Michael Pollan does an excellent job of guiding the reader through the complicated web of American eating. From field to table, and through all of the processing and sometimes shocking stages of production in between, ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ offers a lot of food for thought.
The first section of the book illustrates the industrial food model through the story of corn, from it’s domestication, hybridization, and the mechanics of the large-scale farming operations that now depend upon it, to the appalling subsidies and suspected connection of corn to the rise in obesity rates. Pollan also follows corn through the cattle feedlot industry, and establishes how the use of a grain unnatural to most of the animals we eat is affecting the health of those animals and in turn the health of the human population that relies so heavily upon them.
A few chapters into the corn section, I started reading my food labels even more closely (already such consumer research was a habit) and started declaring the “complex food” corn additives where-ever I found them – B., who was not at the time reading this book, found my “war on corn” to be highly obnoxious. At one point he asked if we’d ever eat corn-on-the-cob again (a sweet summer favorite for us both) because, heaven-forbid, there is corn in that too.
The second section is about the pastoral realm of food production, and the close relationship sustainable farming practices have with grasses. With chapters like “All Flesh is Grass” and “The Animals: Practicing Complexity”, this section of the book confirmed a great deal of what I already believe about food; the closer to the earth you produce it, the healthier it will be for the eaters, the eaten, and the land from which it all comes. Also, this section confirmed my desire to one day have enough land to operate a small sustainable farm, with several crops and varieties of livestock to rotate across the fields and through the woods – truly, Pollans’ investigation of “Grass Farming” and how it uses several ecosystems to sustain the health of the whole, is enlightening and inspiring.
The third and final section is about our more personal connections to our food, and this exploration is set in the forest. With a theme of learning to hunt and gather, Pollan returns to our roots as eaters, and illustrates with clarity the feelings of satisfaction and gratitude that many of us know from having served at the table foods whose origins we understand on a level beyond barcodes – to have gone to the effort of hunting a wild animal, to have navigated the treacherous realm of gathering wild-grown mushrooms or to raise a variety of seasonal produce in one’s own garden, offers a connection to the natural chain that is impossible to replicate in the aisle of the supermarket.
In the end, this is a book about eating, and all of the associated joys and dangers. It is also about the evolution (perhaps in some cases, the devolving too) of our relationship to our food. Pollan even explores the merits and moral claims of vegetarianism and veganism, and the relationship of those lifestyles to our modern food industry. Having grown up in the liberal-foodie stronghold of Northern California, a lot of the conclusions I came to during the reading of this book were not so much new as confirmed, but I did learn a great deal more about how we as a society reached the point of “a national eating-disorder”, and in what ways we might consider changing, for the sake of our health and the health of the planet.
Filed under: citizen earth, for the love of food, reading/writing notes | 2 Comments
Tags: books, food, The Omnivore's Dilemma
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I’m not done yet, and mostly the book confirms what my USDA-hating farmer grandfather told me, but I am still learning things– for instance, I’d never thought about corn in polymers and packaging. Ugh.
Good stuff. I have also written a blog about it here: http://shaunmiller.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/book-review-the-omnivores-dilemma-by-michael-pollan/#comment-665
In response to Pollan, I question the idea that domestication isn’t equal to some master/slave relationship. Pollen suggests that it was actually some evolutionary symbiotic relationship that help both the species. But what if humans forced these animals into domestication? If so, that it seems to weaken Pollan’s ethics of eating meat.