The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollen

• American paradox – unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthy.
• Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal.
  • The lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientists and the marketer, for whom the omnivore’s dilemma is not so much a dilemma as an opportunity.
• Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since a creature that could conceive of eating anything (including, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. We are not only what we eat, we are how we eat, too.
• A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.
  • In fact, the whole history of agriculture is a progressive history of simplification, as humans reduced the biodiversity of their landscapes to a small handful of chosen species.
  • By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence – by definition the very opposite of simplification.
• Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.
  • The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked – nature into culture.
  • Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna.
  • Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
    • The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the U.S. (about as much as automobiles do).
    • As in so many other realms, nature’s logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism, one in which cheap energy has always been a given.
  • By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet’s composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.
• Omnivores are torn between two conflicting emotions, each with its own biological rationale:
  • Neophobia – a sensible fear of ingesting anything new – the comfort of the familiar
  • Neophilia – a risky but necessary openness to new tastes – the pleasure of variety
  • Evolutionary trade-off between big brains (human) and big guts (koala) – two very different evolutionary strategies for dealing with the question of food selection.

Industrial: Corn

• Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn. (97% of what a corn plant is comes from the air, 3% from the ground.)
  • Corn is a C-4 plant.
  • Corn is the most efficient way to produce energy, soybeans the most efficient way to produce protein.
• Corn’s dual identity, as food and commodity, has allowed many of the peasant communities that have embraced it to make the leap from a subsistence to a market economy.
• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) – “They are messing with three billion years of evolution.”
• Hybridization represents a far swifter and more efficient means of communication, or feedback loop, between plant and human; by allowing humans to arrange its marriages, corn can discover in a single generation precisely what qualities it needs to prosper.
  • Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress.
• All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acid; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink.
  • Nitrogen as supplying life’s quality, while carbon provides the quantity.
• These days the price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar beneath the true cost of growing it, a boon for everyone but the corn farmer.
• The invention of commodity grain severed any link between the producer of a foodstuff and its ultimate consumer.

The Feedlot

• CAFOs – Confined Animal Feeding Operations
• When animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist…One of the most striking thing animal feedlots do is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all).
  • CAFOs transform what at the proper scale would be a precious source of fertility – cow manure – into toxic waste.
  • For half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth.
  • Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn, a compact source of caloric energy, get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like. Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass.
  • The contemporary beef cow is being selected for the ability to eat large quantities of corn and efficiently convert it to protein without getting too sick.
  • Much like modern humans, modern cattle are susceptible to a set of relatively new diseases of civilization.
    • What keeps the feedlot animal healthy – or healthy enough – are antibiotics.
    • Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them.
• Growing meat on grass makes superb ecological sense: It is a sustainable, solar-powered food chain that produces food by transforming sunlight into protein.
• As cannibal tribes have discovered, eating the flesh of one’s own species carries special risks of infection.
• Ratio of feed to gain determines efficiency.
  • Chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat; cow 8 to 1 – thus chicken costs less than beef.
• We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens in it also happens to us.
  • The unnaturally rich diet of corn that undermines a steer’s health fattens his flesh in a way that undermines the health of the humans who will eat it.
  • The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you are eating has itself eaten.
• Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now, forgetting.

The Processing Plant

• Wet milling – an industrial version of digestion – a good is broken down through a series of steps that includes the application of physical pressure, acids, and enzymes.
  • A complex food is reduced to simple molecules, mostly sugars.
  • Wet milling is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calories of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.
  • Processed food has become largely supply-driven business – the business of figuring out clever ways to package and market the glut of commodities coming off the farm and out of the wet mills.
• The dream of liberating food from nature is as old as eating. People began processing food to keep nature from taking it back.
  • Corn has done more than any other species to help the food industry realize the dream of freeing food from nature’s limitations and seducing the omnivore into eating more of a single plant than anyone would ever have thought possible.
• If the industry hope to grow faster than the population, it has to figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same 1,500lb of food (our annual consumption), or entice them to actually eat more (creating while new eating occasions i.e. protein bar or Pop-Tart) than that.

There is money to be made in food, unless you are trying to grow it. – Food Industry Executive

• The further a product’s identity moves from a specific raw material – that is, the more processing steps involved – the less vulnerable is its processor to the variability of nature.
  • As Tyson understood, you want to be selling something more than a commodity, something more like a service: novelty, convenience, status, fortification, lately even medicine.
  • Evidently we are moving into the fourth age of food processing, in which the processed food will be infinitely better (i.e. contain more of whatever science has determined to be the good stuff) than the whole foods on which they are based.
  • Due to our current reductionist premise – that food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrients…We breakdown plants and animals into their component parts and then reassemble them into high-value-added food systems.

The Consumers

• The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition – a billion – had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition – 800 million.
• Thrifty gene – our hunter-gatherer ancestors feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to buildup reserves of fat against future famine.
  • Useful adaptation in an environment of food scarcity and unpredictability; disaster in an environment of fast food abundance – our bodies are reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.
• Like most warm blooded creatures, humans have inherited a preference for energy-dense foods, a preference reflected in the sweet tooth shared by most mammals.
  • A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose (the only type of energy the brain can use).
  • The adult human brain accounts for 2% of our body weight but consumes 18% of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.
• The power of food science lied in its ability t break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system.

The Meal: Fast Food

• Like other comfort foods, fast food supplies (besides nostalgia) a jolt of carbohydrates and fat, which, some scientists now believe, relieve stress and bathe the brain in chemicals that make it feel good.
• Vegetarians advocate eating “low on the food chain” – every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten, which is why in any ecosystem there are only a fraction as many predators as there are prey.

Pastoral: Grass

• Polyface Farm
• Healthy soil digests the dead to nourish the living – earth’s stomach.

It is impossible to take a decidedly Eastern, connected, holistic product, and sell it through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system. – Joel Salatin

We are going to have to refight the battle to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. – Joel Salatin

• The Whole Foods shopper feels that buy buying organic he is engaging in authentic experiences and imaginatively enacting a return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact.
  

  Enjoy the best of both worlds – the sophisticated order of art and the simple spontaneity of nature. – Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

• The short-term boosts in yield fertilizers delivered could not be sustained; since the chemicals would eventually destroy the soil’s fertility, today’s high yields were robbing the future.

Artificial Manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally artificial men and women. – Sir Albert Howard

• The notion of imitating the whole natural system stands in stark opposition to reductionist science, which works by breaking such systems down into their component parts in order to understand how they work and then manipulating them – one variable at a time.
• But in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential.
• Management-intensive grazing aka rotational grazing
  • Grazing the optimal number of cattle at the optimal moment to exploit the blaze of growth – yields tremendous amounts of grass, all the while improving the quality of the land.
• Grass farmers grow animals – for meat, egg, milk and wool – but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat.
  • A polyculture of grass, with its wide diversity of photosynthesizes exploiting every inch of land as well as every moment of growing season, captures more solar energy and therefore produces more biomass than a cornfield; also, only the kernels are harvested from a cornfield, whereas virtually all the grass grown in a pasture find its way into the rumen.

All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a good product that can then be turned into high-value human energy. – Allan Nation

• Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. It prizes consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale.
  • Grain is the closest thing in nature to an industrial commodity: storable, portable, fungible, ever the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Since it can be accumulated and traded, grain is a form of wealth. It is a weapon too – the nature with the biggest surpluses of grain have always exerted power over the ones in short supply.
• Attributes of a wonderful tent dweller – always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.
• A symbiotic relationship – in each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore; they also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal’s droppings, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease.
  • Left to their own devices, a confined flock of chickens will  eventually destroy any patch of land, by pecking the grass down to its roots and poisoning the soil with their extremely “hot”, or nitrogenous, manure.

It’s all connected. This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. Farming is not adapted to large scale operations because of the following reasons: farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die. – Joel Salatin

• The idea is not the slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species “fully express their psychological distinctiveness.”
  • What distinguishes Salatin’s system is that it is designed around the natural predilections of the pig rather than around the requirements of a production system to which the pigs are then conformed (as a protein machine with flaws).
  • When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens too.

• When a livestock farmer is willing to practice complexity – to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as they evolved to – he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat.
  • Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.
  • A diversified farm will produce much of its own fertility and its own pest control.
  • Indeed, that’s why these chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing.

• A holon (Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine) is an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained while, and from another a dependent part.
• Horrible as it is to contemplate, it’s not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency.
• There’s been a tremendous brain drain in rural America – Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside.
• The USDA is being used by the global corporate complex to impede the clean-food movement. They aim to close down all but the biggest meat processors, and to do it in the name of biosecurity. Every government study to date has shown that the reasons we’re having an epidemic of food-borne illness in this country is centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transportation of food.
• Americans today spend less on food (10%, down from 20% in the 1950s), as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world.
  • When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is sold strictly on the basis of price.
  • Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.
• …an increasingly globalized economy that turns anything it touches into a commodity, reaching its tentacles wherever in the world a food can be produced most cheaply, and then transporting it wherever it can be sold most dearly.
• Allan Nation: Artisanal Economics in Stockman Grass Farmer
  • The classic way any industrial producer lower the costs of his product is by substituting capital – new technologies and fossil-fuel energy – for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does.
  • Artisanal production’s competitive strategy is based on selling something special than being the least-cost producer of a commodity.
    • Productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts.
• A global food market…has smudged the bright colors of the seasonal food calendar we all once knew by heart.
• The promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses its ruling every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
• A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.
• …we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.
• Nature never puts all her eggs in one basket – the great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock.
• Too high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow.
  • Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-inflammatory.
• Spirit – the word comes from breath, as in the breath of life.

Personal: The Forest

• Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren’t).
• Like other important forms of play, hunting and gathering promises to teach us (didactic) something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives.
• Disgust – the fear of incorporating offending substances into one’s body – largely culturally determined
  • Disgust is intuitive microbiology.
• Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance is restored.
  

  Cuisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food. – Paul Rozin

• If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture.

Nature does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a beast cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous to do so, and a man deviates from it often to his detriment. Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a basin filled with the best meats, and a cat upon heaps of fruit or grain, although each could very well nourish itself on the food it disdains if it made up its mind to try some. Thus dissolute men abandon themselves to the excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind depraves the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent.– Rousseau

Without virtue, man of all the animal is most unholy and savage, and worst in regard to sex and eating. – Aristotle

• The more anxious we are about eating, the more vulnerable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert’s advice.
  • The success of food marketers in exploiting shifting eating patterns and nutritional fashions undermine the various social structures that surround and steady our eating, institutions like the family dinner.
  • We find ourselves as a species almost back where we started: anxious omnivores struggling once again to figure out what it is wise to eat. Instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of cuisine, or even on the wisdom of our senses, we rely on expert opinion, advertising, government food pyramids, and diet books, and we place our faith in science to sort out for us what culture once did with rather more success.
• It may be that as a civilization we’re groping toward a higher plane of consciousness. It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the point where the practice of eating animals – like our former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings – can now be seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with shame.

Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact…The moral idea is that everyone’s interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of what they are like or what abilities they have…If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose? – Peter Singer

• Equality is based on interests rather than characteristics.
  • The one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.

The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do. – Ben Franklin

• Most domesticated animals cannot survive in the wild; in fact, without us eating them they wouldn’t exist at all!

The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all. – One 19th Century Political Philosopher

• Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development – coevolution
  • Before the arrival of sophisticated predators, the bison did not live in big herds and had much larger, more outstretched horns.

The bison is a human artifact, or it was shaped by the Indians. – Tim Flannery

• A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism – the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.
• The proper measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts.
  • For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to its creaturely character – its essential pigness or wolfness or chickeness – characteristic form of life.

• What happens when the choice is, as Singer writes, between “a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being?”
  • One has to stop eating meat before one can in good conscience decide if one can continue eating meat.

No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering. – Peter Singer

• The odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way (i.e. morals and rights).
• Human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not.
• Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It is very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature?
• What’s wrong with eating animal is the practice, not the principle.
  • If our concern is for the health of nature – rather than, say, the internal consistency of our coral code or the condition of our souls – then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

Hunting: The Meat

Only the hunter, imitating the perpetual alertness of the wild animal, for whom everything is danger, sees everything and sees each thing functioning as facility or difficulty, as risk or protection. – Jose Ortega y. Gasset

• Hunting is the genetic way of being a man and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us.
• Since the successful hunter often ends up with more meat than he or his family could eat before it spoiled, it makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors.

Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal. –  Jose Ortega y. Gasset

• So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too – animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink, and decompose – the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature.

Humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely. The animal remains too close for us not to feel mysterious communication with it. – John Berger

• It’s not as though the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practice, out of view and without emotion, by industrial agriculture.

For one creature to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. – Aldo Leopold

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted. – Jose Ortega y. Gasset

Gathering: The Fungi

• Our ability to identify plants and fungi with confidence, which after all is one of the most critical tools of our survival, involves for more sensory information than can ever be printed on a page; it is, truly, a form of “body knowledge” not easily reduced or conveyed over distance.
• Some of their toxins may simply be fungal tools for doing what fungi do: breaking down complicated organic compounds.
• Mushrooms have little to do with the sun (explanation for the lack of calories). They emerge at night and wither in the light of day.
• Pop-out effect – when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we are hoping to spot – whether its color or pattern or shape (narrow visual filter) – it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command.

The Perfect Meal

• Slow Food vs. fast food
  • The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance.
  • The diversity of one the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry; especially its ability to teases a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape: a monoculture of corn.
  • The first of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future.
    • Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water – of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.

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