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glaurungI enjoyed the first two-thirds of The Omnivore's Dilemma. The last third had some good bits in it, and some bits that I just skipped completely. Which was pretty much the case with the previous Pollan book I read, The Botany of Desire.
In The Botany of Desire, Pollan talked about four economic plants not in terms of what humans got out of them, but in terms of how the plants have evolved in order to cause humans to spread their seeds throughout the world. I enjoyed the book until I got to the part devoted to cannabis, in which Pollan ignored the 8,000+ year history of cannabis cultivation (for rope and fabric and food) and focused exclusively on the plant's use as a drug in the late 20th century, and how the plant was transforming in the US and Europe from a field weed into an indoor hydroponics plant adapted to be grown under artificial lights. All because of Pollan's conceit that he was not discussing four plants, but rather four human desires that the plants were exploiting (Cannabis being "intoxication" or some such).
At that point, I found myself wondering how Pollan might have truncated or distorted the history of the other plants he talked about to shoehorn them into his artificial schema of desires, and I put the book aside unfinished.
In Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan is once again creating an elaborate and rather artificial schema to compare U.S. factory farming to U.S. organic farming, and to contrast the mainstream way of food in the U.S. to the "slow food" movement. In each section, he traces a specific type of food from its origins as a crop to its final incarnation as a meal that he and his family/friends eat.
The section on factory farming ends with a meal at McDonald's; the section on organic farming has two meals, one made up of faux-organic food grown factory-style by the organic arms of big agribusiness companies and purchased at a chain health food store, the other made up of locally grown, pasture-raised meat and eggs and farmer's market veggies; and the final section of the book details Pollan's own hunting of pigs, gathering of mushrooms and gardening of veggies for a sort of "extreme slow-food" meal. I found the narcissism of the last part quite boring and skipped a lot, but there were some interesting bits in there about mushrooms and about the ethics of eating meat.
Along the way, I learned a great deal about modern factory farming and big agribusiness in the US today - the book filled in a lot of context, background, and missing pieces that other books I've read on the same subject (Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Cook's Diet for a Dead Planet, Nestle's Food Politics) left out due to their narrower focus.
Overall, I think Pollan is really just too full of himself for me to actually enjoy his books wholeheartedly. But this time, he picked topics that I was already seriously interested in (factory farming and processed foods, and how they are destroying the world and us), and provided a lot of interesting information, especially a global overview, that I had not encountered previously. So I'm glad I read the book, even if I didn't fully enjoy it. And while I may regret this later, I have added Pollan's In Defence of Food to my want list.
Part 1 is basically all about corn. Pollan discusses the peonification of the American farmer at the hands of corporate agribusiness, from the early steps of turning corn into a commodity and introducing hybrid seeds (shackling farmers to the corporations which make and patent and sell the seeds, on the one hand, and the futures traders who dictate corn prices, on the other), to the corporate manipulation of agriculture subsidies (which in the 30's were about preventing farmers from going bankrupt and protecting the land from over farming, but which the Nixon administration transformed into a mechanism for enlarging corporate profits at the expense of farmers and at the expense of the land and topsoil). He then devotes chapters to the use of corn as animal feed, and as the raw material for chemical processes that create everything from corn starch to high fructose corn syrup to "xanthan gum" to vitamin C, which are then in turn used as ingredients in virtually every processed food in the grocery store.
Because corn is a C-4 plant, unlike most other crops which are C-3 plants (1), and because C-4 and C-3 photosynthesis fix different ratios of carbon-12 to carbon-13, it is possible, by measuring the isotopic ratios of the carbon in someone's body, to determine the degree to which their food came, ultimately, from corn. The verdict is that, in terms of where the carbon in our diets comes from, Americans "look like corn chips with legs," deriving much, much more of their carbon from corn than any other source; at McDonald's, over half of the carbon in chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers (from grain-fed animals) comes from corn -- even the fries are often cooked in corn oil, and are thus over 20% corn, and the so-called "milkshakes," thanks to grain-fed dairy cows on the one hand and corn syrup sweeteners on the other, are over 75% corn.
As usual, whenever I read about how the meat in the grocery store is raised, I became even more firmly committed to only eating free-range pasture raised meat after reading Pollan's discussion of cow and chicken factories.
Part two traces two completely different kinds of organic food. The first half of part two talks about how many organic farmers have been suborned by corporate money into becoming a modified version of factory farmers. If an organic vegetable has a brand name attached to it, along with a label indicating it was grown in California, most likely it is "organic" only in the sense that it is not sprayed with pesticides or herbicides, and is fertilized with manure rather than chemical fertilizers. The crops are grown in huge monoculture fields, where weeds are controlled by irrigating the field before planting to encourage weed germination, then ploughing the weeds under, and only then planting the actual crop, which is grown and harvested as fast as possible, before additional weeds can take root. Insects are controlled not so much by predators as by vegetable based pesticides that are allowed under the USDA definition of organic. The result of all that extra watering and ploughing is that this kind of corporate, brand name "organic" farming actually uses the same or more petrochemicals and energy as pesticide based farming, and it erodes and degrades the topsoil more. And once again, the animals whose products are labelled "organic" are still raised (again as fast as possible because without antibiotics they are terribly susceptible to diseases due to the horrible overcrowding they endure) in factories that differ from non-organic factories only in degree, not in kind.
In the second half of part two, Pollan dwells at length on just one farm and just one farmer - Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface farm. I am sure Salatin's strong personality and crusading anti-corporate attitude were very fascinating, but a wider focus on other aspects of farmers markets and the locally grown movement in general would have been nice.
Salatin is a prominent figure in the development of intensive pasture-based farming, in which you corral your cows inside a temporary fence that confines them to a small area of a large field of pasture. You leave them there for one day, then set up another temporary fence immediately adjacent and open the gate. The cows, having eating all the succulent grass where they are, happily move to the new area. By doing this on a daily basis, and returning the herd to the original plot of grass only after the pasture there has started to regrow, but before it has regrown so much that the grass is no longer tender and succulent, you can raise many more cows per acre than is possible with traditional pasturing methods, where the cattle are left in one place until they've eaten everything edible down to a stubble. The same methods can be used with other animals, even chickens (although you need to confine them in a large wheeled bottomless cage that you move daily to keep them from straying and from being eaten by predators).
One particularly interesting bit in this section is that Salatin's intensive method of pasture farming actually yields more meat per acre even than the grain-fed factory method. The overall amount of labour is not that much different between the two methods, but the amount of thought that has to go into the process of raising the animals on an intensive grass-fed basis is much higher than the amount of thought it takes to raise a factory full of grain-fed, antibiotic-dosed cows or pigs or chickens. So in terms of feeding the world, we would do a much better job if we replaced all those feedlots and fields of GMO'ed, petroleum-based corn with pastures of cows raised by smart people. Unfortunately, culturally, growing food is not something that smart people are encouraged to do in Western society; and the peonage of today's farmers is blamed, by Salatin, at least as much on the brain drain that farms and farmers have been suffering from ever since the end of World War II, as on the corporate machinery of peonification.
In the final section of the book, Pollan goes on at narcissistic length about his feelings and reactions to learning to hunt, something he had never done before setting out to do a section of this book devoted to hunting and gathering. I did a lot of skimming. Some of the interesting bits talked about the ethics of meat eating, and how the positions of various philosophers of vegetarianism fit in with factory meat farming on the one hand and pasture meat farming on the other. Pollan concludes that ethically, pasture-raised meat is a lot less problematic than factory raised meat, and I agree with him. The main reason I try to avoid buying factory meat is for my health - as someone with MCS, I really can't afford to be putting all those growth hormones and antibiotics into my body, even secondhand. The secondary reason has to do with reducing my carbon footprint. But the fact that by buying grass fed beef I am eating a cow that led a happy life, and by buying beef in the supermarket I am eating one that led a miserable life, has a lot to do with it too.
I was amused to discover that some philosophers of vegetarianism and animal rights get very upset by the thought that out in the wild, animals eat other animals all the time. Pollan showcases some choice quotes of burning stupidity:
And the book ends with Pollan's fourth meal, one he hunted, gathered, and gardened himself. Pollan is much more of a foodie than I ever will be, and the bits at the end of each section where he talks about how he prepared each meal and how it tasted were really quite dull to me, but might be interesting to someone more interested in culinary arts than I.
(1) C-3 and C-4 metabolism. The names refer to the number of carbon atoms present in the molecules created in the initial stages of photosynthesis, which are then built up into sugars. Most plants, from the earliest Precambrian algae to modern trees and shrubs, use C-3 photosynthesis. C-3 plants need to keep the stomata on their leaves wide open while they are photosynthesizing, because they require large amounts of CO2 from the air. But this means they lose a lot of water to transpiration. And the metabolic process of C-3 metabolism works best when the temperature is moderate. C-4 metabolism, on the other hand, does not need as much raw CO2, which means the plant can half-close its stomata during the day, drastically cutting the amount of water it loses through its leaves. Also, the C-4 process works best at higher temperatures than C-3. All of which means that C-4 plants are well adapted to hot dryish climates. C-4 plants first evolved around 30 million years ago, and while C-4 metabolism appears to have evolved independently in many different species of plants, the most common C-4 plants that exist today are tropical and subtropical grasses. C-4 metabolism is also significantly more efficient than C-3 metabolism, which is why Corn is such a high-yield crop, and why it depletes the soil so much faster than wheat.
Just for geeky completeness, the third and final form of plant metabolism is crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), which is an adaptation to extremely arid environments. Desert succulents such as cacti and yucca are the most common types of CAM plants. CAM plants are able to take in CO2 at night, store it, and then close their stomata completely during the day and conduct photosynthesis without losing any water to transpiration. This method isn't as efficient as C-3 metabolism, so when there is enough water, the cactus opens it stomata during the day and does C-3 metabolism like an ordinary plant.
In The Botany of Desire, Pollan talked about four economic plants not in terms of what humans got out of them, but in terms of how the plants have evolved in order to cause humans to spread their seeds throughout the world. I enjoyed the book until I got to the part devoted to cannabis, in which Pollan ignored the 8,000+ year history of cannabis cultivation (for rope and fabric and food) and focused exclusively on the plant's use as a drug in the late 20th century, and how the plant was transforming in the US and Europe from a field weed into an indoor hydroponics plant adapted to be grown under artificial lights. All because of Pollan's conceit that he was not discussing four plants, but rather four human desires that the plants were exploiting (Cannabis being "intoxication" or some such).
At that point, I found myself wondering how Pollan might have truncated or distorted the history of the other plants he talked about to shoehorn them into his artificial schema of desires, and I put the book aside unfinished.
In Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan is once again creating an elaborate and rather artificial schema to compare U.S. factory farming to U.S. organic farming, and to contrast the mainstream way of food in the U.S. to the "slow food" movement. In each section, he traces a specific type of food from its origins as a crop to its final incarnation as a meal that he and his family/friends eat.
The section on factory farming ends with a meal at McDonald's; the section on organic farming has two meals, one made up of faux-organic food grown factory-style by the organic arms of big agribusiness companies and purchased at a chain health food store, the other made up of locally grown, pasture-raised meat and eggs and farmer's market veggies; and the final section of the book details Pollan's own hunting of pigs, gathering of mushrooms and gardening of veggies for a sort of "extreme slow-food" meal. I found the narcissism of the last part quite boring and skipped a lot, but there were some interesting bits in there about mushrooms and about the ethics of eating meat.
Along the way, I learned a great deal about modern factory farming and big agribusiness in the US today - the book filled in a lot of context, background, and missing pieces that other books I've read on the same subject (Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Cook's Diet for a Dead Planet, Nestle's Food Politics) left out due to their narrower focus.
Overall, I think Pollan is really just too full of himself for me to actually enjoy his books wholeheartedly. But this time, he picked topics that I was already seriously interested in (factory farming and processed foods, and how they are destroying the world and us), and provided a lot of interesting information, especially a global overview, that I had not encountered previously. So I'm glad I read the book, even if I didn't fully enjoy it. And while I may regret this later, I have added Pollan's In Defence of Food to my want list.
Part 1 is basically all about corn. Pollan discusses the peonification of the American farmer at the hands of corporate agribusiness, from the early steps of turning corn into a commodity and introducing hybrid seeds (shackling farmers to the corporations which make and patent and sell the seeds, on the one hand, and the futures traders who dictate corn prices, on the other), to the corporate manipulation of agriculture subsidies (which in the 30's were about preventing farmers from going bankrupt and protecting the land from over farming, but which the Nixon administration transformed into a mechanism for enlarging corporate profits at the expense of farmers and at the expense of the land and topsoil). He then devotes chapters to the use of corn as animal feed, and as the raw material for chemical processes that create everything from corn starch to high fructose corn syrup to "xanthan gum" to vitamin C, which are then in turn used as ingredients in virtually every processed food in the grocery store.
Because corn is a C-4 plant, unlike most other crops which are C-3 plants (1), and because C-4 and C-3 photosynthesis fix different ratios of carbon-12 to carbon-13, it is possible, by measuring the isotopic ratios of the carbon in someone's body, to determine the degree to which their food came, ultimately, from corn. The verdict is that, in terms of where the carbon in our diets comes from, Americans "look like corn chips with legs," deriving much, much more of their carbon from corn than any other source; at McDonald's, over half of the carbon in chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers (from grain-fed animals) comes from corn -- even the fries are often cooked in corn oil, and are thus over 20% corn, and the so-called "milkshakes," thanks to grain-fed dairy cows on the one hand and corn syrup sweeteners on the other, are over 75% corn.
As usual, whenever I read about how the meat in the grocery store is raised, I became even more firmly committed to only eating free-range pasture raised meat after reading Pollan's discussion of cow and chicken factories.
Part two traces two completely different kinds of organic food. The first half of part two talks about how many organic farmers have been suborned by corporate money into becoming a modified version of factory farmers. If an organic vegetable has a brand name attached to it, along with a label indicating it was grown in California, most likely it is "organic" only in the sense that it is not sprayed with pesticides or herbicides, and is fertilized with manure rather than chemical fertilizers. The crops are grown in huge monoculture fields, where weeds are controlled by irrigating the field before planting to encourage weed germination, then ploughing the weeds under, and only then planting the actual crop, which is grown and harvested as fast as possible, before additional weeds can take root. Insects are controlled not so much by predators as by vegetable based pesticides that are allowed under the USDA definition of organic. The result of all that extra watering and ploughing is that this kind of corporate, brand name "organic" farming actually uses the same or more petrochemicals and energy as pesticide based farming, and it erodes and degrades the topsoil more. And once again, the animals whose products are labelled "organic" are still raised (again as fast as possible because without antibiotics they are terribly susceptible to diseases due to the horrible overcrowding they endure) in factories that differ from non-organic factories only in degree, not in kind.
In the second half of part two, Pollan dwells at length on just one farm and just one farmer - Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface farm. I am sure Salatin's strong personality and crusading anti-corporate attitude were very fascinating, but a wider focus on other aspects of farmers markets and the locally grown movement in general would have been nice.
Salatin is a prominent figure in the development of intensive pasture-based farming, in which you corral your cows inside a temporary fence that confines them to a small area of a large field of pasture. You leave them there for one day, then set up another temporary fence immediately adjacent and open the gate. The cows, having eating all the succulent grass where they are, happily move to the new area. By doing this on a daily basis, and returning the herd to the original plot of grass only after the pasture there has started to regrow, but before it has regrown so much that the grass is no longer tender and succulent, you can raise many more cows per acre than is possible with traditional pasturing methods, where the cattle are left in one place until they've eaten everything edible down to a stubble. The same methods can be used with other animals, even chickens (although you need to confine them in a large wheeled bottomless cage that you move daily to keep them from straying and from being eaten by predators).
One particularly interesting bit in this section is that Salatin's intensive method of pasture farming actually yields more meat per acre even than the grain-fed factory method. The overall amount of labour is not that much different between the two methods, but the amount of thought that has to go into the process of raising the animals on an intensive grass-fed basis is much higher than the amount of thought it takes to raise a factory full of grain-fed, antibiotic-dosed cows or pigs or chickens. So in terms of feeding the world, we would do a much better job if we replaced all those feedlots and fields of GMO'ed, petroleum-based corn with pastures of cows raised by smart people. Unfortunately, culturally, growing food is not something that smart people are encouraged to do in Western society; and the peonage of today's farmers is blamed, by Salatin, at least as much on the brain drain that farms and farmers have been suffering from ever since the end of World War II, as on the corporate machinery of peonification.
In the final section of the book, Pollan goes on at narcissistic length about his feelings and reactions to learning to hunt, something he had never done before setting out to do a section of this book devoted to hunting and gathering. I did a lot of skimming. Some of the interesting bits talked about the ethics of meat eating, and how the positions of various philosophers of vegetarianism fit in with factory meat farming on the one hand and pasture meat farming on the other. Pollan concludes that ethically, pasture-raised meat is a lot less problematic than factory raised meat, and I agree with him. The main reason I try to avoid buying factory meat is for my health - as someone with MCS, I really can't afford to be putting all those growth hormones and antibiotics into my body, even secondhand. The secondary reason has to do with reducing my carbon footprint. But the fact that by buying grass fed beef I am eating a cow that led a happy life, and by buying beef in the supermarket I am eating one that led a miserable life, has a lot to do with it too.
I was amused to discover that some philosophers of vegetarianism and animal rights get very upset by the thought that out in the wild, animals eat other animals all the time. Pollan showcases some choice quotes of burning stupidity:
- "the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything aobut it." (Peter Singer)
- "[predation is] the intrinsic evil in nature's design... among the hardest of all things to fathom" (Matthew Scully, a Christian animal rights person)
And the book ends with Pollan's fourth meal, one he hunted, gathered, and gardened himself. Pollan is much more of a foodie than I ever will be, and the bits at the end of each section where he talks about how he prepared each meal and how it tasted were really quite dull to me, but might be interesting to someone more interested in culinary arts than I.
(1) C-3 and C-4 metabolism. The names refer to the number of carbon atoms present in the molecules created in the initial stages of photosynthesis, which are then built up into sugars. Most plants, from the earliest Precambrian algae to modern trees and shrubs, use C-3 photosynthesis. C-3 plants need to keep the stomata on their leaves wide open while they are photosynthesizing, because they require large amounts of CO2 from the air. But this means they lose a lot of water to transpiration. And the metabolic process of C-3 metabolism works best when the temperature is moderate. C-4 metabolism, on the other hand, does not need as much raw CO2, which means the plant can half-close its stomata during the day, drastically cutting the amount of water it loses through its leaves. Also, the C-4 process works best at higher temperatures than C-3. All of which means that C-4 plants are well adapted to hot dryish climates. C-4 plants first evolved around 30 million years ago, and while C-4 metabolism appears to have evolved independently in many different species of plants, the most common C-4 plants that exist today are tropical and subtropical grasses. C-4 metabolism is also significantly more efficient than C-3 metabolism, which is why Corn is such a high-yield crop, and why it depletes the soil so much faster than wheat.
Just for geeky completeness, the third and final form of plant metabolism is crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), which is an adaptation to extremely arid environments. Desert succulents such as cacti and yucca are the most common types of CAM plants. CAM plants are able to take in CO2 at night, store it, and then close their stomata completely during the day and conduct photosynthesis without losing any water to transpiration. This method isn't as efficient as C-3 metabolism, so when there is enough water, the cactus opens it stomata during the day and does C-3 metabolism like an ordinary plant.