The Omnivore's Dilemma

I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma a few days ago, and have been mulling it over ever since... It's really a good read, although sometimes slipping into an over-the-top journalistic style that I didn't care for, and sometimes bending the truth a little (i.e. stating that cows naturally seek out certain plants based on their antibacterial properties if they aren't feeling well... a nice thought, but not true). Overall it's well-written, and the fact that it's gotten me thinking about how and what I'm eating at every meal since sure says something.

The basic premise of the book is that Michael Pollan, the author, attempts to trace four different types of meals from producer to plate. He starts with the industrial food chain, which is heavily based on corn, then moves to big organic (Whole Foods Market, Earthbound Farms, Cascadian Farms, etc), then small organic (locally produced and not shipped any farther than a farmer's market), then a "hunt and gather" meal that he made himself, mainly by hunting a wild boar in California and foraging for morels. He touches on so many aspects of food that it's impossible to comment on all of it here, but these are my favorite bits:

"From 1992 to 1997 Gene Kahn [founder of Cascadian Farms] served on the USDA's National Organic Standards Board, where he played a key role in making the standards safe for the organic TV dinner and a great many other organic processed foods. This was no small feat, for Kahn and his allies had to work around the original 1990 legislation, which had prohibited synthetic food additives and manufacturing agents outright. Kahn argued that you couldn't have organic processed foods without synthetics, which are necessary to both the manufacture and preservation of such supermarket products. Several of the consumer representatives on the standards board contended that this was precisely the point, and is no synthetics meant no organic TV dinners, then TV dinners were something organic simply should not do... Kahn responded with an argument rooted in the populism of the market: if the consumer wants an organic Twinkie, then we should give it to him. As he put it to me on the drive back from Cascadian Farm, "Organic is not your mother."... The final standards simply ignored the 1990 law, drawing up a list of permissible additives and synthetics, from ascorbic acid to xanthan gum."

Pollan gives a very nice review of the history of organic foods, and how Big Organic has now squeezed most of the original philosophy out of the organic movement so that it can fit into an industrial market. Industrial organic farms are often just as large as any other industrial farms... They just don't use pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Better for the environment for sure, but the original organic movement aspired to be something more than that. People wanted to be more connected to their food. Is it a stronger connection to buy organic asparagus from Mexico, or to buy traditionally-raised apples from Northfield?

"Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I'm not prepared to dismiss as trivial... We have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished.

This isn't to say we can't or shouldn't transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten- of predation- but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our own identity- of our own animality. (This is one of 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.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex- also now technically unnecessary for reproduction- a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed."

I know this little excerpt sounds like the usual meat-eater's justification of carnivory (we evolved to do it!), but trust me, he explores the question of eating animals much more thoroughly than that. I just liked this paragraph because he gives meat eating a more complex value than I've ever given it. I will say that our obligatory food animal courses in vet school have made me seriously question eating pigs.

"Perhaps because we have no such culture of food in America almost every question about eating is up for grabs. Fats or carbs? Three squares or continuous grazing? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Veg or vegan? Meat or mock meat? Foods of astounding novelty fill the shelves at our supermarket, and the line between a food and a "nutritional supplement" has fogged to the point where people make meals of protein bars and shakes. Consuming these neo-psuedo-foods alone in our cars, we have become a nation of antinomian eaters, each of us struggling to work out our dietary salvation on our own. Is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders? In the absence of any lasting consensus about what and how and where and when to eat, the omnivore's dilemma has returned to America with an almost atavistic force."

Pollan describes the omnivore's dilemma as having the evolutionary advantage of being able to eat just about anything, but the disadvantage of having to figure out what's good to eat. I think about it every time I go to the co-op and see great food right next to a giant aisle of pills and supplements. How can Whole Foods extol the virtues of eating fresh, organic foods while at the same time offering magic missing nutrients guaranteed to prevent cancer, capture free radicals, and do the laundry? Somehow Americans aren't satisfied with getting everything we need from food.. There must be more, right? Acai, mangosteen, dark chocolate. What hole in nutrition are we trying to fill?