ironSoap – Complete

@ironsoap — December 11, 2011 at 11:00AM

author: Michael Pollan
name: Paul
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2011/12/10
date added: 2011/12/11
shelves: food, non-fiction
review:
For being the type of book that inspires call to action, Michael Pollan‘s book about the natural history of meals, doesn’t really seem to offer a whole lot of practical advice. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is organized into three basic sections: industrial food, alternatives to the industry and a sort of recreation of hunter-gatherer typified from the land eating.

In part one Pollan traces the origins of a fast food meal from McDonald’s, which is notably derived in very large part from corn. This section is eye-opening and in many ways terrifying: The maze of governmental and industrial factors which have led to the overabundance of food supply in the US is dizzying and a sort of case study on Eisenhower’s increasingly prescient warnings about the military-industrial complex. What it boils down to is that we have thrown our lot in with corn as being a nutritive catch-all, primarily servicing the processed foods industry. This isn’t shock journalism here, Pollan is careful to consider as many sides of the topic as possible, finding sympathy for the American corn farmer even while finding little to justify the machine they participate in perpetuating. The result of this corn monoculture, as Pollan describes it, is products that have been derived from corn like high fructose corn syrup as well as feedlots where corn is essentially force-fed to animals that would otherwise subsist on something else entirely (grass—in fact the philosophical war between grass and corn is a bit of a theme to the book). Thus, when Pollan describes where his McMeal comes from, the answer is mostly corn either directly or indirectly… and petroleum.

Part two describes some alternatives to the industrial food which sort of naturally begins with organic food but, Pollan soon realizes, organic food of the type you find from in-system alternatives such as Whole Foods is really more about what Pollan dubs “pastoral narrative.” In other words, the alternative quality of these items and businesses is relative, for the most part still firmly within the confines of the machine. Part of this dates back to the formation of the USDA’s organic label guidelines but also because the demand for organic has reached a level where it is impractical (and unprofitable) for the version of events that Whole Foods markets to ease the consciences of their customers to be genuine. Instead, a small number of industrial organic farms follow the letter of the organic law but not the spirit of the movement resulting in something that is on the surface an improvement over the industrial process, but only just.

A goodish part of this section veers off a bit then as Pollan realizes the true alternative he was looking for is not found in the range of organic food available in supermarkets, much of which is produced by the exact same conglomerates that produce, practically side-by-side, the non-organic industrial food. Instead he finds it in non-organic but truly alternative, almost off the grid system farmers and farms such as Polyface which serves as a case study for what I hope (but the book doesn’t spell this out) is not a unique snowflake of an approach to farming. Polyface farm is a family-run operation that focuses on creating a self-sustaining system that tries to mimic natural solutions to common agricultural problems, such as fertilization, pest control and respect for both the earth and the creatures that maintain the balance (and provide the revenue). Pollan neglects to dive too deeply into the pervasiveness of this kind of approach and he doesn’t seem to ask (or perhaps there was nothing to report) about profitability or potential hazards of the systems in place there. I suppose an impression is given that with the land being owned in full and the farm providing practically everything the family needs for survival, it would take a particular catastrophe for Polyface to fail in the capitalist sense of the word. Ultimately Pollan uses this as an argument in favor of local food, which is perhaps the new face of what organic farming was supposed to represent, getting away from not only natural-debt-incurring processes but also decoupling from the tide of fossil fuel required to create an industrial meal.

Part three is a series of thought experiments framed by a personal quest for Pollan to create a meal using only ingredients he hunted, grew or foraged himself. To this end he kills and cleans an animal, gathers wild mushrooms, creates his own yeast and uses vegetables from his garden. But mostly he ruminates about the spiritual impact of being involved in your food, of comprehending exactly what it takes to put a meal on the table and the ethics of each part of that process. This is the point where Pollan discusses the morality of meat-eating in a kind of roundabout fashion, citing plenty of works by other authors who have dedicated entire books to that one subject alone. It’s kind of hard to tell what Pollan’s final assessment is; he mentions at some parts being vegetarian but earlier in the book he talks plainly about currently being fully omnivorous and by the end he has eaten meat again. In any case the impression I get is that Pollan feels the problem with carnivorous diets for those plugged directly into the industrial food chain is that it forces a sort of willful ignorance from the participants. In some senses this is demanded and regulated by the system: As a journalist he was forbidden from visiting the slaughterhouse floors in the processing plants, forced to rely on secondhand accounts from those who worked there. This alone was very disturbing to me and I liked Pollan’s suggestion that a better way to handle the regulations and concerns about humane treatment and sanitation would be to replace the walls of slaughterhouses with glass and let transparency weed out the offenses.

This kind of thing will never happen of course. The industrial food business is dependent on the amount of meat consumed and I believe most thinking people can comprehend that if the manner in which their hamburger went from being cow to meal were visible, there would be a lot less demand for meat. Pollan goes further and suggests that even without the specific hows being addressed, the very what of killing animals for food forces either a careful consideration of what it means to end life to create sustenance or a deliberate self-blinding of that entire question. Even before reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma this has tripped me up. Pollan approaches the question from the angle of suffering and humanity toward the living creatures (basically viewing it from the animal perspective) and though he does (especially in the talk about hunting) discuss the karmic debt incurred by the actually hunter/killer, he seems to never really be able to resolve the first question alone. It is, however, the second which really stymies me: If I can’t conceive of myself performing the act to reduce animal to food (i.e. killing), what right do I have to use someone else’s bloody hands to obfuscate that necessity? Pollan’s self-made meal provides a lot of my contextual support: He hunts and kills and subsequently eats a wild pig and at no point do I begrudge him the right to do exactly that.

Part three ends with a note about how food in America is simultaneously a subject of grave importance and heavy concern while at the same time being this mysterious, almost nebulous topic. Without books like this to open eyes and cast light on what exactly we mean when we talk about food, the topic in modern society is almost comically superficial. Pollan starts his book with an account of the anti-carb craze from several years ago and brings it around to point out that this kind of food fad and conversations (which I’ve had myself) about carbs and ketosis and vitamins and frozen diet meals and free-range eggs are so under-informed because the system we feel is so indispensable is one whose purpose we have (intentionally) misinterpreted. Food in America is not here to nourish us, but to nourish the balance sheets of the companies who provide it.

I loved this book. Pollan’s self-insertion dissertation on all matters food is not a judgmental book. It doesn’t condemn much of anything (except maybe the USDA and the processed food industry, but even then it doesn’t feel preachy, it only feels like reporting) but demands self-evaluation by the nature of its persuasiveness. This is a challenging book mentally but a breezy book in style which is, to me, the best kind of nonfiction. I can’t recommend this book enough and I know it, and the lessons within that require some mental effort to tease forth, will stick with me for a long time to come.

from Paul's bookshelf: read