Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma
Michael Pollan has a new book out. Have you heard?
The Omnivore's Dilemma has hit bookstore shelves just as America's concern about food issues has unfurled like a bullwhip, a slow wave of defiance building to a snap at agribusiness's throat. Wal-Mart and Safeway scurried to carry organic products in the last year. New farmer's markets open every week. The Eat Local movement is the darling of the food press.
Pollan's fluid, detailed prose makes this book the new bible of culinary activism. The four meals he describes in the book serve as Nicholson-Bakerian lenses that bring a keen insight into our modern food systems.
He makes the point, explicitly and through example, that we don't understand complex natural systems enough to graft them onto industrial thought processes. Our entire food system is in danger because we've paid attention to short-term efficiencies, not long-term costs.
No surprise that "conventional" agriculture suffers from this blind spot, with its cattle feedlots, impoverished farmers, and environmental destruction. But many of the "ethical eaters" who read this book might be surprised to find that similar problems afflict organic farming.
Organic food has become big business, and former idealists have become savvy CEOs of sprawling companies. Ever purchased a Rosie free-range chicken? Seen the little farm on the label? Now picture thousands of chickens packed into a shed, with minimal and unused access to a small grass yard for the last two weeks of their lives. Or picture organic food that's been shipped across the globe, "awash in fossil fuel" to use Pollan's phrase.
The book offers Polyface Farms as a counterexample. Joel Salatin, something of an icon among small farm advocates, relies on innate animal behaviors to do the heavy lifting on his property. Cows graze in pasture and leave their manure in the field. Three days later, farmhands move chickens into the same area to spread the manure (and add their own) as they seek out the fly larvae that have become plump in the cow patties. Three weeks later, a rich field of grass is once again ready for the cattle.
Salatin's practices have increased productivity on his farm. This reality flies in the face of theory, which positions agriculture as a zero-sum game where we take away and never give back. And, says Pollan, the meat and eggs taste great.
Polyface represents a utopian vision, but Pollan doesn't speculate about how well the model would scale. Could we feed everyone in the country with a zillion copies of Salatin's farm?
The last meal in the book certainly won't scale. In the last section, he hunts and forages his own food (more or less), including a wild boar. It is here that the book bogs down. The section looks at the philosophy of food (his well-regarded essay "An Animal's Place" is reprinted almost verbatim), and his own epiphanies about killing an animal for his supper. I don't doubt that he had a profound experience, but I didn't learn from his hunting tale the same way I did from earlier sections.
Read the book. You'll never look at your dinner plate the same way.
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