- Pollan, Michael.
The Omnivore's Dilemma.
New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-14-303858-0.
-
One of the delights of operating this site is the opportunity
to interact with visitors, whom I am persuaded are among the
most interesting and informed of any audience on the Web.
The feedback messages and
book
recommendations they send are often thought-provoking and
sometimes enlightening. I don't know who I have to thank for
recommending this book, but I am very grateful they took the
time to do so, as it is a thoroughly fascinating look at
the modern food chain in the developed world, and exploration
of alternatives to it.
The author begins with a look at the “industrial”
food chain, which supplies the overwhelming majority of
calories consumed on the planet today. Prior to the 20th
century, agriculture was almost entirely powered by the
Sun. It was sunlight that drove photosynthesis in plants,
providing both plant crops and the feed for animals, including
those used to pull ploughs and transport farm products to
market. The invention of the
Haber process
in 1909 and its subsequent commercialisation on an industrial
scale forever changed this. No longer were crop yields constrained
by the amount of nitrogen which could be fixed from the air by
bacteria symbiotic with the roots of legume crops, recycled
onto fields in the manure and urine of animals, or harvested
from the accumulated droppings birds in distant places, but
rather able to be dramatically increased by the use of
fertiliser whose origin traced back to the fossil fuel which
provided the energy to create it. Further, fossil fuel insinuated
itself into agriculture in other ways, with the tractor replacing
the work of farm hands and draught animals; railroads, steam ships,
trucks, and aircraft expanding the distance between production on
a farm and consumption to the global scale; and innovations such as
refrigeration increasing the time from harvest to use.
All of these factors so conspired to benefit the species
Zea mays
(which Americans call “corn” and everybody else
calls “maize”) that one could craft a dark but
plausible science fiction story in which that species of grass,
highly modified by selective breeding by indigenous populations
in the New World, was actually the dominant species on Earth,
having first motivated its modification from the ancestral form
to a food plant ideally suited to human consumption, then
encouraged its human servants to spread it around the world,
develop artificial nutrients and pesticides to allow it to be
grown in a vast monoculture, eradicating competitors in its
path, and becoming so central to modern human nutrition that
trying to eliminate it (or allowing a natural threat to
befall it) would condemn billions of humans to starvation.
Once you start to think this way, you'll never regard that
weedless field of towering corn stretching off to the horizon
in precisely the same way….
As the author follows the industrial food chain from a farm in
the corn belt to the “wet mill” in which commodity
corn is broken down into its molecular constituents and then
reassembled into the components of processed food, and to
the feedlot, where corn products are used to “finish”
meat animals which evolved on a different continent from
Zea mays
and consequently require food additives and constant
medication simply to metabolise this foreign substance, it becomes
clear that maize is not a food, but rather a feedstock (indeed,
the maize you buy in the supermarket to eat yourself is not
this industrial product, but rather “sweet corn”
produced entirely separately), just as petroleum is used in the
plastics industry. Or the food industry—when you take into
account fertiliser, farm machinery, and transportation, more than
one calorie of fossil fuel is consumed to produce a calorie of
food energy in maize. If only we could make Twinkies directly
from crude oil….
All of this (and many things I've elided here in the interest
of brevity [Hah! you say]) may persuade you to
“go organic” and pay a bit more for those funky
foods with the labels showing verdant crops basking in the Sun,
contented cows munching grass in expansive fields, and chickens
being chickens, scratching for bugs at liberty. If you're
already buying these “organic” products and
verging on the sin of smugness for doing so, this is not
your book—or maybe it is. The author digs into the
“industrial organic” state of the art and discovers
that while there are certainly benefits to products labelled
“organic” (no artificial fertilisers or
pesticides, for example, which certainly benefit the land if
not the product you buy), the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(the villain throughout) has so watered down the definition of
“organic” that most products with that designation
come from “organic” factory farms, feedlots, and
mass poultry confinement facilities. As usual, when the government
gets involved, the whole thing is pretty much an enormous
scam, which is ultimately damaging to those who are actually
trying to provide products with a sustainable solar-powered
food chain which respects the land and the nature of the animals
living on it.
In the second section of the book, the author explores this
alternative by visiting
Polyface Farms
in Virginia, which practices “grass farming”
and produces beef, pork, chickens and eggs, turkeys, rabbits,
and forest products for its local market in Virginia.
The Salatin family, who owns and operates the farm, views
its pastures as a giant solar collector, turning incident
sunlight along with water collected by the surrounding
forest into calories which feed their animals. All of
the animal by-products (even the viscera and blood of
chickens slaughtered on site) are recycled into the
land. The only outside inputs into the solar-powered cycle
are purchased chicken feed, since grass, grubs, and bugs
cannot supply adequate energy for the chickens. (OK,
there are also inputs of fuel for farm machinery and
electricity for refrigeration and processing, but since the
pastures are never ploughed, these are minimal compared to
a typical farm.)
Polyface performs not only intensive agriculture, but what
Salatin calls “management intensive” farming—an
information age strategy informed by the traditional
ecological balance between grassland, ruminants, and birds.
The benefit is not just to the environment, but also in the
marketplace. A small holding with only about 100 acres under
cultivation is able to support an extended family, produce a
variety of products, and by their quality attract customers
willing to drive as far as 150 miles each way to buy them at
prices well above those at the local supermarket. Anybody
who worries about a possible collapse of the industrial food
chain and has provided for that contingency by acquiring a
plot of farm land well away from population centres will find
much to ponder here. Remember, it isn't just about providing for
your family and others on the farm: if you're providing food
for your community, they're far more likely to come to your
defence when the starving urban hordes come your way to plunder.
Finally, the author seeks to shorten his personal food chain to
the irreducible minimum by becoming a hunter-gatherer. Overcoming
his blue state hoplophobia and handed down mycophobia, he sets out
to hunt a feral pig in Sonoma County, California and gather
wild mushrooms and herbs to accompany the meal. He even
“harvests” cherries from a neighbour's tree
overhanging a friend's property in Berkeley under the
Roman doctrine of
usufruct
and makes bread leavened with yeast floating in the air
around his house. In doing so, he discovers that there
is something to what he had previously dismissed as purple
prose in accounts of hunters, and that there is a special
satisfaction and feeling of closing the circle in sharing a
meal with friends in which every dish was directly obtained
by them, individually or in collaboration.
This exploration of food: its origins, its meaning to us, and its
place in our contemporary civilisation, makes clear the many
stark paradoxes of our present situation. It is abundantly clear
that the industrial food chain is harmful to the land, unsustainable
due to dependence on finite resources, cruel to animals caught up
in it, and unhealthy in many ways to those who consume its
products. And yet abandoning it in favour of any of the
alternatives presented here would result in a global famine which
would make the Irish, Ukrainian, and Chinese famines of the past
barely a blip on the curve. Further, billions of the Earth's
inhabitants today can only dream of the abundance, variety, and
affordability (in terms of hours worked to provide one's
food needs) of the developed world diet. And yet at the same
time, when one looks at the epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes,
and other metabolic disorders among corn-fed populations, you have
to wonder whether Zea mays
is already looking beyond us and plotting its next conquest.
April 2012 