Pollan - The Ominivore's Dilemma (2006) - Synopsis

UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper XLI: February 18, 2008, 7:00 p.m. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006). NOTE: Named by the New York Times one of the five best nonfiction books of 2006, The Omnivore’s Dilemma won the James Beard Foundation’s prize for best food writing in 2007. The title of the book comes from a 1976 paper by Penn psychologist Paul Rozin. THESIS: Modern agribusiness is too separate from farming’s natural cycles. It overuses corn, is inefficient, is dominated by financial interests, and is harmful to the health and spirit of Americans. INTRODUCTION: Our National Eating Disorder. Traces the roots of “an American paradox―that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily” (3) to the lack of “a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us,” leaving us “especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientist and the marketer” (5) “The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. . . . [each] constitutes an engagement with the natural world” (7). “A food chain is a system for passing . . . calories on to species that lack the plant’s unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight” (7). Summary of book (7-9). Recurrent themes: “[T]here exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry” (9); “[T]he way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world . . . What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections” (10). PART 1: INDUSTRIAL: CORN.

Ch. 1: The Plant: Corn’s Conquest. An ecological detective’s view of the modern supermarket (15-18). Zea mays (corn) is its foundation (18-19). “[W]hat we mostly are is corn―or more precisely, processed corn” (20). Corn is a C-4 plant [i.e. uses the C4 photosynthetic pathway, enabling it to produce more sugar in challenging conditions] (20-23). History of corn’s success (23-26). Maize is a human artifact: “there are in fact no wild maize plants” (27). Evolution and reproduction; hybrid corn allowed commercial exploitation (27-31). Ch. 2: The Farm. George Naylor’s monoculture corn farm in Greene County, Iowa, producing 180 bushels of corn per acre (32-48). “[T]he modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched [its tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate] over to making chemical fertilizer” (42); deriving from the 1909 discovery of how to artificially fix nitrogen by Fritz Haber (“Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process” [47]), this made industrial agriculture possible. Agricultural economics and farm price supports (48-56). Ch. 3: The Elevator. How commodity corn, invented in Chicago in the 1850s, contributed to swelling production to present levels (more than 10bn bushels a year worldwide) (57-64). Ch. 4: The Feedlot: Making Meat. Pollan follows steer number 534, from a ranch in Vale, SD, to Poky Feeders in

Kansas, a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) that constitutes an animal city, with population of 37,000 animals (65-84). Ch. 5: The Processing Plant: Making Complex Foods. In the U.S., 25 wet mills process most of the corn that is not consumed by food animals, fabricating “the innumerable products food science has figured out how to tease from a kernel of corn” (86; 85-90). Processed foods (90-99).

but not that different from industrial food and “nearly as drenched in fossil fuel” (182; 176-84). Ch. 10: Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture. Back to Joel Salatin’s farm. Grass farming and rotational grazing (185-99). Advantages of grains that can be commodities (199202). History of Polyface Farm and the Salatin family (202-07).

Ch. 6: The Consumer: A Republic of Fat. Increasing consumption with highfructose corn syrup and supersizing since circa 1980 (100-08).

Ch. 11: The Animals: Practicing Complexity. A day on the farm, organized as a dozen “holons” (term from Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine), and “the sheer ecstasy of life” (185-225).

Ch. 7: The Meal: Fast Food. A McDonalds meal, consumed in a car (109-19).

Ch. 12: Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir. Pollan helps in the slaughter of 300 chickens (226-38).

PART 2: PASTORAL: GRASS.

Ch. 13: The Market: “Greetings from the Non-Barcode People.” Salatin uses “relationship marketing” and a oneperson marketing company to sell his produce (239-52). The rise of local food systems as a rebelion against what Wendell Berry calls “the total economy” (253-61).

Ch. 8: All Flesh Is Grass. Joel Salatin’s 100-acre (with 450-acre woodlot) Polyface Farm in Virginia, grounded in grass: “Our species’ coevolutionary alliance with the grasses has deep roots and has probably done more to ensure our success as a species than any other, with the possible exception of our alliance with the trillion or so bacteria that inhabit the human gut” (128; 123-33). Ch. 9: Big Organic. [By far the book’s longest chapter.] Organic food industry’s attempt to reconcile the pastoral ideal with industrial reality (134-40). Its roots in 60s counterculture, J.I. Rodale, and Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947), author of An Agricultural Testament and opponent of “NPK mentality” (140-51). Gene Kahn and Cascadia Farm; organic goes mainstream, circa 1990; Drew and Myra Goodman’s Earthbound Farm (151-69). Rosie the organic chicken, in Petaluma (169-73). An organic industrial meal (173-76). Probably tastier and healthier,

Ch. 14: The Meal: Grass Fed. Makes a chicken dinner for friends in Charlottesville (262-66). Nutrition quality better (more omega-3s―essential fatty acids) (266-69). Sublimity of the meal (269-73). PART 3: PERSONAL: THE FOREST. Ch. 15: The Forager. Undertakes to prepare a meal for which he has hunted, gathered, or raised everything himself (277-82). Angela Garro as guide (28284). Hunting mushrooms in the Berkeley Hills (284-86). Ch. 16: The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The ability to eat anything creates a dilemma: neophobia vs. neophilia (287-

89). Humans have evolved to be omnivorous, a trait linked with brain size, needed for refined taste, disgust, learning to cook (289-94). Stresses and anxieties of eating are eased by culture: cuisine (294-98). “America has never had a stable national cuisine” (298-99). Result: vulnerability to fads (299-301) and marketing (301-03).

Ch. 20: The Perfect Meal. The preparation and eating of the elaborate meal (391-411). Acknowledgments. Sources, colleagues, staff, editors, family. Sources. 19 pp. By chapter. Index. 14 pp.

Ch. 17: The Ethics of Eating Animals. Americans’ schizoid relation to animals at present (304-07). Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument for animal rights (307-13). Difficulties of vegetarianism (313-15). Reflections on animal suffering (315-19). Reflections on animals’ well-being, and on symbiosis (319-25). “[H]ow parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is” (325; 325-27). E-mail exchange with Singer (327-28). Reflections on industrial slaughter of animals (328-33) Ch. 18: Hunting: The Meat. Pollan hunts and kills a wild pig; reflections on hunting, with assistance from Ortega y Gasset (334-63). Ch. 19: Gathering: The Fungi. Hunting for chanterelles (364-73). The mysterious kingdom of mushrooms (37378). Morel hunting (378-90).

[On the Author. Michael Pollen was born on Feb. 6, 1955. He is the son of financial advisor Stephen Pollan (coauthor of Live Rich), brother of actress Tracy Pollen (“Family Ties”) and brotherin-law of Michael J. Fox. He has a B.A. from Bennington College and a Master’s in English from Columbia University. He teaches journalism as the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. Michael Pollan has published four other books: Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), A Place of My Own (Random House, 1997), The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (Random House, 2001), and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, 2008). In Defense of Food is currently the No. 1 bestseller on the New York Times list and No. 13 on Amazon.com. His wife, Judith Belzer, is a painter. They have one son, Isaac.]