Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma, Part II

I found the second half of The Omnivore’s Dilemma to be eminently readable and entertaining, but somewhat less informative than the first. Pollan’s stories about acquiring a rifle and his first pig, hunting for wild mushrooms, and freezing his fingers in search of a tasty abalone are amusing, but as he acknowledges himself, we are way past the point of supporting the earth’s population on hunting and gathering lifestyles. More interesting were further details about the efforts of local, sustainable food producers like Joel Salatin, their tricks for taking advantage of natural food webs, and their struggles with federal policies designed for the advantage of big agribusiness.

As a biologist, I appreciated Pollan’s point about natural systems having a very different sort of efficiency than industrial ones, an efficiency in which coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops permit the waste of one organism to sustain another (p. 214). The sort of manmade efficiency that eschews natural complexity for the simplicity of monoculture may allow for more mechanization of production and standardization of product, but it also demands both constant consumption of additional resources – notably pesticides and nitrogenous inputs – and perpetual disposal of nitrogenous outputs. But even if every person in America could see the real costs, suffering, and waste entailed by the modern food industry, would much of what happens – “the cruelty, the carelessness, the filth” – simply have to stop (p. 235)? Or would the vast majority of consumers still opt for the lowest price, even if they would strongly prefer the cruelty-free option if identical in short term cost and efficacy? If so, then sound governmental policy rather than consumer education will be most effective at changing our behavior.

While the first half of The Omnivore’s Dilemma described some of the policies designed to encourage overproduction of cheap industrial commodity crops, I had not realized how related policies actively discouraged organic and sustainably minded local farmers from competing with big agribusiness. This 3/1/08 New York Times op-ed written by a small Minnesota grower further revealed that not only will landowners lose their federal subsidies for growing something other than commodity crops, they are also penalized the market price of the forbidden fruit. The demand for local organic food is already high and growing, and eliminating the preferential treatment of big business by governmental programs would go a long way towards leveling the perceived cost differential for the individual consumer.

This change in policy is especially critical for low-income families, who are required to purchase the cheapest food options available in order to use WIC food vouchers (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children). Once designed to improve nutrition, WIC encourages the purchase of high-calorie foods, especially dairy products, and only in 2006 began providing more fresh produce vouchers in recognition of the obesity and related chronic diseases now disproportionately affecting the poor. Moreover, a recent UCLA study in the American Journal of Public Health indicates that WIC mothers who shop at farmers’ markets buy more produce than those who shop at grocery stores. To promote public health as well as environmentally sustainable farming practices, we should encourage the government to increase the WIC budget and provide more than the $8 per recipient and $6 per child now allotted each month, as well as to permit local organic foods to be purchased with WIC vouchers.

While The Omnivore’s Dilemma provides a wealth of information, captivatingly conveyed, it raises as many questions as it answers regarding What to eat? As Pollan himself admits at the end of the book, the two framing meals – one a fast food frenzy from McDonald’s eaten in an automobile, the other a slow food feast of ingredients painstakingly hunted and gathered, aged, and lovingly prepared for friends – stand at the extreme ends of human eating. One might say that the main point of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to show us that “the pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; [sic] the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance” (p. 410). But if we discard both of these options as unreal and unsustainable, how can concerned consumers find some happy medium that would still allow us to know what we’re eating, where it came from, how it got to our tables, and what it really cost?

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.

The World Is Flat, Part II

Overall, I liked the second half of The World Is Flat much better than the first. Having established the factors flattening the world, Friedman turns his attention to America’s chances for success and what we can do to improve them. He also examines how the same technological innovations can empower individuals who want to create a better future via political activism or entrepreneurship and those who want to destroy the modern institutions they envy and fear in order to pull the world back into a simpler, more glorious past. More importantly for me, he describes the downsides of at least some of the great flatteners and their likely impacts on society.

I thought that Friedman did a great job of identifying the gaps in America’s education, infrastructure, and ambitions that threaten our future success in a flattening world, although his proposed solutions are not as clearly laid out. For example, he describes how our system of funding public education via local property taxes might have made sense when our society needed a combination of unskilled laborers and educated professionals, but no longer works when decent wages require a very high standard of education (p. 360). Friedman advocates making benefits and education as flexible as possible to encourage upward employment mobility (p. 383) and suggests that compulsory and/or subsidized tertiary education may be required (p. 387), although it is unclear how this would be funded given that pesky problem with public education mentioned above. He also points out the relative success of many immigrants’ children and the importance of high expectations and two-parent homes (p. 396). What he fails to acknowledge is that having one parent or other caregiving relative at home to supervise and encourage children is much more difficult in our mobile modern society, in which both parents often work to make ends meet and there is much less support from the extended family. Friedman criticizes the welfare system (p. 391) without acknowledging that parenting one’s children is as important to a society as performing paid work, and hardly mentions the critical issues of flextime, parental leave, and the costs (financial and emotional) of “outsourcing” childcare.

I appreciated Friedman’s discussion about the importance of the internet in shaping society as well as its potential pitfalls. He suggests that for all China’s resources, its government’s use of censorship impedes the imagination, idea sharing, and (presumably) achievement that accompany the world of information potentially accessible online (p. 449). On the other hand, Friedman makes the important point that the transparency allowed by the internet means fewer second chances, so young people had best take care of their reputations now that prospective admissions committees and employers can get to know them through their MySpace accounts and other online records (p. 529). (I myself have tried hard to keep my personal information from becoming publicly available, but recently was shocked to discover that my name, employer, and home address were listed on a Huffington Post website along with the amount I donated to a presidential campaign.) Friedman also describes the danger of the “echo effect” that can occur when like-minded individuals self-associate online, reinforcing each other’s ideas without dissenting (perhaps saner and/or better informed) voices (p. 526).

I liked Friedman’s point that participation in a global supply chain provides a strong incentive for peaceful relations and political stability, a.k.a. the Dell theory (p. 587). He could have elaborated further on the idea that since financial dependence on the exchange of goods, ideas, and services with other nations provides such incentives more generally, the US and other democratic world powers should try to engage rogue nations through trade, diplomacy, and media. Imposing embargoes only serves to isolate those nations further, allowing despots to cultivate fear of the unknown Other to retain popularity/power and impeding the filtration of modernizing influences and inspirational counterexamples that could help those they rule to envision and demand alternatives. He does acknowledge that outsiders should collaborate with progressive forces of the Arab-Muslim world by, for example, signing free trade agreements, to foster a war of ideas within their civilization that could result in true empowerment (p. 569).

Finally, Friedman finally acknowledges the devastating impact that population growth coupled with increased standards of living will have on the environment (p. 570). However, for an expert in the Middle East, Friedman seems quite unrealistic regarding the important issue of oil, particularly with respect to its abundance and its ecological impacts. I did appreciate his point that China’s foreign policy focuses on access to oil, causing them to collaborate with, for example, the Sudanese government despite the genocide being perpetrated in Darfur (p. 574). As Friedman states much later, despotic leaders will not reform as long as they can use oil revenue to fund their regimes. But rather than criticizing the US for cozying up to the fundamentalist Saudi Arabians, who supply the madrassas that created the Taliban as well as zealous al-Qaeda recruits, Friedman advises us to work with our allies to bring down the cost of crude oil (p. 628). A fine idea, but how exactly is that to be accomplished given the ever-growing demand from developing nations like China in combination with a finite, perhaps dwindling, supply? He states that “one thing we will not be able to do is tell young Indians, Russians, Poles, or Chinese that… they have to hold back and consume less for the greater global good” (p. 575). But that is precisely what we must do if we are to have any hope of preventing global warming catastrophe, albeit in combination with the willingness to lead by example ourselves.

Review: The World Is Flat, Part I

I'm currently auditing a very interesting course on science policy and turned in this reaction paper on the first seven chapters of The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman:

In the first half of his bestselling book The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman describes the technological innovations and historical events that have “flattened” the world, putting individuals from all nations on a more equal footing as more and more jobs can be done by anyone, anywhere. I agree with his main thesis, and was glad to have a handy historical outline of the development of the World Wide Web, open source software, and so forth. Friedman has an engaging style and a knack for interweaving personal interviews and simple analogies to explain technological concepts to the average reader. However, he seems to repeat himself a great deal – all right already, globalization is good, it’s here, and we need to adapt! – while simultaneously glossing over a lot of associated issues that I consider to be of great importance.

For example, fresh from our class discussions of the IPCC assessment reports, I find Friedman to be too much the uncritical cheerleader for the rapid rise of the developing world, without enough concern for the environmental impacts of dramatically increasing demands for natural resources as well as waste produced. In general, Friedman writes as though our modern energy needs were unproblematic rather than heavily dependent on finite and polluting fossil fuels, e.g., “transportation seems to grow easier and cheaper over time” (p. 281). He praises Ratan Tata for the innovative and affordable Indian car created by trimming cutting-edge safety and emissions technologies (p. 274) – just what we need, a billion more people burning gasoline in private vehicles! He does mention briefly that “if we don’t learn how to do more things with less energy and lower emissions, we are going to create an environmental disaster and make our planet unlivable for our children” (p. 297), thus providing the incentive to develop renewable energies and environmentally sustainable systems. But the shortness of this section and paucity of specifics or real-life examples speak to a lack of real interest in these issues.

I also think that Friedman gives capitalism too much credit for improving people’s quality of life. He proclaims that while “Communism was a great system for making people equally poor… Capitalism made people unequally rich” (p. 52), a slick set of phrases that gloss over the fact that capitalism made plenty of people unequally poor as well. Even worse, Friedman criticizes the Soviet Empire for propping up “autocratic regimes” around the world, claiming that capitalism in contrast allows economies to be governed “by the interests, demands, and aspirations of the people, rather than from the top down, by the interests of some narrow ruling clique” (p. 52). I think that this would come as a big surprise to the citizens of countries like Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Indonesia (to name only a few) whose democratically elected leaders have been overthrown by dictators with the help of the United States in order to serve our military and corporate interests. Friedman also makes a big deal of India’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s without recognizing that Nehru’s initial socialistic model served to protect the country in its economic infancy, preventing its exploitation by the West (p. 53).

In my opinion, the biggest weakness of the first half of The World Is Flat is that Friedman does not express sufficient concern over the darker side of globalization. He uses the example of the state of Indiana attempting to hire an Indian consulting firm in order to deride those who worry that outsourcing and offshoring can result in exploitation (p. 242). But it’s a straw man, only created to be easily dismissed. Educated, skilled workers may be getting the opportunities of their dreams as a result of globalization, but that doesn’t allow us to ignore the environmental degradation and worker exploitation that do take place as corporations seek to evade US regulations by moving their operations to the desperate developing world.

And so far, Friedman has failed to inspire my trust that we can protect ourselves from the excesses of capitalism gone global. Wal-Mart is the obvious example of “too much of a good thing” – the quest for economic efficiency taken to egregious extremes. His solution to the ruthlessness of “the China of companies” that somehow has been isolated from “the currents of global debate on labor and human rights” even as it has become the biggest and most profitable retailer on the planet? “One can only hope that all the bad publicity Wal-Mart has received in the last few years will force it to understand that there is a fine line…” (p. 163). Call me a cynic, but I don’t think that we should bet the farm on hope: only regulation or consumer pressure will change the unfair practices of corporations with this much leverage.

Finally, while Friedman claims that flattening is frightening but will ultimately create more satisfying kinds of jobs that reward innovative thinking, passion, collaboration, and so forth, he also baldly states that advances in communications technology will make it possible (and eventually expected) for us to work those jobs at all times: “You are always in. Therefore, you are always on” (p. 249). For those of us who don’t think that one’s entire waking life should be defined by one’s paid labor, this sounds like a kind of hell. What about having the “leisure” time to develop and nurture personal (as opposed to commercial) relationships with family and friends, to serve one’s community, to stay informed about the world - not to mention to keep learning the new skills that will be essential to staying afloat in the brave new world that Friedman describes?