A few insights from Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan…
Virtually everything that we Americans eat is a form of corn. Cows, chicken, farmed fish, and pigs are fed from corn, resulting in meat, eggs, and milk from corn. Most of the ingredients in processed food come from corn, including the lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the coloring, the citric acid, and the “natural raspberry flavor” (need not come from a raspberry, only from something “natural”… such as corn).
Cows are designed to eat grass, not corn. If you feed a cow corn she will tend to get sick and require massive doses of antibiotics. Most of America’s cows are in fact sick and pumped full of antibiotics. In some cases the antibiotics are necessary to prevent bacteria from turning the corn in their stomachs into a gas that would literally explode the cow. Humans were adapted to eat meat from grass-fed animals. Steak from a corn-fed animal is probably not as healthful and the heart disease that we get from eating steak might well be caused by eating corn-fed cows.
Whole Foods is a scam. “Organic beef” is corn-fed beef from cows that are crammed together in filthy feedlots. They might get lighter doses of antibiotics or skip out on eating protein derived from dead animals, but the steaks at Whole Foods don’t come from what you would recognize as a traditional farm. [I went into a local Whole Foods and asked if they had any grass-fed beef; the clerk looked in one little corner of a case where such beef sometimes was stocked and came back to report that they were out.] “Free range” chickens are produced in vast chicken houses where the chickens are locked in for all but the last two weeks of their life. During those last two weeks a couple of doors are opened onto small side yards. The chickens could in theory go out these doors and walk around a bit, but they don’t because they’ve no experience with leaving the big chicken house.
Farmed salmon is a scam. People fall in love with salmon because it has a lot of nutrients and omega-3 fatty acids. Most of those properties are side-effects of the natural life of a salmon. A farmed salmon that is fed on corn is literally “chicken of the sea” and there is no reason to believe it is more healthful than a corn-fed chicken.
Pollan visits a farm that runs more or less naturally, Polyface. The cows munch the grass, the chickens run through the pastures and eat insects that would become pests, the surrounding forest cools and waters the pastures, the manure from all of the animals fertilizes. This is more or less how things work in Nature and it is nothing like the “organic” farms that supply supermarkets. Industrial farming is always a monoculture, which means that you need to bring chemical fertilizers in to replace nitrogen and pesticides to control insects. When the animals are fattened in feedlots their manure becomes a waste product to be treated rather than a fertilizer for the fields where they eat grass.
Organic produce sold at supermarkets is 99% as bad for the environment as standard produce because it is grown on massive monoculture farms and all of the inputs, such as fertilizer, must be trucked in from far away. Pest control is a serious problem with any monoculture and it becomes even more of a challenge with an “organic” monoculture because the farmers aren’t permitted to use modern weed- and insect-killers.
Food, especially meat, is a lot cheaper than it was in the 1960s. Pollan shows that it might look the same but it really isn’t the same food.
[Penguin published the book at $20 originally. That apparently wasn’t enough for them to pay an editor to notice that Pollan consistently misuses the term “begs the question” to mean “raises the question”.]
It must be terrible not to live out west. Wild salmon is readily accessible from May through September, and everybody knows that you shouldn’t order salmon at a restaurant unless they tell you where it came from.
My local Whole Foods has a decent selection of grass-feed beef. It’s very, very expensive.
Whole Foods has adapted pretty dramatically to some of the criticisms in Pollan’s book, ours in Petaluma California, for instance, carries much of the same produce from the same farmers that we meet at the farmer’s markets. Albeit with a mark-up.
And they’ve got grass fed beef, although there again I prefer to go straight to the producer, because “grass fed” means different things to different sellers.
Sean, I don’t know which west coast you’re on, but down here in Northern California the salmon season this year was cut very very short because of a lack of stock…
And I’ve got a question: If 90% of English language speakers use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question” rather than “begs that you overlook the answer”, does it really mean the latter?
Phil, if you haven’t already, you might be interested in reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.
I just finished Pollan‘s follow-on book, In Defense of Food while vacationing in Paris, where there continues to be a deep appreciation of quality of food. He’s one of my favorite authors. I especially appreciated the hunting details of Omnivore’s Dilemma. I hunted waterfowl for the first time a few years ago. I learned from my then three year old son that you shouldn’t eat meat unless you can take personal responsibility for the death of the animal at some point in your life.
For Omega-3s, try growing kale. It’s one of the best sources of Omega-3 and will readily grow in any patch of dirt in New England. Delicious! Those fancy expensive Whole Foods eggs with Omega-3s come from chickens that have simply been fed kale.
Hi Philip,
If you liked this book, you may also like the movie “King Corn”, where they go through a typical lifespan of corn (and attempt to grow their own acre of corn in Iowa.) They explore the fact that even our hair is made of corn, due to the fact that it’s used almost everywhere. A good video complement to the book, and readily available for rental at both Blockbuster and Netflix.
-Erica
Maybe I am just an ignorant Kansan but most of that makes very little sense. Where I live, in Manhattan, KS, we have cattle all around us that are fed on what we refer to as prairie (the natural grasses of Kansas). And then during the winter when the prairie isn’t growing, we feed the cattle what we call hay (what we cut on the prairie during the growing season, bale, and then store). And to make sure cattle get the correct nutrients, we supplement their diets with other food stuff (oats, barley, alfalfa, corn, etc.). I am sure that when the cows head off the the feedlots they may be”finished” by feeding corn but that is usually just the final months – not the largest part of their growth.
I also wanted to point out that I have other sources of food that have nothing to do with corn – fruits, vegetables, and wheat-based products to name a few. So saying that “virtually everything that we Americans eat is a form of corn” isn’t quite accurate – at least for me.
Todd, my father in law was a chicken and turkey farmer, and one of the accomplishments he saw in his field over his life is that a bird brought to market consumes approximately 2x its market weight in feed. And, yes, that feed is corn. So, if you’re eating chicken, you’re eating processed corn.
I don’t know the similar numbers on beef, but Pollan’s assertion is that most of the cattle’s weight comes from those last few months in the feedlot, and that the feedlot is largely subsidized corn.
You may also think that a lot of what you’re getting elsewhere is wheat based, but I’ll bet a lot of the sugars in those baked goods come from corn, and a whole bunch of the flavors in any processed foods you eat come from corn byproducts.
I lived in Austria from 2006-2008 and can attest that the milk there tastes very different, whether it was whole or had some of the fat removed, compared with U.S. milk. Many farms there are still mountain farms, which are more expensive (and of course subsidized) but also serve the function of keeping the land beautiful. Since returning to the U.S. in June, I have realized how I don’t trust the food producers here and, when I am no longer a student, will gladly pay more for food that comes from a farm where animals are treated well and I can know what’s going into the food.
You can join a meat CSA, like this one in the Boston area:
http://www.chestnutfarms.org/