Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan

It's probably fitting that during the several weeks I spent reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma in fits and snatches, I kept an advertisement for some bold new "power beverage" tucked between its pages as my bookmark. After all, power beverages are - in some strange way, perhaps - food, too. And I suspect that, were I to approach the dilemma of my own omnivorous nature, power beverages might be part of my own diet and therefore a part of whatever arcane formula enters into deciding what I will have for dinner. It is, after all, the same process...

There are food movements afoot. Perhaps you've overheard cocktail party conversations about "slow food." You may have heard rumors about a "local food" movement - people (e.g., Barbara Kingsolver and family) who eat only foodstuffs grown within 75 or 100 miles of their kitchens - even restaurants that adhere to the same local limitations. You've even heard the term, "a fifteen-hundred-mile tomato," right? The inference is that a lot of food is a heckuva lot better traveled than the people who eat it: kiwis from New Zealand, apples from Israel, onions from Peru; all flown to our shores in cargo jets... Heck, I eat plenty of potatoes and I've only been in the very tippy-toe of Idaho, myself. It seems that I'm more a part of the problem than I am of the solution. So, too, is Michael Pollan - and he admits it.


The Omnivore's Dilemma is subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals," a rambling narration in which author Pollan holds forth on evolution, sociology, psychology, politics, and economics. Gee, had he included religion, he'd have covered every subject one isn't suppose to discuss over dinner! Those four meals pretty much box the compass of human cuisine, spanning from one meal whose ingredients "hunter-gatherer" Pollan collected and cooked with his own hands, along the way embarking on his first ever hunting and mushrooming expeditions; all the way to fast food. At the nether end of the spectrum of cuisine lies a lunch bought under the golden arches and consumed at the legal speed limit - a lunch that Pollan traces back to its roots in an Iowa cornfield. About half the calories in his family's meal were the product of a long chain of processed corn, some of it processed biologically by a doomed steer, some of it rendered nearly unpronounceable in the fermenting vats at Cargill and ADM.

The third meal is completely "organic" - a word Pollan finds to have become messily divorced from its original meaning and turned into a lengthy food chain all its own. It's a food chain that's just as long and involved as the one that takes corn from the heartland and turns it into hamburgers eaten in east Texas, cut from a steer born in Wyoming and fattened in a Kansas feedlot (them cows is pretty well-traveled, too...) When a Whole Foods in Chicago sells organic bananas from Ecuador and organic chicken from Marin County, CA, the food chain is every bit as long as the road to Burger King. Once "organic" became big business, Pollan muses, it was all over but the shouting.

Ah, but that fourth meal - that's your new wave. It's a wave that proponents called "sustainable agriculture," a handful of farmers who work the system with nature, not against it; farmers like Joel Salatin at Virginia's Polyface Farms. Salatin's cattle eat grass - the food for which they evolved - as opposed to corn, which makes animals so sickly feedlots have to supply a steady stream of antibiotics to their charges. Chickens eat the grubs that flourish in fresh cow pies, and chicken droppings nourish the grass that cows will eat on their next pass through the pasture. It's a natural cycle and a natural - and more important, sustainable - form of farming, one in which farmers flourish through ingenuity and hard work instead of the consumption of mass quantities of petrochemicals. Oh, and the food? It tastes like the food your grandparents ate: rich and natural, instead of tasting like meat processed to within an inch of its life and then re-injected with "flavors" brewed up in a New Jersey chemical plant.


Ah, but what's the dilemma for omnivores like us? it's a simple question and yet it's complex, because it's a two-part dilemma. The first is "what should I have for dinner?" and that's a question for which our affluent society typically generates myriad answers. The second is how our food should be produced, a question that should concern us far more than it does. A nation that builds so much of its food supply thousands of different (and usually hidden) ways to eat processed corn will have problems when its farmers start selling all their corn to ethanol plants. It already has problems because of the mass quantities of petrochemicals needed to grow all that corn - and not just the diesel a farmer needs to run the tractors, but also the nitrogen used to fertilize the fields.

In a world of plenty, Pollan implies, we are perilously close to starvation. To feed our hunger for asparagus in October, apples in May, and strawberries in December, our society has come pretty close to mortgaging the planet. Dumb move, America...


Now I'm not telling you that Michael Pollan has stumbled on something new: he hasn't; the local agriculture movement is by no means new and "slow food" has long been with us. While the information that Pollan imparts to his readers isn't particularly new, it is compelling - the indirect links between agriculture policy and an obesity epidemic among US children, for instance. While not worthy of a "stop the presses!" it's a tale marvelously told. Pollan (The Botany of Desire), a professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and former executive editor of "Harper's Magazine," spins a wide-ranging narrative that touches on hundreds of topics sometimes closely and sometimes remotely related to the modern US diet. We learn than the Koala, a monovore, devolved from an omnivore, and in the process lost a significant fraction of brain mass. We learn the value of a sweet tooth: the human brain gobbles far more than its share of glucose from our diet, so simple sugars and carbohydrates are essentially "brain food" (are you listening, Atkins dieters?) We learn about why the mere thought of eating certain things disgusts us - a trait evolved to protect us from disease, for one.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is a treasure trove of the history of human cuisine. It's packed with Pollan's musings on a plethora of subjects and liberally sprinkled with humorous asides. And, perhaps best of all, it's beautifully crafted - take this brief glimpse of the aftermath of a forest fire where Pollan and friends were mushroom hunting:

"The forest was gorgeous, and the forest was ghastly. Ghastly because it was, for as far as you could see, a graveyard of vertically soaring trunks that had been shorn of every horizontal, every branch, by the fire... [it] had roared across these mountains, consuming seventeen thousand acres of pine and cedar before a change in the wind direction allowed firefighters to contain it. The fire had been so fierce in places that it had vaporized whole trees. The only reason you knew this was because the flames, still ravenous for wood, had followed the trunks all the way down beneath the forest floor to consume the tree's roots, creating voids that reached deep into the earth...

And yet if you achieved a slightly more aestheticized view of the scene, the same landscape exhibited a tranquil, almost modernist abstraction that was just beautiful. The dead-straight black verticals ordered the hillsides as evenly as bristles on a brush, their steady rhythm varied every so often by a heavy black slash angled weirdly across the grid. The underlying shapes of the land, which was deeply creased into ravines gushing with snowmelt, had the explicitness of a line drawing, everything in view reduced to its formal essentials."


If asked whether The Omnivore's Dilemma had any impact upon me, I'd need only to point to my kitchen. As I write, there's a chicken stewing in my kitchen - a chicken grown and slaughtered at Moore Farms in Watseka, IL, a sustainable farm built using the model of Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm (and personal attention from Salatin). That's one small chicken for my house, a giant leap for mankind. OK, perhaps a small leap - but we all have to start somewhere: why don't you start with The Omnivore's Dilemma?