The Omnimivore’s Dilemma: A natural history of four meals, by Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma can be simply stated. What shall we eat when the design of our bodies suits us to eat almost anything? Unlike the Koala bear, the cow, or the lion, whose evolutionary experience confines them to a limited number of foods (or even a single species of food) we are free, and freedom has costs, creates anxieties and poses dilemmas… the Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Journalist Michael Pollan’s book is not so much about food or eating as it is an empirical and personal work of philosophy through the lens of our relationship to food. It is a profound exploration of what it means to be a human being situated in an ecosystem that produces the energy that makes life possible.
Pollan sets out to consume and then to understand four meals, from a fast food McDonald’s meal consumed in a car at 65 mph, to meals produced on a Virginia organic farm operated according to principles of sustainable agriculture, to a meal hunted and gathered with his own hands from various California environments.
This is not a book with answers so much as a book that asks good questions and provides some data for thought. Pollan lifts the veil off of meat production and corn production, and, provides multiple Soylent Green moments (Soylent Green is People!), and Matrix moments (we realize that we are plugged into a system that is not real, and that our happiness itself may be an illusion), and asks us to think not just about food but about the entire ecology of our consumption and existence.
Could we live differently? What have we lost in allowing the complete corporatization of our food chain, its subjugation to the principles and demands of the market place? Are industrial eggs at half the price really just as good as more expensive eggs produced on an industrial organic farm or on a fully sustainable organic farm? What is the middle ground, and is there one? Do the densely storied eggs of Whole Foods, richly labeled with poetic images of farm life, represent any kind of useful middle ground at all?
As described by the author I found the example of Polyface farm in Virginia to be truly inspiring and educational. Here is a farm in which almost every input into food production is derived from resources available on the farm, in which the ecology of cattle, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and above all grass is managed and balanced by the farmer. The author swears by the taste of the resulting products, and the ecological balance seems clear. But when Pollan explores the relevance of this kind of farming for people in New York City, grass farmer Joel Salatin replies “Why should New York City exist?”
I’m less horrified by that question than Pollan. I’m reminded of James H. Kunstler’s predictions for the future of dense urban environments in a post peak-oil world. Kunstler sees life returning to small towns spread across the landscape in close connection with agriculture, and I think he’s got a good point. Why indeed should New York City or Southern California, or even Portland Oregon, exist in their current sizes, at the end of 1500 mile petrochemical fueled food supply chains? These urban conglomerations defy reason, and are only made possible by the reality of cheap oil, a reality that is now beginning to diminish. Polyface farms is a sustainable reality. New York City is not a sustainable reality, and surely that kind of dense urbanity has no future as a form of human civilization. (Yet New York City is probably a more sustainable mega-urban environment than any other in the U.S., because of its lower reliance on cars.)
When reading about Polyface farms I was struck by contrast with the Biosphere constructed in Arizona (link) in a vain attempt to create a completely closed self sustaining ecological environment. The Biosphere failed on every level, both as a science experiment and as a tourist trap, and fell into scientific fraud and disgrace. There were many reasons for the failure, but just on aesthetic and poetic terms the idea of enclosing a world inside a corporate glass and steel box can’t compete with the reality of running a real farm beneath the sky. To what corporate and industrial science illusion did the Biosphere project’s founders fall victim, and how did it lead them to imagine it was possible to build a complete ecology inside a glass and steel box? The failure seems mythic in its dimensions. How could they possibly have succeeded and how did they imagine they knew how to do this? Did anyone on the Biosphere team ever so much as try to manage a sustainable farm?
If you want to learn about ecological systems working in harmony to sustain human life you don’t go to a bunch of corporate pseudo-space-scientists and ask them to build you a world inside a box. Go to a farmer like Joel Salatin and watch how he built a working sustainable farm over two generations. Duh! Pollan unplugs us from the matrix of agricultural illusion and makes the real facts of our very existence seem suddenly clear.
Here are a few additional reflections and questions that emerge from my reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
1 – Food Made of Oil
The industrial food system on which we in America depend is so essentially dependent on fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer, and transportation, that we are effectively “eating oil.” Given the increasing cost and decreasing supply of oil, we are likely approaching the end of an era. The 1500 mile food supply chain is surely unsustainable.
2 – Bodies Made of Corn
In another sense, we in America are largely eating and comprised of corn. We are made of corn, more than even the indigenous peoples of America (the original “people of corn.”) Whether having so much of our carbon derived from corn is bad for us is an open question and an issue worthy of further research. The problem of being physically derived from a mono-culture seems worrisome on its face. The very fact that industrial mono-cultures make so many calories available so cheaply is also problematic. At “these prices” it becomes very difficult to sustain higher quality food production.
3 – Industrial Organic: What’s it good for?
“Industrial organic” doesn’t get you very far, but maybe it’s better than nothing. Industrial Organic, the kind of organic farming produce sold at Whole Foods and similar markets may be marginally better for you, but it unlikely to be significantly better for the planet, the farm economy, or the local ecologies from which it emerges. This is because it merely substitutes inputs, but does not change the system of production itself. Organic has been co-opted by industrial agriculture and, arguably, has become part of the problem.
4 – Keeping it Local
Local and sustainable, not organic, are the issues (don’t say buzz words!) that really matter. The Organic definition has become another cog of the the USDA corporate machine, a brand signifying something about the content of the inputs, but changing little about how food is produced. The real and pressing issue is not how we substitute one set of inputs for another slightly healthier one, but how we redesign our entire farming and transportation ecosystem, reducing fossil fuel use (which the force majeure of peak-oil will require soon enough, regardless of our preferences) and rebuilding a sustainable local agricultural landscape populated and managed by intelligent thoughtful farmers who have relationships with the communities that eat their produce. How do we tear out all the barriers to knowing where our food came from and how it is produced, so that we can begin to value and support the kind of agriculture that will connect us again to the earth and recreate a more “organic” (or holistic) existence on this planet?
5 – Taste matters!
Taste matters, in both senses, and the two senses in which it matters are more closely related than we tend to think they are. To say that taste matters, is not the same thing as saying that every fool’s food preferences matter. The ability to taste the difference between corporate foods and organic sustainable locally produced foods is not something we are likely to be born with, particularly if we are raised on industrial corn based byproducts. It is something we have to educate ourselves and our children to appreciate. Taste itself is in part an acquired taste. Taste can be overwhelmed by cheap sugar. Taste can be overwhelmed by convenience. Taste can be overwhelmed by “cultural” tastes, and by beliefs, ideologies and distribution systems. By subjecting food to relentless downward price pressure and uniformity we can drive even our innate human propensity to care about how things taste out of the system of choice-making that might otherwise sustain a more variegated agricultural system.
6 – Agriculture and Human Intelligence: Grade D Minds in the Countryside
An interesting subtheme that arises from this book is the deep role of human intelligence in farming. A critical consequence of capital intensive agriculture is a “human resources” effect. We recruit the best and the brightest minds out of the countryside and away from the farms. We’ve been doing this for 150 years. The human intelligence (the “best and the brightest”) leaves the landscape and returns embodied in the capital intensive machinery and farming products and seeds. The farmer becomes, increasingly, a routinized factory worker, and as Pollan delicately puts it, sometimes not the brightest fellow around.
The contrast to a farmer like Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms is striking. Salatin’s kind of sustainable agriculture requires the continued application of observation and deep intelligence to the process of growing grass and moving animals through the places and ecosystems of his farm. This is not work for someone who wants, or prefers, a routinized job. As described by Pollan, this is work that is as much intellectual as it is physical. Sustainable agriculture not only requires an active, engaged, experimental intelligence, but it may represent a model of agriculture that could sustain the interests of someone with that kind of intelligence. If we imagine a post-urban (post peak oil) existence, and the kinds of lives that intelligent minds would live out in the rural landscape, it becomes clear that there is a kind of agriculture (the kind we should hope will one day become universal?) that is more than able to absorb and engage the brightest minds. Potentially there are challenges in sustainable agricultural that are well the intellectual match of those that engage today’s urban professionals, the doctors and lawyers and business folk in their millions. The role of widely distributed highly educated human intelligence in creating a sustainable agricultural landscape is a theme that deserves further exploration.
November 12th, 2006 at 1:57 am UTC
First, we’re not particularly dependent on oil. We just use it because it’s convenient and, until recently, very cheap. Once prices are consistently above about $35 a barrel (in 2006 dollars) half a dozen substitutes become feasible.
“Substitutability” is something you have to keep constantly in mind when dealing with prices and economics. There is always something _nearly_ as cheap as what you’re using currently; often it turns out to be cheaper, in the long run.
For example, using the best _currently_ available technology — no speculative unobtanium — the complete liquid-transportation fuel needs of the US could be met by biofuels grown on about 8% of the total cropland. And that includes the fuel necessary to grow the crops; that would be switchgrass and cordgrass grown for synthetic-enzyme production of ethanol.
Likewise, using the best commercially available technology, auto mileage could fairly easily be pushed up to 250 mpg, and probably to something like 1000 mpg, which means we could run our current fleet on about 20% of the current fuel input.
November 12th, 2006 at 2:04 am UTC
Also note that the US (and some other Western countries) became predominantly urban long before tractors, which didn’t become important until roughly the 1920’s. “Mechanization”, for its first century, meant machines pulled by horses or powered by coal-burning steam engines.
When most people were farmers, it was because they had no choice. As soon as they had a choice, they fled the farm. Farming, particularly the premechanized kind, is killing toil — I’ve done some, and I’ve lived in Third World countries.
It’s also radically unsafe. Note that it is the peasant countries that still have killing famines where people starve to death; the hyperdeveloped ones have obesity problems. Ours is the first society in human history in which being fat is a sign of poverty, rather than wealth.
There are transparently obvious ecological reasons for this. A single small farm is hideously vulnerable to things like local climatic fluctuations. Drawing your food from the entire planet, by way of contrast, is pretty safe because it’s more diversified.
North Americans who farm today are much more likely than in the past to be doing it because they like it. I have relatives who farm 16,000 acres of prairie, raising wheat and canola (and some things you wouldn’t expect, like birdseed). They could make more money by selling their land and equipment and living off the interest from the proceeds.
November 12th, 2006 at 5:19 am UTC
S.
I agree completely that farming is killing work. I’ve spent enough time picking grapefruits and bananas to know that this is no easy life.
I’ve also done some calculations about biofuels and I agree that we could grow current car energy needs on about a 10th of current ag land.
See comments on “pdxoregon” here at the Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/22/211321/89 and copied here:
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Thanks for all of these responses.
If it is true that we have 953 acres of ag land in the US
http://www.demographia.com/db-farm1950.htm
and only 60 or 70 million cars
http://www.faqfarm.com/Q/How_many_cars_are_there_in_the_US
and 1 hectare can fuel 2 cars for a year.
and 1 hectare is about 2.5 acres
then 2.5 acres can fuel 2 cars for a year
and 1.25 acres can fuel 1 car for a year
So with about a 10th of available ag land acres we could run a moderately efficient car fleet of current size.
Well that’s actually quite doable… more than I would have guessed…. although topsoil and water issues would be exacerbated.
Thanks.
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The problem I have with your comment is what you mean by “they like it.”
Your relatives like their farming life…… urbanization opened new possibilities and created disatisfactions for millions of farmers across the American landscape. They fled the relative hardships for the seeming improvements of urban life. How much happier is the condition of human kind today than 2 centuries ago? I wonder.
People find happiness in their circumstances, as long as they have food and shelter and community and a few basics. It is relative disparities that are more implicated in unhappiness than absolute levels of material wealth.
I do not believe that auto fuel mileage could go as high as you suggest, but if you have a scientific paper that suggests that I’d like to see it.
I don’t know what you mean by “not particularly dependent on oil.” This seems to me to be untrue. We are not only dependent on it, but the infrastructure to make substitutes is mostly undeveloped. Those of us who study peak oil tend to think that the transition to solar power (of which biomass is one form) will be a difficult one. I would not say it will be impossible. However I think that it is undisputable that even if we make the transition, the continued extraction of energy from farmland will create problems for topsoil, water use, and compete with food production. These are not trivial issues.
As a technological optimist I believe there may be solutions, but as a political pessimist I doubt our ability to smoothly implement them.
May 19th, 2007 at 5:21 pm UTC
“They fled the relative hardships for the seeming improvements of urban life. How much happier is the condition of human kind today than 2 centuries ago? I wonder.”
– I don’t, because they continue to vote with their feet. The satisfactions of peasant life don’t seem to satisfy peasants. The only people who “like” the peasant lifestyle are urban sentimentalists who’d “like” to be able to watch “authentic” peasants going about their impoverished, animalistic lives.
Nor is anyone entitled to decide what “should” or “would” make other people happy. That’s _their_ decision and theirs alone.
“I don’t know what you mean by “not particularly dependent on oil.”
– it’s simple; we’re not particularly dependent on oil because our primary source of energy is coal.
Our primary source of _liquid fuels for transportation_ is oil.
However, other liquid fuels can be substituted fairly easily and within the current price range.
All-electric cars are not really feasible within the current technological envelope. We’d need considerably better batteries.
However, plug-in hybrid cars _are_ perfectly feasible, and (when mass-produced) would be only slightly more expensive than the current types.
This takes the liquid-fuel requirement to 250 mpg, without factoring in ethanol. If you presume use of synthetic-enzyme cellulosic ethanol, the _petroelum_ requirement (at an 85-15 blend) goes up to around 1000 mpg.
And since ethanol is a liquid fuel, it’s no big deal in terms of infrastructure; fairly minor modifications are all that’s required and they’re already being made.
Capitalist economies _work_.
May 19th, 2007 at 7:26 pm UTC
I don’t romantize peasant life in the abstract. However my peasant ancestors (Iowa/Illinois farmers in the mid and early 19th century… New England farmers in the 18th century, Jewish eastern european farmers up to the mid 19th century) seem to me to have had lives that were made hard both by the hardness of earning a living from the soil (as you suggest) and by differential effects of a growing capitalist economy around them that drew capital and wealth and people out of the hinterlands and toward metropoles.
I can see how one might argue that people have more material wealth, more food security, etc. and as a result one might argue that they are “happier.” To me that’s just an argument, not a given. People today are also disconnected from communities and family, spend less time moving their bodies, and experience other kinds of stresses. I have no problem comparing the human condition in different centuries and ecosystems and wondering whether the modern condition is the pinacle of human happiness. I have my doubts. For one thing, you have to include the starving and malnourished of Africa and Asia in your calculus of net human happiness in the early 21st century. The number of people living in gross ecological over reach relative to the sustaining capacity of their environment is probably much larger today.
I couldn’t agree with you more that people will decide what makes them happy. Your point is what?
I think my point about oil stands on face value… we have a transportation based economy, and that depends on liquid fuels. QED. Without a transportation energy solution, the global on time delivery manufacturing system and Ricardian comparative advantage system grinds to a halt.
None of your proposed solutions to moving people and goods around at current speeds and volumes seem to me particularly likely to pan out.
Hybrids give you what? 20% better mileage. This is trivial, a matter of a few years extension on the Peak Oil death warrant.
Plug in hybrids, just another way to say “electric vehicle” with range extender, don’t solve anything that I can see. 250 mpg? Not sure how you’re planning to produce all that electricity, but last time I checked the two big options are coal (unacceptable from a global warming perspective) and nuclear (unacceptable from waste disposal point of view).
The biofuel movement will be an agricultural disaster, final rape of the top soil. But perhaps it is unavoidable. We will go in that direction, and it will hasten the ultimate die off process that will force Earth’s population back to pre industrial levels.
Capitalist economies do what capitalist economies do. You call it working, I call it eating. We agree probably that they are very good at what they do, and probalby attach a different name to that thing they do.
But there is a whole field of ecological economics that explores how the growth oriented logic of capitalism conflicts with the steady state/sustainable oriented logic of planetary ecological balance. Eventually the two come into conflict, and I guarantee that the Planet Earth is a bigger mother f**cker then the Fortune 500.