What to eat...

For my choice non-fiction book I read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, a Journalism Professor at Berkley University in California. I chose this book on after I had seen a fellow employee reading it and then saw that it was on Mr. Kunkles suggested reading list. I had hoped that I would enjoy it. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that I did not enjoy this book as my interest in food is not nearly as intent as that of Pollan's. The largest problem I had with it was that much of it seemed much to in depth on the subjects and made the book fairly dull and I would not recommend this book to anyone that does not have an interest in food. Despite this Pollan brings up many interesting points.

This book is about 400 pages and is split up into three parts as he goes through four different meals as he goes through the different extremes of the food society. The first part centers around corn, the second around organic food and locally grown food, and the third about food either grown, hunted, or foraged, coming directly from nature. In each part he exams the food chain and does his best to follow a product from start to finish, from being planted in nature to being put on plate at the dinner table (or in a bag out of the drive-thru in one case).

Corn was the first part and right off I was surprised about how in depth he went into on what I thought to be a very simple generic subject. He started off by going into depth about the evolution of corn by explaining its risky, but highly effective way of using the human race to spread it. Today, most of what we has some form of corn or another that goes into it including soda, chips, some bread, and especially fast food. It is one of the largest industrial products in which we use just as much fossil fuels as we do in our cars (approximately one-fifth of our total consumation each).

The next part of it went into the economics of this entire process and how in many ways it has gone quite corrupt. Corn began to become an important product that people farmed more and more in the 20th century. The problem was that farms began to produce only this crop and prices started to drop very quickly, so they grew more to match the new prices which would then drop even more. During Roosevelt's New Deal, agricultural programs were put into place to help control it, but a few decades ago this was taken away and the subsidies program with the high increase in demand of corn. This encouraged farmers to sell their products at any price even if it was for less than what the corn cost to grow. The government would then cover the difference (plus some more for income) with susidies. However the subsidies program failed to change with the resulting inflation and thus farmers began making less and less money, getting poorer and poorer. To fight this, instead of growing another crop, they just grow more and more corn, trying to get more bushels per acre, which of course, drops the price.

However, despite this poor economic structure for the farmers, the industrial head companies like CAFO still make a lot of money. They sell seeds to the farmers that are hybrids that taste and sell the best, however, these hybrids do not continue into a second generation and so the farmers have to buy more and more seeds each year. Also, the soil in the ground can't keep up with the draining of nutrients, so farmers cover their fields with fertilizers (which they buy rom the companies) to refill the grounds nitrogen supply. Once these crops are harvested (by machinery sold by the companies) they bring the corn to processing mills that are controlled by, you guessed it, compainies like CAFO and sold for a very low price. This is where Pollan has some trouble following the food chain from start to finish as kernals are mixed together from many different farms and shipped across the country. He compromises this goal by thinking of this new gathering of the corn kernals as a generic as they all come from similar farms.

Next they travel into two specific places. The feedlot, and the processing plant. Many people thing that cows usually get there food by eating the grass, but nowadays, industrial food companies have found it easier to give these animals corn mixed in with fats and meat fluids from other animals that allow cows and chickens to get more protein and grow bigger so that they can be sold for more. However, these animals have not evolved to eat corn and as a result different chemicals are added to help these animals digest the food. One of the points that Pollan makes is that we are not only what we eat, but "we are also what what we eat eats." The processing plant uses corn for its natural sugars and starches. It breaks it down to these basic substances and use this to add flavor or calories to foods like soda's or tv dinners, etc. Another good point Pollan makes is that when we go to get our food at fast food restraunts, we don't realize how much of the food we eat is actually what we think it is. Chicken nuggets for example, have been added to by corn products so much that how much chicken is actually in them would be very surprising and that is the point he tries to make in this section.

The second section is called grass and is more interesting than the first. As I said it splits into two parts and examines two different meals. The first part is about organic foods and explains the little known facts that come with these foods. Organic foods became bigger in the last couple decades and people began to grow their own foods and animals without using fertilizers and antibiotics that could possibly reduce the quality of the end product. As this phenomenon grew, companies began to grow out of this and regulations had to be set as to what was organic and what was not. However, one of the problems was that these companies had a large say in what was to be considered organic. Since then many of these regulations were easy for companies to maneuver around and pass off as organic that would surprise many of use. For example, when people see free range chicken they think that it is chicken that has been allowed to roam around freely. What they don't know is that chickens are kept confined in buildings, with less than a square foot of space for the first five weeks to protect from disease as antibiotics cannot be used to be organic. Then by this time the chicken has no reason to believe that it should go outside, having lived in the building before, and even if they do decide to go out and "range freely," they have about two weeks to do so before they are slaughtered and processed for food, and the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) deams this acceptable under its standards. Also, you here about these new microwave dinners and you wonder how that makes any sense to have a processed organic food. Now you may start to here about "beyond organic" farmers, many of which with the same goals as the initiators of the organic movement had and see how odd this system is.

The next part talked about local foods, where Pollan himself travels to Virginia to work on a farm and to learn about it, and I found this to be one of the most interesting parts of this book. He meets Joel Salatin, a man who sells meats including beef, pork, chicken, and turkey, yet he considers himself a grass farmer. He farms buy letting nature do most of the work for hime. There is a certain way to farm grass that he has found to give the most nutrients to the animals, and keeps the soil fresher and gives it more nutrients. All he does is rotate the animals into different fields so that they can control environment. Cows keep the grass low, chickens clean up after the cows, and turkeys go into the short grass and provide nutrients with their high nitrogen content waste. One of the problems that local farms face is regulations by the USDA on all size farms, small or industrial, that don't make sense for these smaller farms, such as having white walls in for slaughtering chickens to check sanitation, when many local farms do chicken killing outside. Another requires a designated bathroom for USDA inspectors and seems silly for smaler farms to have to deal with. Other regulations prevent these farms from doing any processing themselves for things like making bacon and so have prices increased to match the cost of this processing. People are deterred from buying this food because it costs more, but what they don't realize is that the price is just as high when taxes are taken into account to help support these larger companies, and as Pollan goes through his experience he sees this entire process and sees how natural the whole process is. As people come to the farm to buy food (some coming as far away as an hour to get there) he hears the different reasons people choose to buy this food including better taste, the freshness, or knowing animals were raised happily outside and not in an industrial building.

The final section is called The Forest where he makes an entire meal from food he either grows, hunts, or forages. But before he explains where he gets all of his ingredients, he first goes into what he describes as the omnivores dilemma. Omnivores like us have the ability to eat such a wide range of foods, and need to eat a variety to. However, we have such a wide range of foods to eat, that we don't know what we should eat. Where as an animal such as the koala has grown to eat only the leaves of the eucalyptus tree, they don't have to worry about what will be good or bad for them like omnivores do. Rats for example solve this by a process of trial and error by eating small bits of a new food and then seeing if they feel sick about a half hour after eating it. They can then remember the results for the rest of their lives and choose what to eat. For humans we have what Pollan calls a "disgust reflex" that attempts to protect ourselves by deterring us from eating things that we may think harmful to out bodies. After explaining this he begins to go on about the reasonings for being a vegitarian, a choice that about 10 million people follow today. One of the largest reasons for people changing their diet is the belief in whether or not animals have the ability to know think and feel the same level of pain that man can and how humane it is to kill an animal and how they are treated growing in industrial farms, and Pollan himself has trouble going through with eating meat as he studies more and more into it, but he realizes that many nof thesse animals would otherwise be largely driven to extinction were they to roam wild from other predators and nature and he uses this as his argument to go through with his hunting, but he does encourage us to think about this for ourselves and actually decide what we are going to believe when it comes to food.

Next he tells of the hunting aspect of the dinner he makes that is completely self gathered. He describes the months that it took him to learn about hunting, as he had not done before, and worried whether he would be able to kill a wild animal. He finds this particular food chain to be rather short and focuses a lot on human nature and the feelings that go into hunting, the focus and the preparation needed to make it happen. However, when he finally does make his kill, he gets a photo taken over his prize (a wild pig) and looking back is almost disgusted at the pride he sees in himself in the picture at killing an animal. He questions whether or not he will be able to eat the pig when the time comes to do so.

Finally, he finishes his hunt for food in his gathering, mushrooms to be specific. The first thing he must overcome is the fear of eating a dangerous mushroom, instilled in him as a child by his parents. He looks in guides to help him through it, but is not confident in his ability to tell what is different between good or bad mushrooms. He finds confidence by going with others who then teach him what to look for and the ways to look for his mushrooms, although he does find some resistance to this as mushroom foragers are not keen on revealing their "mushroom spots" to strangers, especially those that could publish them out for their readers to find. By the end of it he learns the techniques and conquers his fears of mushrooms and then goes into making his final meal.

The "all natural" meal that he makes he says is real in that it comes directly from the environment, but unrealistic to live by because of the months of preparation put in to procurring the meal (which sounded delicious). He finishes off the book by noting both of the extremes he looked at, the entirely processed fast food, and the completely self made meal and how ridiculous it would be to live by either one of them, but both are important in that they give us the chance to ask ourselves: What are we eating?