune movement, and then to the organic movement.
It was founded on the ecological premise that everything’s connected. What you eat is connected to how it was grown and got to your table. The movement rejected the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in favor of alternate methods of pest control.
The movement was built on the philosophy of Sir Albert Howard, an English agronomist who wrote in the 1940s, but whose ideas were revived in the 1970s by Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming magazine.
In Howard’s time, chemists were contending that plants needed only three ingredients for growth, which could be produced artificially: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium or NPK. Howard argued that this was an oversimplification. This science-driven” industrial mindset ignored the complexity of the growth process. For instance, it left out the biological process that takes place in humus. Humus is what’s left of organic matter after it’s been broken down by billions of organisms. An additional group of organisms breaks down humus into the components plants need, via both chemical and biological processes. Humus creates nutrients as well as minerals that hold water in soil.
This is more complex than just adding three elements in chemical form (which makes plants more susceptible to insects and disease, and ultimately less nourishing).
By contrast, Howard promoted farming in conjunction with nature. He contended the health of soil, plant, animal, human, and nation are connected. Howard’s views were reintroduced and popularized in Rodale’s magazine, and also by essayist and sustainable farming advocate Wendell Berry.
The traditional organic movement continues to honor its founding principles. But Big Organic, which developed to meet the demand for large quantities of organic food by big food companies, has come to resemble the industrial system it set out to replace.
The evolution of Cascadian Farm from its organic origins to a megafarm today shows how this happened. Gene Kahn and Cascadian Farms grew out of the commune movement. Now it’s owned by General Mills. Kahn was a pioneer of the organic movement and pushed it into the mainstream.
By the late seventies, Kahn had become a skilled farmer and discovered the benefits of value-added innovations like freezing blueberries, making jam. He could make more money by processing food bought from other farmers than by just growing it himself. He began shipping products around the country.
Demand for organic food from supermarket chains exploded beginning in 1990 with the “Alar scare,” in which the pesticide widely used by apple growers was discovered to be a carcinogen. This was followed by other scares: food poisoning, mad cow disease, and GMO crops.
Kahn borrowed money to expand. When Americans’ food safety concerns died down and organic sales started to level off or decline, he found himself overextended and was forced to sell his majority stake in Cascadian.
The organic industry recovered and started growing again as mainstream food companies acquired organic brands; Kahn took an executive position with Cascadian Farm.
Also in 1990, the government created a board to set organic standards. Agribusiness wanted to define organic as broadly as possible, so it could cash in on selling the increasingly popular organic foods without changing its production methods much. The definition grew to encompass factory farms where animals lack access to grass, use of chemicals, and a long list of permissible synthetic additives.
While organic food was more environmentally responsible than industrial food, the broad definition eliminated many of the original philosophical values, and opened the way for adopting industrial practices. Nonetheless, the image of organic food in many people’s minds is still pastoral. They don’t realize there are two organic production systems.
Big Organic farms look a lot like industrial farms, with vast acreage devoted to a single crop (a monoculture) such as broccoli, lettuce, or corn. In California, some of the biggest organic operations are actually owned and run by conventional megafarms.
Big Organic proponents argue that the scale of a farm has no bearing on its adherence to organic principles. Big farms are necessary because organic production can’t be a significant alternative to the industrial food chain unless it’s practiced on a large scale.
Greenways Organic is a 2,000-acre organic produce operation incorporated into a 24,000-acre conventional farm. It practices both conventional and organic farming.
On the conventional side it uses chemical fertilizer; in the organic operation it uses organic compost (horse and chicken manure). The conventional farm uses chemical herbicides; the organic farm tills to control weeds. However, the heavy tilling needed to meet large-scale production demands is hard on the soil. It also requires “inputs” of compost, fish emulsion, or nitrate.
The organic ideal calls for a sustainable system modeled on nature that requires not only no synthetic chemicals but no purchased inputs of any kind, and that returns as much to the soil as it removes.
This kind of farm is too small for Big Organic to work with. It’s more cost-efficient to buy from one 1,000-acre farm than from 10 hundred-acre farms. For a big company like Whole Foods, economies of scale, specialization, and mechanization are more important than values of diversity and interconnection.
Two giant growers sell most of the fresh organic produce from California. One of them, Earthbound Farm, came up with the idea of selling washed, bagged salad mixes. This undercut the popularity of iceberg lettuce. They pioneered the use of washing and packing machines, and of filling salad bags with inert gases to extend shelf life.
Sales exploded with orders from Costco, Walmart, so the company had to scale up. It partnered with conventional farms, which helped convert more acreage to organic.
However its production and delivery methods deviate from organic principles. While Earthbound’s produce is grown organically, it goes into a conventional supply chain once it’s picked. Also, it takes a lot of energy to wash, package, and chill bagged lettuce, as well as to transport it.
Smaller organic farmers think this process should not be called organic. They are moving beyond the government’s definition of organic, to focus on quality, labor standards, local distribution, and true sustainability.
While traditional organic farmers sell their food directly to local customers and answer their questions first hand, Big Organic-supplied supermarkets like Whole Foods take a different approach to customer communication.
Products sold at Whole Foods carry labels with pastoral descriptions intended to make you feel good about buying the food. For instance, the labeling on the “range-fed” steak describes it as coming from a steer “living in beautiful places.”
Such descriptive labels are showing up more frequently in supermarkets, but Whole Foods goes the farthest. Milk is described as coming from cows enjoying lives “free from unnecessary fear and distress.” An organic chicken identified as “Rosie” comes from Petaluma Poultry, which claims its “farming methods strive to create harmonious relationships in nature…”
Supermarket “stories” invite shoppers to fill in most of the details and imagine they’re participating in a pastoral tradition of farms like those described in stories for children. But Whole Foods depends on industrial methods to get the volume and variety of foods its consumers expect. It uses the grocery industry’s standard regional distribution system encompassing warehouses and huge farms.
Two big corporate organic growers in California — Earthbound Farms and Grimmway Farms — dominate the U.S. market for organic produce. Earthbound grows 80 percent of the organic lettuce sold in the U.S.
When you trace some Whole Food items backward, you find:
Whole Foods’ labels, brochures, and certification systems may appear to be informative. But the effusive descriptions can be misleading and make it hard to decide among competing products.
Pollan created a Big Organic meal using Ingredients from Whole Foods, including:
The meal for three cost $34. Except for the asparagus, which was tasteless, the food tasted better and probably was healthier than conventionally produced food due to lacking chemical residues.
Research suggests organic food items like those in the meal also may be more nutritious. Organically grown fruits and vegetables have higher levels of several nutrients, including vitamin C and recently discovered polyphenols (antioxidant, antimicrobial elements).
At the same time, organic doesn’t automatically mean a food is healthy, especially if it’s heavily processed. But in general, large and small organic are both better for your health and the environment. They use no pesticides, there’s no nitrogen runoff, no hormones getting into groundwater, no antibiotics, no soils damages, and no government subsidies.
But when scaled up, Big Organic has downsides:
In contrast to the huge organic producers that supply Whole Foods, Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia is a small farm operating on organic principles of sustainability, diversity, and simplicity (no synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or antibiotics; and local marketing).
Owned and operated by Joel Salatin, Polyface Farm provides an alternative to the industrial food chain, by farming according to the logic of nature rather than by industrial principles. According to the author, this is what a true organic farm looks like.
The farm raises chickens, beef, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits, as well as tomatoes, sweet corn and berries, on 100 acres of pasture, abutted by another 450 acres of forest.
The foundation of the farm’s food chain is grass of various types, in the way corn is the foundation of the industrial food chain starting on an Iowa farm. Animals and crops are rotated through the various pastures and benefit in a symbiotic way.
Pastures are grazed twice by beef cattle, followed by hens that eat bugs in the manure and spread the manure around (acting as a cleanup crew). Chickens also add their own fertilizer (nitrogen). Finally the pastures are cut for hay.
By the end of a season, the grass has produced 25,000 pounds of beef, 50,000 pounds of pork, 12,000 broilers, 800 turkeys, 500 rabbits, and 30,000 dozen eggs.
The pasture is not degraded in the process; it is improved, becoming lusher, more diverse, and more fertile, with more earthworms. The process shows that farming in accordance with nature is not a zero sum proposition in which humans benefit but nature is diminished.
Animals eat grass and we eat the animals. The Old Testament describes the connection this way: “All flesh is grass.” But the industrial food chain overlooks or eliminates grass as a component.
The human connection with grass began with our ancestors. They encouraged the growth of grass to attract and fatten animals. They set fire to it periodically to prevent trees and shrubs from taking over, and to improve the soil. This helped the grass, which then helped the animals and the humans.
Annual grasses (corn, wheat, rice) developed, which humans could eat, and we eventually put all our energy into growing and harvesting them. Our appreciation for the polyculture of grass waned.
At Polyface Farm, grass of many types — bluegrass, timothy, fescue, clover — underlies the farm’s success.It’s supported by soil teeming with fungi, bacteria, insects, earthworms, and voles. (Healthy soil digests decomposed matter.)
The grass must be managed effectively, which requires local knowledge and action, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach of industrial farming using machines and chemicals for greatest efficiency.
Salatin practices “management intensive grazing,” which involves rotating animals through different pastures at various intervals. This requires using portable fencing and moving animals every day, as well as understanding how grass grows and responds to grazing.
To manage pastures effectively, it’s necessary to keep track of the grazing and stages of growth and recovery of each section, which varies according to the amount of rainfall and season. A farmer knows the average amount of forage a cow will eat in a day (a cow day) and calculates how many cow days each pasture will provide. Grazing the optimal number of cows at the optimal moments yields tremendous amounts of grass while also improving the quality of the land.
Polyface Farm achieves as much as 400 cow days per acre (compared to the county average of 70), in effect expanding the farm without adding new acreage.
Among the benefits of good management:
If the 16 million acres now being used to grow corn to feed animals became well-managed pasture, that would remove 14 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere a year. This is comparable to removing four million cars from the road.
Poor pasture management causes problems.
Grass’s contrast with corn couldn’t be sharper.
In a similarly intricate way, Polyface Farm manages its animals. The various animals and the grass are interdependent, benefiting each other and the land while producing food.
Chicken pens housing broilers are moved around the farm regularly — 10 feet per day — so they can eat grass and fertilize it with their manure; the birds avoid pathogens, and get nutrients from the varied grasses plus bugs, but are moved before their pecking and manure can destroy it.
There’s also an eggmobile (portable chicken coop) housing laying hens and their eggs, which is moved into areas that cattle have recently vacated. The chickens clean up the insects, larvae and parasites from the cow manure, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease.
The hens get protein from eating the grubs and insects, and lay tastier, higher quality eggs. The cows don’t have to be treated with chemicals to kill parasites.
Another example of interdependence is the way the farm handles rabbits for sale as meat to restaurants. The rabbits live in cages suspended over wood chips, in which their manure and urine collects; chickens scratch in it, which helps turn it into compost.
The farm grazes turkeys in a grape orchard, where they eat bugs, cut the grass, and fertilize the vines.
Manure that collects in cattle sheds, where cows spend winter, is layered with straw and corn, which ferments; then pigs are allowed to root in the manure for the corn, and this aerates it, creating a rich compost in a few weeks. This can later be spread on pastures, which will enhance the grasses, which feed the cows, chickens, and turkeys.
In such an interconnected system, you can’t change one thing without changing the others.
For example, if the farm added more chickens, their nitrogen-based manure would be too much for the pastures to handle and it would kill the grass. Also, the farmer would need to add more cattle to produce the manure and insects to feed the chickens, or their eggs wouldn’t be as good.
The farm is more like an organism than a machine; it works only on a smaller scale.
Natural systems are efficient in a different way from industrial systems; for instance, in nature, there’s no waste problem. One animal’s waste becomes another’s food source; turning cow manure into eggs is efficient, as is using the same pasture repeatedly to produce different things: cows, pigs, broilers, eggs, turkeys.
In an industrial system, simplified by creating a monoculture, the only way efficiency is measured is by yield.
But natural systems’ efficiencies grow from interdependence. You need multiple species complementing each other, to eliminate the need for fertilizer, pesticides, drugs, etc. The animals accomplish this by behaving naturally, doing what they are designed to do.
Pastoral farming is labor intensive compared to the more mechanized and standardized industrial farming system.
Polyface Farm processes and packages its own chickens. The government allows farmers to process a few thousand birds on farms, but most other food animals must be processed in a state- or federally-inspected facility.
Polyface Farm does its processing in an open-air assembly line of steel sinks and water tanks, which customers can watch if they want to. Birds are placed upside down into metal funnels or cones, with their heads sticking out the bottom of the cone. Their necks are quickly cut and they are bled out.
The federal regulations for processing facilities are rigid and specific — for instance, walls must be painted white, with screen doors and windows. Processors are required to provide an exclusive bathroom for the USDA inspector.
Regulations are one-size-fits all and are difficult to apply to small organizations. For instance, because Salatin’s process is open-air, conducted in an open-sided building, it lacks white-painted walls.
However, there are no federal standards for food-borne pathogens (if there were, inspectors would have to test and order recalls of meat.) Yet government research has shown that the main cause of food-borne illness in the U.S. is centralized production and processing, plus long-distance transportation of meat. Irradiation rather than decentralization is the solution.
Slaughtering animals can be dehumanizing to the people doing it and inhumane to animals if it becomes routine. Polyface Farm processes chickens only a few days a month, so it doesn’t become routine. Salatin says this keeps workers focused on what they’re doing, so they can be as careful and humane as possible.
Salatin believes transparency is a better guarantor of a clean and humane process than regulations or irradiation.
The industrial food chain is long: A typical food item travels 1,500 miles. By contrast, Polyface’s grass-based food chain is short. For example, most of its chickens are eaten a half-dozen miles from the farm — or at most, a half-day’s drive.
The farm doesn’t ship long-distance or sell to supermarkets, or wholesale its food. It sells its products via five methods: direct sales at the farm store, farmers’ markets, urban buying clubs, local stores, or direct delivery to restaurants.
Polyface couldn’t function without this local food economy. Salatin calls his sales methods relationship marketing — direct interaction between farmer and customer.
In terms of marketing, the main differences between local and industrial food are price and availability of information on quality.
With on-farm sales, the farmer, rather than middlemen, receives most of the consumer’s dollar. Local food is honestly priced (its price reflects the true cost of production), meaning it costs more but you’re not paying additionally for pollution and health costs, or through a government subsidy.
The only information available on industrialized products is price, although there’s a barcode, which isn’t understandable to consumers. The USDA message is that all meat inspected by the government is of the same quality (which isn’t true).
While industrial food is sold on the basis of price, buyers of local organic food can discuss quality and get information directly from the farmer. With more information people might make different decisions on what they buy.
Small producers focus on exceptional quality and keeping expenses down. For instance, they save money by using word of mouth and reputation rather than advertising. They educate customers about seasonality: For example, eggs are better in summer, when chickens have a natural diet, than winter.
As consumers we can still decide what to eat and what sort of food chain to participate in. Supporting a local food chain supports a pastoral environment and values, but this type of shopping requires more effort than shopping at a supermarket or Whole Foods. Preparing fresh food requires more time and effort as well.
A local food economy requires not only a different kind of producer, but also a different kind of customer, who is willing to give up convenience and spend time on shopping and preparation to get better quality food.
Pollan’s meal based on a local food chain consisted of two chickens from Polyface Farm, plus eggs and sweet corn from the farm.
The chickens were slow roasted over a wood fire (apple twigs) and brined. Although the meal was a common one, the grass-fed version tasted better than typical supermarket ingredients, and had greater nutritional value.
Research has shown that pastures produce more nutritional chickens, eggs, beef, and milk. Meat from pasture-raised animals contains more beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid from grass, and higher levels of Omega-3. Also, it has less saturated fat, and more unsaturated fat, which is better for us.
There are better ratios of Omega-3s to Omega-6s. Omega-3 helps blood to clot, while Omega-6 helps blood flow; Omega-3 is an anti-inflammatory, while Omega-6 is inflammatory. Having the right balance is important to health. The changes in the composition of fats in our modern diet may account for the increase in diseases such as diabetes, obesity, cardiac, and eye diseases.
The pasture-raised chicken in the meal tasted much better — more like chicken than fast-food or factory-produced chicken. When chickens are raised naturally, they taste like chickens. The other foods raised naturally — corn and salad — also tasted better.
The fact, demonstrated by alternative farmers, that the way food is raised affects its nutritional quality and taste belies the premise of the industrial food chain, which is that all foods are the same — for instance, that one egg is the same as another, or all chickens are the same.
By way of contrast with industrial and organic eating, Pollan set out to create a meal entirely from foraged ingredients: those he had hunted, grown, and gathered himself. He planned to gather wild mushrooms, exemplifying the rewards and risks of eating from the wild, and to go hunting.
Today most of our hunting, gathering, and food-growing is a hobby or form of recreation. But there are lessons to be learned from exploring these activities.
Foraging (both hunting and gathering) is the food chain that natural selection designed us for. As we switched from food found in nature to food produced by agriculture, we’ve developed new traits, for instance greater adult tolerance for lactose. But we still retain the traits of foragers: we’re predators and our bodies are designed to eat meat as well as plants.
Anthropologists say that typical hunter-gatherers worked about 17 hours a week to find food in nature, and they were healthier and lived longer than they did after adopting agriculture. One theory for why they gave up this comparatively easy lifestyle in favor of labor-intensive agriculture is: humans had to switch to agriculture because they ruined hunting by killing off too many animals and ruining their habitats.
By exploring our earliest food chain, the author sought to learn more about the ecology and ethics of eating than could be learned from buying food from a supermarket or farm. For instance:
Pollan also wanted to:
As a guide, he enlisted the help of a local chef in Northern California, whose passions besides cooking were hunting and foraging. He also signed up for hunter education and shooting practice, in order to get a hunting license. He had to pass a 14-hour class and a 100-question multiple choice test.
But before going hunting for wild pig, he explored the ethics of killing and eating animals.
Americans are confused when it comes to how we treat animals. We vacillate between sentiment and cruelty. We treat dogs as family members, yet consign pigs, which are just as intelligent as dogs, to suffer on factory farms.
We handle our confusion and doubts about eating animals by distancing ourselves from how animals are raised and processed for food.
Most people would rather not know what it takes to get meat on their dinner plates. The meat industry understands that the more people know about the slaughter of animals for food, the less meat they’re likely to eat. So the industry keeps its practices under wraps and behind factory walls, and the public doesn’t ask many questions.
In the past, our cultural traditions and rituals involving the slaughter of animals resolved any moral dilemmas around killing and eating them, thus allowing people to eat meat without agonizing about it. We mostly lack such traditions today.
Today most people remain deliberately ignorant of how we process animals for food, and they continue eating meat. As an alternative, a relative few become vegetarians.
But there are signs of a broader backlash against eating animals:
One argument for eating animals is that we have the right to use animals for our own ends because they are less intelligent than humans. Yet we believe all humans are morally equal although some are less intelligent than others. We don’t discriminate against people on the basis of differing characteristics or interests.
Another argument for eating animals is that animals eat other animals too. But it would be problematic to base our moral code on the laws of nature, where murder and rape take place too. Also, unlike humans, animals must kill to survive.
If humans differ from animals morally speaking, they also have interests in common with animals, especially the interest of avoiding pain. The question is whether animals suffer, not whether they can talk or reason the way we do. They do suffer, and the suffering they experience at our hands (greater today than at any time in history) is a problem.
Our choice to inflict a lifetime of suffering on animals so we can eat meat (which we don’t actually need for survival) creates an ethical conflict. To resolve it, we typically either ignore and deny how we treat animals, or we stop eating them.
While he debated these questions, Pollan became a temporary vegetarian. But he found that to be problematic too, because:
Whether our interest in eating animals trumps their interest in living hinges on the question of suffering.
One philosopher argues there’s a difference between pain, which animals experience, and suffering, which require a self-consciousness, which few animals possess. Suffering is pain accompanied by feelings such as self-pity and dread. But the consensus among scientists is that higher animals are wired much as we are.
However CAFOs treat animals as machines incapable of pain. This requires denial of their nature. For example, in response to the stress created when their instincts are blocked, the confined animals resort to cannibalism, self-mutilation, and other stress behaviors. CAFOs in turn treat stress as an economic problem, and clip beaks and dock tails in response, which creates further pain and stress for the animals. A CAFO defines animal life as protein production.
Yet animals on other kinds of farms live differently; animals at Polyface Farm live according to their instincts.
A good life for a domestic animal actually requires association with humans who feed, protect, and care for them, and advance their interests (and ours) through breeding. Domestic animals evolved in conjunction with humans because they were more likely to thrive as a species that way than in the wild.
Killing some animals can benefit a species. Eliminating weak individuals, as wolves do, strengthens a species by improving the gene pool. Predation is natural and has been good for many species, whether the predators are other animals or humans. Also, killing invasive species helps native species.
Animal rights advocates look only at what’s good for individual animals, and therefore oppose killing them. But they fail to consider the entire species’ interest in survival and in the health of its habitat. Saving individuals has less impact long term than saving an endangered species or restoring habitat.
The human idea of individual rights isn’t applicable to nature.
Accepting an animal rights ideology requires denying our human impact on nature.
Even a vegan’s interests conflict with those of animals. Farm equipment harvesting grain kills mice, woodchucks and fawns; pesticides, windmills, tall buildings, and cars kill songbirds or animals.
Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. Replacing rangeland with grain would displace and kill animals. If the goal is to avoid killing animals we should probably eat only the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-fed beef.
If our concern is the health of nature, then eating animals is an ethical thing to do because:
It’s not the principle of eating animals that’s the problem — it’s the practice. People who care about animals should work to ensure a swift and painless death, so that they don’t suffer. They should work for animal welfare rather than animal rights.
A wild animal that’s been cleanly shot has suffered far less than has the pig raised on a factory farm.
The factory farm industry is a relatively new idea and is specific to America. No other country has so thoroughly industrialized the process of raising and slaughtering food animals. Efficiency is the priority, with cruelty a side-effect.
Here’s how it works. At the National Beef Plant in Liberal, Kansas, animals are led up a steep ramp and through a blue door.
The extent to which the animals may suffer is hidden from the public eye. By contrast, Salatin’s open-air process for slaughtering chickens lets customers see and decide for themselves if they want to. Even if customers don’t want to see the operation, maintaining transparency helps ensure the chickens are killed humanely.
A third option besides denial or giving up meat is being informed about what goes on and influencing the process. If people could see what happens in big slaughterhouses, maybe they would choose smaller ones. If the walls of our meat industry were transparent, we would likely change how we do things.
Meat would get more expensive if efficiency were given up to treat animals humanely — and maybe we’d eat animals with the consciousness and respect they deserve.
Columbus and the Spanish explorers brought pigs to the new world, and the animals ended up flourishing in the wild. Wild boar in many states are now considered a pest and destroyer of forests, farmland, and vineyards. They can also be vicious to other animals.
Since wild pigs are a nuisance and damage the environment — and are known to taste particularly good — Pollan decided to go pig hunting in northern California. He initially had anxiety about hunting a pig, but ended up enjoying it.
As he stalked the woods, his attention to signs and sounds became acute, and shut out everything else. He developed “hunter’s eye,” which is a sharp focus on any movement that filters out distractions.
He had these insights from the experience.
Pollan ended his first day of hunting empty-handed because he wasn’t ready to take a shot when the opportunity presented itself. He had neglected to pump his rifle there was no bullet in the chamber when he spotted pigs. Pumping the rifle at the moment he located several pigs would have alerted and scared them away, so he let his companion take the first shot, and get a pig.
Every hunt results in the creation of a story. It starts taking shape immediately after the first shot. Hunters tell each other the story to make sense of the chaos of the moment and to resolve ambiguous feelings.
In the end, the story was that Pollan wasn’t ready this time. He felt he had to go hunting again; he couldn’t truly hunt without firing his gun. Plus his goal was to take responsibility for killing an animal he ate.
They went hunting again about a month later and he shot a pig. He considered it a gift, and felt gratitude. He didn’t feel remorse as he had expected to, but rather felt elation and accomplishment — and he posed for a photo with the kill. Field dressing the animal, which weighed 190 pounds, was a messy and somewhat disturbing process.
Later, when he looked at the photos of himself with the pig, he felt shame because the photos reflected his joy in the killing, which was one of the things he had always despised about hunting. His different feelings immediately after killing the pig versus those later on reflected the ambiguity of hunting: hunters feel accomplishment at succeeding in a role humans are biologically designed for; but they also identify with the animal they killed.
Pollan ultimately felt good about participating in the earliest food chain, which sustained humans for thousands of years.
People garden and gather mushrooms to feel self-reliant, as though we still have the skills to provide for ourselves.
Gardening and mushroom hunting, however, are very different ways of being in nature. The gardener divides the world into two parts: cultivated and uncultivated, domestic and wild.In a garden, plants present their fruits (to ensure propagation). In mushroom hunting, the species you’re looking for is hard to find; it literally hides in nature.
Mushrooms are wild and pursue an agenda different from yours; some of them can kill you. That’s why looking for mushrooms is called hunting rather than gathering or harvesting.
We actually know little about fungi, the third kingdom of life. Books and articles about mushrooms pose as many questions as answers. We don’t know even basic things. We don’t know what rules govern their creation and growth.
Here’s are some of the things we do know:
A mysticism surrounds mushrooms; some associate their powers with the moon.
Mushroom hunters, like fisherman, are reticent about their best sites, and Pollan at first had trouble finding someone who would take him mushroom hunting. Then the man who took him pig hunting also took him to hunt for chanterelle mushrooms.
Chanterelles grow under old oak trees, hiding from view in the leaf litter. They’re hard to see and you have to sharpen your focus or “get your eyes on” before you can see them. Eventually Pollan started seeing them and gathered a few.
Wild mushrooms underscore the omnivore’s dilemma: figuring out which ones are safe to eat. Community and culture answer this question. Mushroom hunters teach novices by showing them the right mushrooms. After a hunting trip with experienced mushroom hunters, the author had confidence to go hunting for chanterelles on his own.
Hunting morel mushrooms is different from hunting chanterelles. It’s a more competitive pursuit. Pollan found someone to take him hunting or “burn morels,” which grow profusely in pine forests that have been burned over by wildfires.
People have been gathering morels in burned forests for a long time; in Bavaria, they once set fires in order to harvest morels. No one is sure exactly why morels come up after a fire.
You hunt for them in steep, rocky terrain in variable weather (usually hot or rainy). Hunters keep in touch via walkie-talkies, and mark positions via GPS. It can be very competitive with foragers rushing to get to the best spots first. Some “professionals” make a living selling morels to restaurants or to brokers.
In California, morels come up when the snow melts and the soil warms. They’re difficult to spot and hunters lie on the ground to look for them at that level.
You see them by fixing in your mind the size, shape, and image of what you are looking for and they seem to pop out of your visual field. The pop-out effect is a visual phenomenon confirmed and studied by researchers.
On that trip, the author and his companions found 60 pounds of morels worth $20 a pound, and which they quickly sold.
Pollan’s hunter-gatherer food chain meal was the “perfect” meal because it fully answered the question of where the food came from. It met the following criteria:
The ingredients for the meal, which required considerable preparation, were:
Preparing and consuming the meal became a way of giving thanks to nature, of saying grace. The author told guests the story of each item, which could be done because the food chain was transparent and short. Also, the meal connected its eaters to Northern California’s nature and culture.
Nothing had a barcode or price tag, although Pollan knew firsthand the true cost. Its creation didn’t diminish nature because nature could replace each item (in contrast to the debts we incur when eating industrially, without thinking).
When you compare the foraged meal with the McDonald’s meal:
In the past, eating took place in the context of family and culture, where everyone knew what was involved. Because of the way our food is produced and consumed today, we have mostly lost this context.
Although it is impossible to depend on a hunter-gatherer food chain for our meals today, we can become more active participants in our food production: We should ask what we’re eating, where it came from, how it got to our table, and what its true cost is.
Ten years after publication of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, determining where our food comes from is still a daunting question, but some aspects of our food systems are changing in ways that are helping us to understand what we are eating and make better choices.
Since The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published in 2006, additional writers and books have stirred the public’s curiosity about where their food comes from. They include Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser and Food Politics, Marion Nestle.
The public’s attitude toward food and farming shows signs of shifting. Food safety problems have drawn attention, including mad cow disease and E. coli contamination in hamburger. Also, food-related health problems have grown, especially obesity and Type II diabetes.
Significant changes have taken place in food and farming since 2006.
We are beginning to value transparency and simplicity when it comes to food. Support is growing for the idea of a national food policy that would ensure everyone has access to healthy food, and that government farm policies no longer undermine our health and environment.
Nonetheless, commodity corn still dominates food production: The amount of farmland devoted to corn has grown by 12 million acres since 2006.
But there’s reason for cautious optimism — industrial policies and practices increasingly are being challenged by food activists and better-informed consumers determined to reform the system.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma refers to the evolutionary conundrum: How do we decide what’s safe and healthy to eat?
What is your biggest concern or anxiety about deciding what you should eat? How can you lessen that concern?
In choosing what to eat, what’s most important to you in making your selections? (Factors could include: ingredients, source of the food, quality (freshness, taste), health benefits, convenience, and price.
Would different priorities benefit you? In what way?
Many of our foods are highly processed and contain synthetic ingredients. One of the most common and harmful to your health is the sweetener high-fructose corn syrup, which contributes to obesity and Type II diabetes.
Look at the labels of some products currently in your home. How many contain high-fructose corn syrup? What could you replace them with?
What other synthetic ingredients do you see on your labels? Which would you prefer to eliminate?
Shopping locally and eating minimally processed foods benefits our health and environment. What are some locally produced foods you could buy right now that you haven’t been?
Our government’s long-standing agriculture policy of encouraging overproduction of corn has led to many problems, including farm bankruptcies, toxic waste, cruelty to animals, and unhealthy food options.
How have industrial food production practices affected you or your community? Is there anything you would like to see changed?
What are some ways you can become better informed about where your food comes from?
How can you use the information to make choices that are better for you and your environment?
What are some ways you might influence food policy?