If you’ve been fortunate enough to catch me getting into a rant recently on the subject you already know that I just finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, a Berkley journalism prof and NY Times magazine contributor. The book, which I had been meaning to read for a long time, hit upon exactly a subject I am extremely interested in and believe is skipped over by a lot of us in our society that strives only for quantity and low cost (but is starting to change) and that is understanding all the dynamics of the food we eat, the impact of our choices that are much greater than most of us understand. Okay before I start getting too lofty, let’s get back to the basics, for those who don’t know this book, it attempts to chronicle several meals, one based upon what is now the norm, the monoculture (corn & soy among others) and fast food / industrialized food based upon these. Another meal is based upon a very different type of agriculture, on a small farm where food is local, animals are grazed on grass and all the profound changes that occur from this type of diversified farming. The last meal he goes through is a hunter/gather meal for the most part (his gathered sea salt doesn’t turn out too good from the San Francisco bay, but the rest works out pretty good — wild pig, mushrooms, wild yeast, etc.).
While I think just understanding the food chains we live in is a useful exercise, the book does a good job showing how far we have strayed from our origins (and arguably what we have evolved to eat) with our creation of the massive corn fields and cheap subsidized corn, that create corn syrup and any other number of other derivative substance as well as creating the cheap feed that encourages the toxic feed lots that fatten cattle with a food they aren’t designed to eat (thus requiring lots of drugs). While there may be other things that are harming the American diet, the thing I most took away from the book is that all the problems of this type of food society are inherently taken care of using more traditional methods of raising livestock on grass and careful rotation.
The last part of the book where he goes hunting also goes a long way to dealing with our complete separation from where our food comes from, the lives of the animals that feed us and that we are doing so intentionally – putting meat further and further into sanitized forms, moving butchering into factories, keeping primal cuts out of view.
“There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog–that becomes the Christmas ham. We tolerate this schizophrenia because the life of the pig has moved out of view; when’s the last time you saw a pig in person? Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible.” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, page 306)
One last thing I’ll mention in the section on the ethics of eating animals is his discussion of the ethics of vegetarianism. One thing I hadn’t really thought about is that many of todays animals are domesticated, and would not continue to exist without humans (corn as well) and essentially if we all stopped eating meat certain species would be wiped out (something to think about). Additionally there is the conundrum of vegetables that are being grown using petrochemical based fertilizers versus animal protein raised off of grass, when you compare those two which is better? (“The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing (and hunting) animals on it–especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein. To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitats, unless of course we are willing to make complete dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain.” page 327) Also veggies should take note that lots of animals are killed unintentionally by modern farm equipment, that crushes moles and other animals during planting and harvesting.
Lots of interesting stuff in this book, if you do get into and find you agree with some of the ideas, I think the thing to take away is to attempt and support local farming, local grass raised meats that raise animals in a lifestyle you aren’t ashamed to go and see. Even the organic national brands are factory farms, which while better than the rest are still probably not what you picture when you pick up the product in Whole Foods, which is a whole other subject he gets into.
