The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Occasionally, one comes across a book that is so informative and interesting that you’d like to go door to door and hand out copies. I thought I knew quite a bit about food. But Michael Pollan in his new book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals adds importantly to anyone’s knowledge of where our food comes from and how we get it. I was pretty certain that most supermarket food was crap (and it’s actually worse than I thought). But I was flabbergasted to learn how industrialized (corrupted) the organic food industry has become. The problem is that both are based on our national reliance on oil. Mr. Pollen details the production organic lettuce at Earthbound Farms, a “good” organic grower in Salinas, California that controls 25,000 acres of lettuce. They produce a healthy vegetable but the sad fact is that it takes 57 petrochemical calories to produce 4 calories of organic lettuce. Organic food, like conventional food is transported hundreds of miles from producer to consumer using huge energy resources. Agriculture (including logging), in fact, is responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions. Organic, even the industrial model, has many benefits over the corn/soybean dominated foods that line Safeway’s shelves but as Pollan points out the organic food industry is floating on a “sinking sea of petroleum.” At least it’s edible, or mostly edible as the organic standards have been pretty much hijacked by big business. (I hadn’t noticed, for example, that one of my favorite organic brands—Cascadian Farms—is now owned by General Mills.) The Omnivore’s Dilemma sets the stage for our food problems and national food issues by detailing in the first section of this book the monoculture of corn. Corn is ubiquitous and is the basis for much of the food eaten in this country. Like a detective trying to find the source of the crime, the author visits cornfields, poultry farms and feedlots to trace the history of a meal he will eat based on his research of industrial food. The meal came from McDonald’s and was eaten in a moving car. It included, among other items, Chicken McNuggets (McCornnuggets) which contains in its food additives, TBHQ, a form of butane. That’s pretty hard core industrial—to have a bit of butane for lunch in a product that’s supposed to be chicken but, somehow, really isn’t anymore. Corn based agriculture is very scary. Before WWII our food supply was sun based. After WWII industry wanted to find a use for the nitrate production capacity we had developed to make explosives. It was turned into fertilizer and our food supply has been on a downward slide since. It is so unnatural, in fact, that common sense dictates that our mainstream food supply has to be the cause of our poor national health. Many of us believed that organic food was the solution to this crisis. We like the little stories on the labels about idyllic farms and happy cows and free range chicken only to learn that the chickens really don’t range free at all. The industrial organic paradigm, though again with many benefits for the environment, health of the workers and ourselves, is not sustainable. It depends on oil. Foreign oil.
In the second part of the book Michael Pollen searches for more answers and when I’ve digested that portion more thoroughly, I’ll post again about this  fascinating and most readable book.

Comments

[Phil]

Randy, The company I work for is growing lots of organic fruit and I do mean lots. Other than the fact that we no longer use synthetic chemicals to kill bugs it appears to me to be mostly marketing.