- from The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world – and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a though in the world; this book is probably not for them. There are things in it that wil ruin their appetites. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.”
I have been trying to come to terms with my place on the food chain, and so far, The Omnivore’s Dilemma has given me much to think about. Having read Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by Vandana Shiva, I have already accepted the fact that as someone who consumes goods produced on a worldwide scale, I am a part of the problem, and with the consequences of climate change on the horizon, the problem of who grows what where, and more importantly how, is only going to become more pressing.
More from Michael Pollan, who draws attention to the corn-centered industrial foodchain that has come to power in the West:
“Corn adapted brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.
This shift explains the color of the land: The reason Greene County [where the author has gone to explore this angle of the story] is no longer green for half the year is because the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops to capture a whole year’s worth of sunlight; he has plugged himself into a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.)
Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.“
Simply put, by industrializing agriculture, and growing monoculture crops (corn in particular) while raising meat and dairy animals in highly-concentrated feedlot arrangements, we have disrupted in it’s entireity the efficient and elegant exchange of energy that nearly all life on this planet evolved to participate in. The Naylor farm was once able to produce food energy so efficiently because the fertilizer came from the farm’s animals, who in turn ate the waste from the crop cycle, which they turned into feritilizer for the next round of crops, and so on. Cover crops put nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil, so that when the next round of corn is planted, there are enough resources for it to do what it evolved to do. This sort of energy exchange works best on a small scale, and capitializes on seasonal variety as well as containing and using most of the waste produced in the process.
This book is an eye-opener – the first chapter is all about corn, from it’s unique mutation that allowed for it to become the favored food crop of ancient civilizations in the Americas, to the adaptations undertaken to bring it into an industrialized organization that led to the overproduction of corn, thanks to the warped logic of the almighty dollar. As a result, corn is in nearly every processed food you eat, and animals that evolved to participate in the natural cycle by grazing on grass (cattle) or eating small particulate in watersheds (salmon) are being bred to withstand a diet almost entirely made-up of corn, antibiotics, and animal byproducts. There is very compelling evidence that this may be leading not only to the obesity epidemic the U.S. is now witnessing, but many other, far graver environmental concerns that can only be undone by unplugging from petroleum as the heart of our food chain.
