Steve Reads

Omnivore’s Dilemma can be summarized very quickly: Michael Pollan eats four meals, and tracks down where they all come from. It is a brilliantly simple conceit, and could only be pulled off well by a writer as gregarious, warmhearted, easygoing and scientifically rigorous as Pollan. He wants to know where McDonald’s comes from, so he goes into a cornfield, follows the corn through cows on its way to becoming beef, and visits the “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” (CAFOs) in which they’re slaughtered. He interviews corn farmers. He explains the perverse incentives which have motivated corn growers to produce more and more of the stuff, even when it’s not needed. (The government pays them the difference between some set price and the current market price. Hence farmers have an incentive to produce as cheaply as possible.) This is one of the reasons why we as a nation are growing fatter and fatter.

Pollan takes it a step further, though, making something explicit that had never occurred to me: the fact that our country is so nutritionally faddish, leaping from fruit diets to hourly enemas to high-carb diets to high-protein diets, is a sign of something deeply dysfunctional in our relationship to food. (We call the French diet a “miracle,” but Pollan notes that they don’t. They just consider it good eating and a part of the culture.) Pollan never really figures out why we might have this relationship. The lack of a distinctive national cuisine might have something to do with it, he says, but the end effect is clear: we don’t eat well, and nowadays we’re as likely as not to microwave something and eat it in the car. The family meal has been destroyed, and with it the sense of community that food fosters in healthy societies. Pollan’s writing is meticulous and heartfelt, and it made me desperately want to change the way I eat.

After McDonald’s Pollan paints the bright side of the American meal: places like Polyface Farms that are growing more-than-organic food: food that is completely sustainable and delicious. Cows, pigs, and chickens roam widely on a carefully maintained schedule that keeps the grass growing at the optimal rate. The farm produces almost no waste: every last bit of organic matter feeds the next step in the cycle. It’s something of an agrarian utopia  . . .  and it’s probably completely unrealistic for feeding a nation of 300 million people. Indeed, says Pollan, our nation certainly would have capped out at a much smaller population had we not had industrial farming. (It’s a reasonable counterfactual, but it’s debatable.)

After he visits a self-sustaining farm, Pollan tramps off into the wild to hunt and forage for his own food. Also not sustainable at large scale, but that’s not the point: Pollan is trying to reorient us to what meals are about, and how they’re philosophically and ethically larger than just what’s on the plate.

Pollan’s book has made me want to try being a vegetarian again. My girlfriend used to be a vegan, but has turned around 180 degrees and eats a high-protein meat diet. (Atkins vegans are, I imagine, hard to come by.) So the vegetarian thing might have to wait a bit. Being vegetarian isn’t really the sine qua non in Pollan’s book, though; if anything is, it’s short food chains: knowing where your food came from, using food to support your community, and reducing the amount of petroleum necessary to get it to your door. (If peak oil ever comes, bananas may be history.) Joining a CSA is well within my power, and I intend to do so soon.

If I have any gripe about Omnivore’s Dilemma, it’s small: Pollan is a bit too self-satisfied. At one point he eats a meal in the car with wife and child, driving at 65 miles per hour down the highway in California. I don’t actually believe that he wanted to do that. I can hear him saying to himself, “This would make an excellent story for my newspaper article.” Likewise when he’s reading Peter Singer in a steakhouse. If more of the book seemed like Pollan being Pollan, it’d be perfect.

As it is, it is just about perfect. I intend to buy a copy just to have around to shove into people’s hands. It’s a life-changing sort of book.