Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a brilliant, biting muckraker of a book that uses the conceit of following food from soil to plate in order to expose the atrocities and absurdities of the modern industrial food system. Without explicitly dictating the choices consumers should make, Michael Pollan provides us with a great deal of information that can inform our ethics regarding decisions about which foods to buy. He explains the production and distribution methods that permit us the cheap food that comes with a huge hidden price tag: environmental poisoning and degradation, animal cruelty, petroleum consumption, obesity. Perhaps most relevant to our course, he reveals how government policies dictate price-based consumer choice, for example by subsidizing industrial overproduction of cheap corn and discriminating against small independent farmers by means of regulations tailored to large agribusinesses.

I was dismayed to learn that “industrial organic” is very nearly an oxymoron, given the prevalence of monocultures and CAFOs, centralized distribution methods, ultrapasteurization and synthetic additives to increase shelf life, etc., in nearly complete disregard for the revolutionary philosophy underlying the original organic food movement. Pollan mocks the myths of “supermarket pastoral” labels – that name brand organic milk comes from happy cows ruminating on grassy fields, not eating organic grain in factory farms, and “free range” chickens actually spend their days outdoors instead of cooped up in a crowded shed with doors kept shut for fear of infection (p. 140). Buying organic from Whole Foods may allow us to assuage our guilt by paying several times the average price, but it does not mean that the animals were treated more humanely, or that the produce is more nutritious, or that the agricultural methods were more sustainable, or that less fossil fuel was used for processing and transport. On the other hand, buying organic does reduce the amount of pesticide contaminating our soil, water, and produce, as well as the antibiotics and exogenous hormones in our meat. It just can’t be regarded as a panacea for the market-driven evils of modern agriculture.

Pollan’s discussion of fertilizers offers a powerful critique of scientific reductionism, which has been used to identify key elements necessary for a process and then to justify regarding them as entirely sufficient. As he says, “once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else,” ultimately giving way “to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine” (p. 147-8). But evolved biological systems are extremely complex, and many things are connected in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. I was fascinated by the descriptions of Polyface farm, where deep knowledge of the different species of grasses and of the animals that are nourished by them permit much higher, and sustainable, food production that draws almost all of its energy from renewable, pollution-free solar power.

This is critical because, as Pollan observes, the food industry uses about a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the US (p. 183), and “as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow” (p. 198). This makes a lot of sense given that anthropogenic climate change began with ancient agriculture, long before fossil fuels were harnessed in its service. There is a further, interesting parallel that Pollan does not explicitly articulate: the “blind-man’s accounting” that ignores the true costs of industrial food production – from government subsidies to health and environmental impacts – often also operates in discussions about the economic effects of limiting greenhouse gas emissions that ignore the indirect costs of global warming. Finally, I was intrigued to learn that grasslands naturally evolved the original method of underground carbon sequestration (p. 197)!

My main criticism of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is that Pollan occasionally throws in interesting scientific hypotheses without providing supporting references. For example, when he speculates that a particular cow “has also chosen exactly which grasses to eat first depending on whatever minerals her body craves that day,” I suspect that he may be giving too much credit to bovine instincts. I am aware of some studies suggesting that chimpanzees self-medicate by swallowing rough leaves to eliminate intestinal parasites, but Pollan offers no source for his claim that “grazing cattle instinctively use the diversity of the salad bar to medicate themselves” (p. 195). I also wondered how much evidence we have that the ancestors of our food grains were perennial grasses that evolved into annuals in order to nourish humans directly (p. 129). Still, these are fairly minor points that did not detract significantly from my enjoyment of the work or the validity of its major themes.