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Books, Naturally

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan. 2006. The Penguin Press, New York. 450 pp., hardbound. $26.95.
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In a startling but apt metaphor, Michael Pollan likens the modern American supermarket to a landscape filled with plants and animals from which we must choose what to eat. If we had specialized diets like koalas and giant pandas do, the choice would be easy: Head straight for the eucalyptus or bamboo aisle, load up the basket, and go. But we don't. Human beings are omnivores, and the omnivore's dilemma of Pollan's title refers to the fact that we, like other animals that eat a variety of foods—plants, animals, fungi—must figure out what's good to eat and what's not. What will nourish healthy bodies and what will sicken or kill us?

Until recently, cultural patterns borne of tradition, taboos, and rituals pretty much dictated what people ate, and in most places at most times the choices were relatively small. When I was growing up, dinner was baked or grilled chicken, beef, or pork, with mashed or baked potatoes, boiled peas or carrots, bread and butter, and a glass of milk—all prepared with few adornments beyond salt and pepper. Had I asked my parents what is this stuff I'm eating and where did it come from, they could have answered.

No more. Most of the supermarket landscape is not given over to recognizable animals, fruits, and vegetables. Rather, it is filled with bottles, boxes, cans, and plastic containers of processed food, and their labels list obscure ingredients with no clue as to what they are or where they came from. Other label blurbs tout healthful properties, such as low-fat, no-carb, or whatever the last medico-dietary fad of the moment helps sell products. We also face what might be called ethical labels on increasingly more food items: organic, cage-free, free-range, wild, farmed, and the like. What do those mean and how should they affect food choices? On the flip side, how do our choices affect not only our personal well-being, but the well-being of the planet?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan sets out to answer these questions by tracing three food chains that result in the ingredients of four different meals. Along the path of reaching each of these meals, he explores food and our relationship to it from multiple diverse perspectives. Eating, more than any other human activity, "constitutes an engagement with the natural world. As ecology teaches, and this book tries to show, [sun, soil, and what we eat are] all connected, even to the Twinkie." But today, it's "hard to see how." Pollan was driven to undertake this project by a deep desire to eat knowledgably, and share what he learned so the rest of us can too.

Pollan's three food chains are industrial (the way most of us eat today), pastoral (divided into big industrial organic and small ecological organic), and personal (a meal he hunted and gathered himself). Each of these three journeys tells stories I found surprising, and you may too. Did you know, for instance, that most of the supermarket chickens labeled "free-range" merely have the opportunity to go outdoors, and most never do? That it's possible to go pig-hunting just outside of San Francisco? That a single farm in Virginia forms its own sustainable ecosystem that creates food from nothing more than the input of sunlight and human labor?

But most surprising, and scariest, is Pollan's explication of the industrial food chain, an invention of the last 50 years or so that is based almost entirely on corn and petroleum. We eat so much corn, disguised in any number of ways, that Pollan quotes one scientist who says, "When you look at the isotope ratios [in body tissues] we North Americans look like corn chips with legs." In other words, we may think of ourselves as omnivores, with more choices of diverse food items from every corner of the Earth than ever, but we are actually heading toward a panda-like specialization on a giant grass!

Whether that is good or bad—I personally think that being stew and salad is better or at least more interesting than being a corn chip—this sort of industrial agriculture is not sustainable. When you factor in the costs of the fossil fuels that go into producing corn as we do now, it takes more than a calorie of fuel to produce a calorie of food. As Pollan puts it, "From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink the petroleum directly… ." And this calculation doesn't factor in other costs, including wetlands poisoned by fertilizer runoff, biodiversity lost to a monoculture of corn, and human health undermined by a new and unprecedented diet.

When a person or animal must continually spend more energy to obtain a meal than the meal provides, that individual's body begins to eat itself and eventually dies. The same principle applies on a societal scale to our corn-petroleum diet. Unwittingly, we have been eating ourselves to death. By learning to eat knowledgably, starting with reading this book, we can return to eating for life.

—Susan Lumpkin

ZooGoer 35(4) 2006. Copyright 2006 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.

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