“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan

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Last year, a reader recommended that I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. (At the time, I had just finished reading his article “Unhappy Meals“. See my post about it here.)

I looked unsuccessfully for the book, both at the used bookstore and the library. I finally purchased it brand new, a rare luxury. I’m slowly working my way through it, and enjoying that he writes technically, yet with beautiful prose.

Once again, this book puts forward his evolutionary viewpoint, and states it as a foregone conclusion. However, the facts he states about food production are undisputable and eye-opening.

He starts with the question: What shall we eat for dinner? And then he focuses on what he calls the three principal food chains:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. — page 7

I’m only in the first of those scenarios –what he calls Corn Conquest. These are notable passages that I would like to share with you.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.

…

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.

…

…the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five thousand different items or SKUs (stock-keeping units) in the supermarket — seventeen thousand new ones every year — represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.

–pages 18 to 20