Book Review:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
By Michael Pollan
Reviewed by: Jay Shenk
I didn’t expect to like this book for two reasons. First, there is a movie Food, Inc. which is based loosely on this book, and I fell asleep watching the movie (which I’m sure had nothing to do with watching it in bed on a laptop after a couple glasses of wine). Secondly, it’s a fairly radical indictment of our food industry, so I figured much of it would have to do with how we treat the animals that end up as steaks in the supermarkets, which is something I already know but prefer not to think about. In fact, a good friend of mine was once between jobs and ended up consulting for one of the big 8 (now down to 4 or 5 thanks to consolidations) consulting firms, but on the low end of the consulting “food chain”—he got the worst jobs, and this particular time his job was to work at a meat packing plant and try to determine what management could do to reduce the level of alcoholism amongst their employees on the floor of the plant. Apparently the employees were not just drinking on the job, but getting a head start by showing up inebriated as well. This friend of mine said the two weeks he spent on this assignment were two of the worst weeks he ever had—his consulting mission there was not just a failure—he determined that he’d have become an alcoholic too if he’d had to work there much longer.
Humane treatment of animals is dealt with at the end of the book, but the main thrust of the book is how our food industry is affecting us personally, and this is the part I found both fascinating and disturbing, and not for reasons I had expected.
The whole first part of the book deals with corn….I had no idea, but apparently corn is in virtually everything we eat. Corn has a particular type of carbon molecule in it, which is traceable wherever it goes, including into our diets, and it turns out that Americans consume more corn that anyone else, including Mexicans, for whom corn is a staple of their diet. Corn is in everything, from almost every type of cereal, to soda, to Chicken McNuggets, to steaks in the supermarket. It’s there because it can be made into so many different products, like sweeteners, preservatives, livestock feed, as well as batteries and gasoline. It’s everywhere, and it’s in almost everything we eat, in large quantities.
Corn is used in everything because it’s cheap, and it’s inexpensive because it is subsidized by the government, and has now become a main reason for what the author, Michael Pollan, refers to as our factory based, industrialized food industry. This proliferation of corn has changed everything. There aren’t many real family farms out on the Great Plains anymore—it doesn’t pay to raise anything but corn, which changes the whole farming lifestyle and dynamic. It makes possible the huge henhouses and feedlots (CAFOs--Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), where extensively hybridized animals are fed diets of corn and antibiotics and growth hormones so they grow fast in close quarters without getting sick, and it also makes farmers into more like factory workers, as they just plant crops in endless rows, spray pesticides and herbicides, and repeat the process, over and over.
There is a lot of information in this book on the monopoly power of the major food and chemical companies. For instance, in case you don’t already know, the new genetically modified corn (and anything else genetically modified) is patented, so that although a farmer could plant the next year’s corn from seed from this year’s corn, it’s illegal, and it is also relentlessly prosecuted.
And, much of the genetic modification is to make plants resistant to Roundup, a herbicide put out by Monsanto….that way the crops can be doused in herbicide, and it won’t kill the crops but will kill all other plant life growing nearby, making it a very easy way to weed the rows of crops.
It’s an eye opening book, and also a good book if you want to go on a diet—I now read the ingredients of everything hoping to find something without a ton of corn products in it, and there aren’t very many. This does make you more than a little cynical about government efforts to combat obesity, since government subsidies are responsible for corn being used so much (corn actually costs less for large food processors to purchase than it costs farmers to produce, with the balance made up by government subsidies), and many corn ingredients as well as corn fed livestock are fattening.
The section of the book on organic food is also enlightening but not as disheartening, except for some parts such as the marketing of organic chicken, for instance. It’s better than non-organic (in my opinion), despite the fact it is also now a niche in the industrial food chain—almost all organic food in any of the big food chains comes from two huge farms in California as well as some other countries like Argentina or Mexico (hopefully they keep better track of being organic than China, for instance, did of lead paint in toys).
However, keep in mind that when you go to Whole Foods and see an organic chicken labeled with a name, as if someone actually named the chicken, and a picture of a bucolic farm with the chickens ranging free, it’s baloney…..these chickens are fed organic feed, but they are generally packed like sardines into henhouses with 20,000 chickens, and although they are given access to the great outdoors via a small door per government regulations, for the most part they don’t use it. These chickens are so hybridized (cross bred to bring out desirable characteristics for the food supply, like large breasts and fast growth) that they are ready for slaughter in just 7 weeks. Since the door leading outside doesn’t open until they are 5 weeks old, and chickens are not intrepid explorers as well as often being too top-heavy to even walk thanks to their breeding, the vast majority of chickens spend their last two weeks indoors.
Some parts of the book I had to overlook to get to the good parts. For instance, Pollan sees government conspiracies where I do not, if simply because I don’t think the federal government is capable of any long term planning, including conspiracies. Even in business I’ve yet to see a ‘Five Year Plan’ that holds up more than about five months. I think that much of the situation we find ourselves in is a result of special interest legislation and unintended consequences of laws. At the end of the book Pollan becomes a vegetarian, and makes a convincing argument for doing so, but I’m sticking with steaks, locally grown whenever possible.
Affordability is the essential issue we are dealing with. For those of us who can, it’s great to eat local, and stick to organic food, but all the chemicals and pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers are also what used to be called the “green revolution”—it is how the world is fed. To abandon the mass production model would result in mass starvation. We just happen to be lucky to live in an area where local farms still exist, and their output is reasonably priced, but how would this work in NYC or LA, or worse, India or Bangladesh? The answer is that it wouldn’t, and that is the real dilemma we face in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”.