This is a great synopsis of the Ominivore’s Dilemma reblogged from the informative Paleo Diet Online:
“Michael Pollan’s 2006 New York Time’s best seller is a 400 page, eloquently written novel based around 4 meals followed from sunlight to stomach. “The pleasures of the one [meal] are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance.” (p410) The third and fourth meals, lost in this quote, were equally steeped in knowledge as the former.
To start, Pollan acknowledges the current abysmal state of American health. The prevalence of heart disease, diabetes, and new disorders popping up overnight. This is what spurred him to entrench himself in this research, why was this happening? In the first section, he starts on the farm of Iowa corn grower George Naylor, whose family farm has transformed from multi-organism just 100 years ago into the modern day monoculture of corn. From here, Pollan asks the question, have we domesticated corn or has corn domesticated us? After reading Pollan’s description of the history of corn, you’d start to believe that the plant has a mind of its own. In this section, Pollan uncovers the simplicity of farming corn: “driving and spraying” as Naylor says, and how it has changed from what used to be a very cerebral occupation to one relying on mega corporations and petroleum. For example, corn may be planted every year due to the involvement of pesticides and fertilizer (thank you Haber-Bosch process…turning nitrogen and hydrogen captured from the air into ammonia and eventually ammonium nitrate). Before this, nitrogen consuming corn had to be cycled with nitrogen providing soy year after year. After the corn had been grown and harvested, with a long summary of the political nuances (or atrocities if you asked Naylor) thrown in, Pollan follows the corn to the local grain elevator and onto the processing plant, although the processing plant only sees a fraction of the corn output. In the processing plant, each corn kernel is broken down and about 30 different basic food components are made, including the now infamous High Fructose Corn Syrup. HFCS is made by treating the corn-based glucose with the enzyme glucose isomerase. (Isomers: 2 compounds having the same chemical formula yet a different structure. In this case, glucose being a 6-carbon ring and fructose being a 5-carbon ring.) Fructose is sweeter than glucose, meaning less of it needs to be used and hence less money spent. Pollan also tells the story of corn through a steer he bought named #534, who grew up in a feed lot and was eventually slaughtered in a place Pollan was denied access. Reading about Pollan’s trip to the feedlot (classified as a CAFO-concentrated animal feeding operation) will make you want to turn vegetarian, or at least avoid all commercially made meat. #534’s diet consisted of corn flakes (more easily digested by the cow who is not supposed to digest corn), liquefied fat, molasses, and urea, along with the cocktail of antibiotics and growth-hormones. All the components needed to supply a cow with each element necessary to build protein. Remember though, cows are ruminants whose stomachs are set up to eat grass and allow the bacteria which colonize its stomachs to ferment it, making it digestible. Two of the best statements made during this section included “another vet told me the diet [fed to the cow] would eventually ‘blow out their livers’ and kill them. The other was that “I don’t know enough about the emotional life of a steer to say with confidence that 534 was miserable, bored, or indifferent, but I would not say he looked happy.” The entire experience of corn was summed up by the essential corn meal, McDonald’s, eaten at 65 mph.
The second section starts on the lush hills of Polyface farms where Joel Salatin considers himself a grass farmer. His farm is a tightly wound system made to intertwine many different organisms. Sun feeds grass, grass feeds cows, manure grows grubs, grubs feed chickens, chicken poop feeds grass, and the cycle starts over again. Salatin has many of these circles of holons (holon is a term coined by this particular industry to mean a part of the whole) which keep his farm as self-sustaining and healthy. In this section, Pollan takes a foray into the organic industry and how it has grown from underground political movement into money making government run industry. After describing his week of working on Polyface farms, Pollan describes in depth the slaughtering of chickens which occurs on the farm in a open-air slaughterhouse, which allows patrons to watch the actual killing and cleaning of the product, a statement about the cleanliness of the whole farming process, which of course has very little waste as everything is recycled and reused in some way to grow another food. This section leaves you yearning to go into the garden and start your own little circle of holons. Of course Pollan ends it with an organic meal made with fresh slaughtered Polyface farms chicken.
The third section focuses on a meal made with ingredients, all of which have been hunted or gathered. Before going into the details, Pollan spend many pages describing the mental intricacies needed to be overcome before one will go hunting or even eat meat, basically answering the question of why eat meat? Why not be a vegetarian? Backed up with the stories of the pig he hunted, the mushrooms he collected, and the vegetables he gardened, Pollan prepares an exquisite meal, shared with his family and the people who helped him gather all the ingredients.
If you have stumbled upon this website or are a dedicated reader, you need to read this book. It will change the way you think about food at its most basic level as well as help you decide if you want to have the composition of a human being or of a corn chip with legs.”
