Book 3: "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

The ferocious face of a hungry omnivore.

Of the three books I purchased on my first trip to Barnes & Noble, I was most intimidated by Michael Pollan's  "The Omnivore's Dilemma." These are a few of the thoughts that ran through my head: "What awful truths am I going to discover about the food industry? Will I become a puritanical farmer or farmer's market vegan? What if the book is really academic and boring and I can't finish it? 411 pages is going to take me days to read!" As it turns out, I had nothing to fear in The Omnivore's Dilemma and, in fact, I'm planning to read a few of his other books: In Defense of Food, Cooked and The Botany of Desire.

A little background on why I chose the book. My family is above average in food education. I was brought up in a family that might not have had a label for the omnivore's dilemma, but certainly lived out the consciousness of people who cannot turn away in ignorance. My cells grew to maturity on a steady diet of "Down to Earth" (local grocery store) and Whole Foods food, which means mostly organic and/or simple, unprocessed food. In addition, I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for over 14 years. Besides a macroscopic awareness, we've also been students of the microscopic perspective, evaluating food on it's inherent nutritional value. The credit for this core familial belief goes to my mother who drew all these conclusions long before all the exposes, documentaries and news specials. She has really helped to shape my view of food, and I don't eat a single meal without understanding or at least considering the implications of what I'm about to ingest. 

The Omnivore's Dilemma is divided into three parts titled "Industrial," "Pastoral" and "Personal." Industrial is about the part of the American food industry supported by corn. It's the largest section, and probably the most hotly debated yet mysterious part of our national agriculture. In this section, Pollan discusses the processes and implications of a food system based on corn. He touches upon all of the most controversial myths/truths of the cycle, including GMO, monoculture, livestock production, government subsidies and obesity, among other topics. 

Important Questions:

• "What should we eat for dinner?"
• "What are the moral and psychological implications of killing, preparing and eating a wild animal?"

Terms:

• The omnivore's dilemma: "When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you." 
• Industrial food: "Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain." 
• Hypoxic: dead zone resulting from nitrogenous waste
• CAFO: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation
• "Fixed stomach" = inelastic demand
• 2 chemicals in McDonald's chicken nuggets: dimethylpolysiloxene (suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen and reproductive effector, flammable); tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) (antioxidant derived from petroleum, form of butane, "ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse; ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.")

Revelations:

• "Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility."
• "Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead."
• "A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities."
• "The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn."
• "Corn's dual identity, as food and commodity, has allowed many of the peasant communities that have embraced it to make the leap from a subsistence to a market economy...Corn is the protocapitalist plant."
• "Had maize failed to find favor among the conquerers, it would have risked extinction."
• "It takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food."
• "These days the price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar beneath the true cost of growing it, a boon for everyone but the corn farmer."
• "This is a system designed to keep production high and prices low. In fact, it's designed to drive prices even lower, since handing farmers deficiency payments (as compared to the previous system of providing loans to support prices) encourages them to produce as much corn as they possibly can, and then dump it all on the market no matter what the price--a practice that inevitably pushes prices even lower." 
• What cows are fed: corn plus, "liquified fat [which on today's menu is beef tallow, trucked in from one of the nearby slaughterhouses] and protein supplements [a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea]," "liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen," "antibiotics--Rumensin and Tylosin," "alfalfa hay and silage (for roughage)." 
• "...feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. Rendered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow's protein requirement...eating the flesh of one's own species carries special risks of infection...we make them trade their instincts for antibiotics."
• "The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat...the rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to ruminants. Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces and discarded bits of feed) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish and pig meal."
• "Most of the health problems that afflict feedlot cattle can be traced either directly or indirectly to their diet...bloat...acidosis...the diet would eventually blow out their livers...Most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed." 
• "Feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream."
• "[The cattle industry's] preferred solution for dealing with bacterial contamination is irradiation--essentially, to sterilize the manure getting into the meat."
• "One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food."
• "Processed food has become largely a supply-driven business."
• "Corn accounts for most of the surplus calories we're growing and most of the surplus calories we're eating." 
• "Researchers have found that people presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise."
• "Natural selection predisposed us to the taste f sugar and fat because sugars and fats offer the most energy...food systems can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods."
• "One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie."
• "Every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten."

Favorite Quotes:

• "...forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principle reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat."
• "Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds."
• "Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us." 
• "The double edge to our manipulation of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but the same knowledge."
• Thoreau: "Men have become the tools of their tools."
• "This is the corn without qualities. Quantity is really the only thing that counts."
• "I had to remind myself that this is not ordinary dirt dust...this is fecal dust."
• "There's money to be made in food, unless you're trying to grow it."
• "The problem is, a value-added product made from a cheap commodity can itself become a commodity, so cheap and abundant are the raw materials."
• "The food industry has gazed upon nature and found it wanting--and has gotten to work improving it."
• "According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic."
• "When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat."
• "Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals...that perhaps is what the industrial food chain does best: obscure the histories of the foods it produces by processing them to such an extent that they appear as pure products of culture rather than nature--things made from plants and animals."

I know it seems as though I copied the whole section down with all those quotes,  but I did that out of pure horrification. By now, we've had plenty of chances to educate ourselves as to what goes on in the industrial food system through movies (probably the most easy media form to process), such as Food, Inc. and Supersize Me, there wasn't too much new material here that I hadn't heard before. To revisit the inner workings of meat processing plants was stomach-turning. I wanted to become a vegetarian immediately. Participating in industrial food opens oneself up to all the ethical and environmental conflicts that come with supporting the ever-hungry machine that is big food. I appreciate that Pollan did not go for shock value--his insights and fact-finding was presented tastefully and logically as the flow of the book required, rather than in support of a previously determined conclusion. (In fact, I'm sure he could have gone even further to deter people from fossil fuel food.) I suppose what the reader will take away depends on his or her perspective. Some people will be unfazed by the first-hand accounts, whereas others will be so disgusted as to turn away from corn-support industry forever. Rating: 5/5

The second part of the book, "Pastoral," was an account of Pollan's time on Polyface Farm owned by Joel Salatin, the self-labeled "grass farmer" and star of the documentary "Fresh." Salatin practices the most sustainable form of agriculture, which he calls "beyond organic" because the processes on his farm are mostly nature-driven and are surprisingly devoid of human input. 

Important Question:

• "So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?"

Terms:

• "biophilia": inclination towards grass
• "Naylor Farm": industrial, annual species, monoculture, fossil energy, global market, specialized, mechanical, imported fertility, myriad inputs
• "Polyface Farm": pastoral, perennial species, polyculture, solar energy, local market, diversified, biological, local fertility, chicken feed
• organic: "to imply that nature rather than the machine should support the proper model for agriculture"..."organic on the label conjures up a rich narrative, even if it is the consumer who fills in most of the details"..."has been stretched and twisted to admit the very sort of industrial practices for which it once offered a critique  and an alternative"..."the ideal is so exacting--a sustainable system modeled on nature that requires not only no synthetic chemicals but also no purchased inputs of any kind."
• "People's Park": birthplace of the organic movement, "marked the 'greening' of the counter-culture, the pastoral turn that would lead to the commune movement in the countryside, to food co-ops and 'guerilla capitalism,' and, eventually, to the rise of the organic agriculture and businesses like Whole Foods
• Humus: "what's left of organic matter after it has been broken down by the billions of big and small organisms that inhabit a spoonful of earth"
• OFPA: Organic Food and Production Act
• "Supermarket Pastoral"
• "Management-intensive grazing": rotational grazing, "relies more heavily on the farmer's brain than on capital"
• Efficiency: either "economies of scale that can be achieved by the application of technology and standardization" or "the one found in natural systems, with their coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops."
• Holon: "an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part."
• Relationship marketing: "the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye."
• Industrial production: "lowers the cost of product by substituting capital--new technologies and fossil-fuel energy--for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploring the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow even bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does."
• Artisanal production: "the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producer of a commodity...only works so long as it doesn't attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect." 
• "The iron law of competitive advantage dictates that if another country can grow something more efficiently...we will no longer grow it here." 

Revelations:

• "Hunter-gatherers deliberately promoted the welfare of the grasses in order to attract and fatten the animals they depended upon. Hunters would periodically set fire to the savanna to keep it free of trees and nourish the soil." 
• "...farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself."
• "Whole Foods offers what Marx terms 'a landscape of reconciliation' between the realms of nature and culture'...in recent years [Whole Foods] has adopted the grocery industry's standard regional distribution system, which makes supporting small farms impractical."
• Companies now on my bad list: Earthbound Farm, Grimmway Farms, Horizon, Aurora, Cascadian Farms
• "The free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old--for fear they'll catch something outside--and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later."
• "Acting on the ecological premise that everything's connected to everything else, the early organic movement sought to establish not just an alternative mode of production (the chemical-free farms), but an alternative system of distribution (the anticapitalist co-ops), and even an alternative mode of consumption (the 'countercuisine')." 
• "The problem is that 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."
• "Small farms are actually more productive than big farms."
• "The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis."
• "Remarkably little research has been done to assess the effects of regular exposure to the levels of organophosphate pesticide or growth hormone."
• "...atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. Exposure to vanishingly small amounts (0.1 parts per billion) of this herbicide has been shown to turn normal male frogs into hermaphrodites."
• "...in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential."
• "Organic and otherwise sustainably grown fruits and vegetables contained significantly higher levels of both ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and a wide range of polyphenols."
• "Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability and economies of scale." 
• "Growing corn helps drive the very industrial complex that drives it."
• "To measure the efficiency of such a complex system you need to count not only all the products it produces (meat, chicken, eggs) but also all the costs it eliminates: antibiotics, wormers, parasitics and fertilizers."
• "Regulation is the single biggest impediment to building a viable local food chain."
• "The typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there."
• "Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water--of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap."
• Dr. Weston Price "traveled all over the world researching the diets of the healthiest, longest-lived populations, and found certain common denominators in their diets. They ate lots of meat and fats from wild or pastured animals; unpasteurized dairy products; unprocessed whole grains; and foods preserved by fermentation."
• "All those pastoral values--globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth." 
• "...changes in composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of the civilization--cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.--that have long been linked to modern eating habits...the problem with eating red meat...may owe less to the animal in question than to the animal's diet." 

Favorite Quotes:

• "Salatin's audacious bet is that feeding ourselves from nature need not be a zero-sum proposition, one in which if there is more for us at the end of the season then there must be less for nature--less topsoil, less fertility, less life."
• "...the impossibility of taking a 'decidedly Eastern, connected, holistic product, and selling it through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system.'"
• "We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate."
• About Whole Foods food: "It's the evocative prose as much as anything else that makes this food really special, elevating an egg or chicken breast or bag of arugula from the realm of ordinary protein and carbohydrates into a much headier experience, one with complex aesthetic, emotional and even political dimensions."
• "...the organic label itself...is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or inclination to follow their food back to the farm."
• "...to the extent that the organic movement was conceived as a critique of industrial values, surely there comes a point where the process of industrialization will cost organic its soul."
• "Brown foods were less adulterated by industry, of course, but just as important, eating them allowed you to express your solidarity with the world's brown people."
• "When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of mystery...gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine."
• Sir Albert Howard: "Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women."
• "...a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets."
• "...the system is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is anathema in organic. But that's the challenge--to change the system more than it changes you."
• "Seldom if ever stepped upon, the chicken-house lawn is scrupulously maintained nonetheless, to honor an ideal no one wants to admit has by now become something of a joke, an empty pastoral conceit."
• "If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it extracted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain."
• "The trouble began when [the industrial organic food chain] encountered the expectations of the supermarket. As in so many other realms, nature's logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism." 
• "Ranching is a very simple business. The really hard part is keeping it simple."
• "Grass farming done well depends almost entirely on a wealth of nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite: on the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines."
• "This farm is more like an organism than a machine."
• "...a large part of the appeal of industrial farming is its panoply of labor- and thought-saving devices...with scarcely a thought from the farmer."
• "[Health] is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system."
• "'One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.'"
• "In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while, it is no longer morally troubling."
• "Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring--to the carelessness of both producers and consumers."
• "The Roman writer Livy once warned that when a society's chefs come to be regarded as consequential figures it is sure sign that society is well down the road to decadence." 
• "Food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes and biodiversity." 
• "We live...in an era of 'sentimental economics,' since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time."
• "Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture--new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones...a genuinely local agriculture will tend to be more sustainable agriculture." 
• "It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."
• "As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplace, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket."
• "The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked--nature into culture."

At one point, I wondered how Pollan had decided to order the sections of the book. Working chronologically, he could have talked about the hunter-gatherer method before the farmed organic method and finally modern industrial farming. Instead, I think he ordered the book by the resulting feelings that one would get after participating in each system. Knowing what I know now, I will feel a lot worse emotionally (maybe even physically, what with all the fecal matter in the contaminated food) eating a cheap hamburger versus eating a sustainably farmed piece of meat versus a meal I had gathered myself. But perhaps that wasn't Pollan's rationale at all. In any case, the second section of the book was much more uplifting and offered a hopeful look at what the world could be if our country (especially the government) were to completely change it's perspective. It's most striking that we're still eating food grown using methods we know are clearly detrimental when it has been proven that more sustainable methods would yield higher quality and quantity. This section cast a light on who Whole Foods really is and what they truly stand for. Sadly, I'm beginning to believe that Whole Foods is not as for the customers' health as I had previously believed. When I finished this chapter, I felt inspired to live on or start a commune like Polyface Farm. The people who participate in sustainable agriculture sacrifice many of the comforts of modernity--cell phones, cable television, profits--for their beliefs. To draw from Joel Stein's book, it seems as though they've chosen truth over peace. Sustainable agriculture is a throwback to the era of early agriculturists who immediately followed the hunter-gatherers. Before civilizations expanded rapidly and food became a convoluted market (that doesn't follow rules of supply and demand), people lived within their means with an eye for the future rather than profits. It's a system that I believe to be much better for all parties involved, except Wall Street. I wasn't a huge fan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but I now believe that the pursuit of profit margins, along with the previously identified government subsidy culprit, is what has ruined the food industry. Rating: 5/5 stars 

The final section of the book is about the author's journey to live as a hunter-gatherer. One of the points that Pollan made at the start of the book is that the two foods for which the preferred method of acquisition is still hunting/gathering are fish and mushrooms. In order to seek firsthand the consequences of answering the question, "What are the moral and psychological implications of killing, preparing and eating a wild animal?" he decided to hunt for wild boar. In addition, the meal would have to adhere to the following guidelines:

1. "Everything on the menu must have been hunted, gathered or grown by me."
2. "The menu should feature at least one representative of each edible kingdom: animal, vegetables and fungus, as well as an edible mineral (the salt)."
3. "Everything served must be in season and fresh. The meal would reflect not only the places that supplied its ingredients, but a particular moment in time."
4. "No money may be spent on the meal, though already purchased items in the pantry could be deployed as needed."
5. "The guest list is limited to those people who helped me i my foraging and their significant others."
6. "I would cook the meal myself."

Terms:

• Neophobia: "a sensible fear of ingesting anything new"
• Neophilia: "a risky but necessary openness to new tastes"
• Biocultural: "food must be 'not only good to eat, but also good to think.'"
• Disgust: "the fear of incorporating offending substances into one's body," Steven Pinker: "Disgust is intuitive microbiology."
• "The Cognitive Niche": "[Various tools humans have developed to overcome the defenses of other species] represent biological adaptations, so-called because they constitute evolutionary developments rather than cultural inventions that somehow stand apart from natural selection."
• Ketosis: "the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates."
• Jeremy Bentham: "Argument from marginal cases": "There are humans--infants, the severely retarded, the demented--whose mental function does not rise to the level of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration."
• Speciesist": discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he's not human
• Mushroom hunter terms: "Seeing is boleting." "mushroom frustration," "mushroom virginity," "cluster fuck," "screen saver."

Revelations:

• "Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren't)."
• "Our teeth are omnicompetent."
• "There does seem to be an evolutionary trade-off between big brains and big guts...as it evolved towards its present, highly circumscribed concept of lunch, its underemployed brain actually shrank...the price of this dietary flexibility is much more complex and metabolically expensive brain circuitry. For the omnivore a tremendous amount of mental wiring must be devoted to sensory and cognitive tools for figuring out which of all these questionable nutrients it is safe to eat. There's just too much information involved in food selection to encode every potential food and poison in the genes. So instead of genes to write our menus omnivores evolved a complicated set of sensory and mental tools to help us sort everything out."
• "Taste in humans gets complicated...The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature...(The adult human brain accounts for 2 percept of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate)...Our sense of taste's second big bias predisposes us against bitter flavors."
• "By making these foods more digestible, cooking plants and animal flesh vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans, and some anthropologists believe this boon accounts for the dramatic increase in the size of the hominid brain about 1.9 million years ago."
• "We seem bent on reinventing the American way of eating every generation, in great paroxysms of neophilia and neophobia. That might explain why Americans have been such easy marks for food fads and diets of every description."
• "[The French] eat small portions and don't go back for seconds; they don't snack; they seldom eat alone; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs."
• "Perhaps because we have no such culture of food in America almost every question about eating is up for grabs."
• "The more anxious we are about eating, the more valuable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert's advice. Food marketing in particular thrives on dietary instability and so tends to exacerbate it."
• "The proper measure of their suffering...is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts."
• "Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense."
• "This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language, and y virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we can draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals obviously experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a handful of animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread."
• "To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines--'production units'--incapable of feeling pain."
• "To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship--to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development."
• "A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals' animality, too."
• "The surest way to achieve the extinction of the species would be to grant chickens a right to life."
• "Ancient man regarded animals much more as a modern ecologist would than an animal philosopher--as a species, that is, rather than a collection of individuals."
• "Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations."
• "To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us."
• "Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat...If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone."
• "It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature--rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls--then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do."
• "What's wrong with eating animals is the practice not the principle. What this suggests to me is that people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don't suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless--for animal welfare, in other words, rather than rights."
• "The industrialization--and brutalization--of animals in America is a relatively new, enviable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do."
• "Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to navigate the omnivore's dilemma."
• "Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain parts and products of animals, these things disgust us because they confront us with the reality of our own animal nature. So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too."
• "Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing that the sheer force of human will can somehow overcome it, 'The preoccupation with what should be estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.'"
• "[T]he omnivore's dilemma often comes down to a question of identification."
• Andrew Weil: "It's difficult to reconcile the extraordinary energies of these organisms with the fact that they contain relatively little of the kind of energy that scientists usually measure: calories."

Cool Thoughts from Peter Singers:

• "Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact."
• "If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?"
• "Equal consideration of interest is not the same as equal treatment."
• "If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the steer's interest into account or accept that I'm a speciesist."
• "What happens when the choice is between 'a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being?'"
• "We have a strong interest in convincing ourselves that our concern for other animals does not require us to stop eating them."
• "No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering."
• "It must be admitted that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it."
• Utilitarian: "concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering."

Favorite Quotes:

• "[The hunter-gatherer food chain's] chief value for us at this point is not so much economic or practical as it is didactic. Like other important forms of play, it promises to teach us something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives. Foraging for wild plants and animals is, after all, the way the human species has fed itself for 99 percent of its time on earth; this is precisely the food chain natural selection designed us for."
• "I realized that this had been the ultimate destination...to look as far into the food chain that support us as I could look, and recover the fundamental biological realities that the complexities of modern industrialized eating keep from our view."
• Aldo Leopold: "We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry."
• Woody Allen in Love and Death: "Nature is like an enormous restaurant."
• "The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own."
• Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "Since 'everything that is edible is at the mercy of his vast appetite, the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection in man, making man the only gourmand in the whole of nature.'"
• Paul Rozin: "Cuisines embody some of a culture's accumulated wisdom about food...help negotiate the tension between the omnivore's neophilia and neophobia."
• John Harvey Kellogg: "that taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten; that one should not simply eat what one enjoys; that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted, but are discernible only in scientific laboratories; and that experimental science has produced rules of nutrition that will prevent illness and encourage longevity."
• We Americans are amazed to learn that some of the cultures that set their culinary course by the lights of habit and pleasure rather than nutritional science and marketing are actually healthier than we are--that is, suffer a lower incidence of diet-related health troubles."
• Daniel Bell: "[C]apitalism, in its single-minded pursuit of profit, erode[s] the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization."
• "Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore's dilemma."
• "...cultural confusion on the subject of animals. For at the same time many of us seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to other species, in our factory farms we're inflicting more suffering on more animals than in any other time in history...the disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality."
• Benjamin Franklin: "The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you do."
• "The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon."
• "Even if we reject the hard utilitarianism of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny."
• "What troubles me most about  my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience."
• "The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten--of predation--but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity--of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.)"
• "A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism--the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society."
• "The industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever."
• "Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals to themselves for thousands of years."
• "If there's any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right to look."
• "Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve."
• Ortega y Gasset: "Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal."
• Ortega: "[The hunter] does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite."
• Ortega: "Humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely."
• "...manifest joy...This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting--to some, disgusting: that it encourages; or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing."
• "...'creaturely character'...What shames at least some of us about hunting is the same thing that shames us about every other reminder of our origins: that is, the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature."
• "[Respect] just happens to be the direction from which we came--to that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence, and never ate them except with gratitude."
• "Sun-soil-oak-pig-human: There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life on earth for a million years made visible in a single frame, one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what is."
• "Oh, it can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but in the end it isn't really the work that produces the food you're after, this effort for that result, for there's no sure correlation between effort and result. And no deserving of this: I felt none of the sense of achievement you feel at the end of a season in the garden, when all your work has paid off in the bounty of the harvest. No, this felt more like something for nothing, a wondrous and unaccountable gift." 
• "Putting a great dish on the table is our way of celebrating the wonders of form we humans can create from this matter--this quantity of sacrificed life--just before the body takes its first destructive bite."
• Cooking: "...all these unprepossessing parts of things combined into what promised to be greater and more delectable wholes...destroying the order of the things we bring from nature into our kitchens, only to create from them a new order."
• "Most of the meal owed its presence on our table to usufruct, which was a fact of nature long before it became an axiom of law."

One thing that occurred to me while I was reading the final section of the book is just how hard it would be for America, much less Hawaii, to go back to sustainable agriculture. Back in the day, the ancient Hawaiians were self-sustaining. They had multiple farming systems in place not only on land but also in the ocean. It was only when Western influences infiltrated the islands that they abandoned their way of life. Presently, there are only smaller, scattered farms spread over the main islands, and I'm pretty sure none of them would be self-sufficient (with sources of protein, starch, etc.) in the way that Polyface Farm is in the face of the food equivalent of a blackout. Oahu, the island I live on, has become more and more densely populated. The local movement to prevent the outward expansion of townhouses and hotels is represented by the slogan "Keep the country, country." The price of food keeps going up here and now I know why: fuel prices, which not only adds to the cost of producing food but the cost of transporting it across oceans. I'm fairly certain that there isn't enough land on Oahu to support all the people currently living on it should our food supply from the mainland be cut off. Anyone who has ever visited can see that "Honolulu" is half the island alone. Everyone knows, but rarely acknowledges, our dependency on others to survive. Hawaii barely produces anything--tourism is our number one industry by far, so we're pretty much at the mercy of the industrial food market. It's scarier, I think, to live on an island with such a predicament. Were something like what happened in the NBC technological apocalypse show, Revolution, to happen we'd be screwed. In the end, although Pollan proposed many important questions, the one I formulated myself, and the state I live in, will go unanswered (for now). 

Closing quotes:

• "The two meals stand at the far extreme ends of the spectrum of human eating--of the different ways we have to engage the world that sustains us. The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasure of the other on an equally perfect ignorance. The diversity of the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry, especially its ability to tease a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape: a monoculture of corn, The cost of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future." 
• "Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers--outliers of a real life." 
• "Imagine for a moment if we once again knew: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."

What I appreciate most about this book, and the final viewpoint that Pollan expresses, is that he leaves it up to the reader to decide how best to answer the question of the omnivore's dilemma. In fact, his final conclusion leads the reader towards ambiguity, yet it also reflects the truth that neither McDonalds nor hunter-gatherer methods of food acquisition are realistic models. Instead, the solution to our national food woes are somewhere in between industrialization and a complete reversion to the early days of modern Homo sapiens. 

While the picture of our food industry is quite troubling and depressing, I also see hope. In showing us the differences between the industrial, organic and hunter-gatherer methods, Pollan (maybe) inadvertently portrayed food as a market economy. What I now believe is that we all have a choice in deciding what we put into our mouths. Not only what, but where our food comes from. The same capitalist economy that brought on the horrors of processed food has also given us a chance to put our money where our convictions are. We can choose to partake in any of the multiple commercial food chains, or we can simply go off the grid and set about living sustainably without the restrictions that money implies. For many people, navigating the complicated and murky waters of the history of their food is a daunting and impossible task. Armed with a book like The Omnivore's Dilemma, however, readers know that much more about the food industry and have a small glimpse into the frustratingly veiled food industry. Reading the book is a choice, which also happens to be the core principle of the book's material. In the end, what I found most beautiful (and convenient) about the book is that it accepts that it's readers bought the book with prior knowledge and preformed ideas. It has broad appeal (basically its target demographic is anyone who eats), yet it doesn't set about trying to change anyone's mind or way of life. You'll take away what you want to take away, and you may or may not challenge your preexisting philosophies, but you'll definitely consider each agricultural method, which, may be the ultimate objective of the omnivore's dilemma.

Final rating: 5/5 stars