PDF Summary:The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

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The Modern Omnivore’s Dilemma

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.

Lack of Food Culture

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...

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• Cows that produce dairy products are tied to milking machines and troughs of corn.
• Ingredients derived from corn dominate supermarket shelves.
  • For example, a chicken nugget contains corn-fed chicken, corn starch, corn flour, corn oil, lecithin, triglycerides, coloring, and citric acid derived from corn.
  • Sodas and fruit drinks are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
  • Beer contains alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn.
  • Corn is a component of coffee creamer, microwave dinners, cake mixes, most condiments, and bologna.
  • Even non-foods use corn-derived substances. Such items include garbage bags, disposable diapers, matches, cleaning products, and cosmetics.

The supermarket has managed to convince us that 45,000 items represent variety, despite how many come from the same plant — corn.

The History of 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...

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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.

Farm Policy Promotes Excess Corn

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...

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The Feedlot

Factory Farms

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:

• Consolidating animals in feedlots leaves more acreage for planting corn.
• The CAFO system has made meat cheap and abundant. Americans used to eat it just a few times a week, but now some eat meat multiple times a day.
• Also, corn-fed beef is marbled, which Americans like. (The USDA’s grading system is...

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• Butter became something better: margarine.
• Fruit juice evolved into fruit drinks.
• Cheese became spreadable.

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,...

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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:

• Three in five Americans are overweight; one in five is obese. Children have a one in three chance of developing diabetes.
• As a result, today’s children may be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy is shorter than that of their parents.
• Obesity also is spreading globally, with “overnutrition” surpassing malnutrition.

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...

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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.

Co-opting a movement

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...

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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.

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• Petaluma Poultry, which produces Rosie the organic chicken, features a shed of 20,000 chickens that have access to a grass strip for only two weeks before slaughter. Few of them use it because they’ve been kept indoors until that point and have fixed habits.

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.

The Big Organic Meal

Pollan created a Big Organic meal using Ingredients from Whole Foods, including:

• Organic chicken (Rosie) with vegetables
• Steamed asparagus for Argentina
• Spring mix salad from California
• For dessert, organic ice cream topped with organic blackberries from Mexico

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...

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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...

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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.

The True Organic Meal

Pollan’s meal based on a local food chain consisted of two chickens from Polyface Farm, plus eggs and sweet corn from the farm.

• Also, locally grown salad
• Local wine
• Chocolate (not local) to be used with eggs to make a soufflé

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,...

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• The ways we’re tied to the species we depend on for food.
• How we decide what’s edible in nature and what’s not.
• How humans fit into the food chain as hunters.

Pollan also wanted to:

• Take conscious responsibility for killing the animals he ate.
• Prepare and eat a meal in full consciousness of all that it involved.

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.

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Arguments for 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...

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• Hunting calls into play the hunter’s animal side. It connects us with our paleolithic origins.

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...

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Chanterelles

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.

Morels

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...

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• The foraged meal wasn’t easy to acquire, but the price was acknowledged and paid; the industrial meal was seemingly cheap and convenient, but incurred costs to the planet, public health, and the future.
• The foraged meal and the industrial meal represent different ways of using nature’s resources.

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.

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Nonetheless, commodity corn still dominates food production: The amount of farmland devoted to corn has grown by 12 million acres since 2006.

• Government subsidy and farm support programs still heavily favor corn and soybeans.
• Big Food still controls the levers of government

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.