Omnivore’s Dilemma
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”.]
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