Book Review: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Part 1)

Hi All. I spent most of last week recovering from a nasty bout of Bronchitis/walking pneumonia. While I'm pretty well recovered, it did force me to miss presenting CR4's book of the week for March 4^th – The Omnivore's Dilemma. Before I get on to the review, my bout with illness made me rethink the Engineer's Book Club a bit. A week isn't long enough to read and otherwise prepare for a discussion, so I'm going to push entries back to every other Tuesday. The revised schedule is as follows:

(Reviewed) Feb 26: Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick

March 11: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen

March 25: Elephants on LSD and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese

April 1: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion by Henry Darger

April 15: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

April 29: To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski

With our housekeeping in order, on to Omnivore's Dilemma!

Subtitled A Natural History of Four Meals, author Pollan breaks the human approach to food into four story lines: Agribusiness, Large Scale Organic, Intensive Subsistence Farming, and Hunting & Gathering.

If you heard anything about this work, chances are it's related to the chapter on Agribusiness. This chapter, which traces the origin of a meal from McDonald's that Pollan eats with his family, focuses on two main ingredients in the American diet – corn and fossil fuels. Corn and its many derivative products make their way into much of the food we eat. Its prevalence is shocking. Aside from serving as a feed for animals that we eat and as a common starch staple; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. It's in everything from salad dressings, to ice cream, to beer. This may be surprising to some, but I received an crash course in college while living with a roommate who suffered with a corn allergy. Of all the derivative products, including cereals, batter coatings, oils, flavorings and additives, it is the sweetener High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) that gets the heaviest treatment.

While some reviewers seem to see Pollan as demonizing corn, Pamela Kaufman at Food & Wine Magazine states "Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister," I didn't get that. While Pollan is certainly interested in his subject matter, it's more matter-of-fact than ideological. One startling fact is that when HFCS made its' major foray into the American diet in 1982, the use of sugar did not decline at all. That doesn't speak to the "evil of corn" as much as it does to the American love of "sweet" and the desire of agribusiness to give it to us (some would argue force feed), even at the possible detriment to our health.

Corn also plays a major role in the processing of beef cattle. Cattle, which nature adapted to eat grasses and spend two years maturing into adulthood, butt up (no pun intended) against the American desire for cheap beef. Since open grazing land is not particularly available and two years is too much of an investment to work a cow into a side of beef, agribusiness has moved ahead using high energy corn to fatten up a cow in half the time. Of course, cattle haven't developed a gene to digest corn, so while growing quickly, they suffer from all forms of maladies during their short lives, from bloat to immune system issues. This has led to an intensive use of growth hormones and antibiotics to keep the cattle healthy enough to survive to adulthood. These products then make their way through the food chain into our bodies. But that's the rub. To keep beef inexpensive and able to keep up with American demand, the process has to run in this fashion, even though "agribeef" is generally less flavorful than its grass-fed cousin and contains denser fats and higher cholesterol. This is of course, an over simplification, but Pollan does a very good job of walking the reader through the process including interviews with vets and other workers in the field.

Underpinning the extensive use of corn as food staple, additive and animal feed is an intensive influx of fossil fuels. It may take as much as a third of a gallon of gas to grow a bushel of corn. This includes the use of vehicles to plant and harvest the grain, transportation of the crop to processing plants, fossil fuel derivatives that make up fertilizers and insecticides and the packaging used to contain them. A third of a gallon per bushel may not seem like much until you realize that the US produces 2.1 billion of bushels of corn yearly.

Tomorrow, I'll finish looking at Omnivore's Dilemma by going through the other three meals. For those who have read it:

1. What was your take on Pollan's view of agribusiness?
2. What did you find most surprising in this section?
3. Overall, did you find this work heavy or even-handed?
4. How am I doing so far?

- Chris

and as always, if you have a book you'd like to discuss, simply hit the "Contact Blog Admins" button in the blog description and tell me about it!