Several years back, the resident friendly curmudgeon of our
church made a book recommendation during sharing time. I respect this fellow’s mind and sense his
hesitancy to go out on a limb in public, so I heard the recommendation with
interest. However, I was never able to
follow up on it before this August, when I selected Michael Pollan’s
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of
Four Meals as my book to read for the month. Well, August being what it is at our homestead, I didn’t get
it finished in August. Also, it is hard
to make much progress in a book when you feel the need to go back and underline
twenty percent of it (ok, I exaggerate, but not much!). The upper corner of the book is now
substantially thicker than the rest from all the dog-earing I did to alert me
to indispensable quotes for this report.
Indispensable though they may seem, I will now summarily dispense
with nearly all of them, since re-writing much of the book will not be much
help in distilling its essence for you, dear reader. Also, I haven’t the time. If you desire that experience, feel free to
borrow my copy of
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
and skip the non-underlined portions.
I don’t know what I expected out of the book, but I think I
just assumed he we would propose four different actual or hypothetical but
believable meals and help us follow the supply chains to their source, thereby
understanding more of the implications of our eating patterns. That sounds eminently helpful, if a little
dry for most readers. I never expected
it to be so lively.
Mr. Pollan doesn’t employ the desiccated style of many
journalists. His ambition seemed to be
not only to document or summarize or even just to explain or interpret, he
seemed to believe that his job here was to understand, and to help us
understand, too. He is not the reporter
on the edge of the pool, he dives right in with the swimmers.
As such, he chose the strategy of direct involvement with
each step or element of his journalism rather than relying exclusively on
observation, archival research, or interviews, though he employed all of these
techniques. For example, he didn’t just visit a beef brood herd, then a
feedlot, etc. He instead purchased a young
steer being prepared for shipment, then a few months later went back and located
his steer where it was spending its days in a pen with many of its fellows
scarfing corn and wading around in their manure. He didn’t just spend a day following Joel
Salatin around on his farm with a notebook or recorder, he went and stayed
there for a week, working on the farm, and then prepared a meal for some
friends with some of Polyface Farm’s products.
He and his family, for the “processed food” example, scarfed a McDonald’s
meal in the car. It was no good sitting
down and reading Animal Liberation, he
thought he should start the book while sitting down to an exquisite steak at a
nice restaurant. And when it came time
for the ultimate connected eater experience, he killed the wild pig himself,
foraged the mushrooms, kneaded his own wild yeast bread, etc. He even tried to make the salt himself…I won’t
ruin that story for you, but I can tell you it is a tad sobering, if a bit
comic, too. I deeply appreciate this
style of journalism. People can get technical
information the standard way, but the journalist who enters into their subject
so fully ends up, it would seem, with so much more to say, and has an ability
to connect it so much more clearly and with so much more presence to the reader
than the conventional exposé.
Not that it wasn’t also an exposé. He showed his investigative journalist chops
off very well, exploding many popular myths along the way, and uncovering
surprising connections. But it was as
much a matter of crafting his personal philosophy as an eater and cook as it
was a matter of facts and fictions, but as a book of philosophy I must say it
was of the most practical sort. Yes, the
issues are profound and overarching, but they are also intimate, every day
issues. Nothing could be more immediate
and personal than food: it is what I am
putting into and through my very body now.
The title comes from a concept developed by a researcher who
was working with rats, which are as omnivorous as humans (this is why they like
our garbage piles and kitchens so much).
He was curious about how rats chose what to eat and not eat. He developed the opinion that this was one of
the rat’s chief challenges in life. When
you can eat almost anything, you then
face the question that the Monarch butterfly caterpillar and the koala never
face: what is the right thing to
eat? As Americans, Pollan argues, we are
and have been for some time in the throes and the grip of trying to answer this
question for ourselves; for our health and the health of the environment. Food fads, food movements, and what he calls
our “national eating disorder” owe much of their energy to a dilemma that is basic
to our omnivorous nature.
As we try to resolve this ancient question and in so doing
vacillate from one food fad to the next, food corporations see opportunity;
each wave of change opens the door to getting us hooked on yet another processed
or mediated food product. They face
their own dilemma, it would seem, in trying to craft a growth industry from
food, the yearly increase in consumption of which is too thin a gruel to
impress investors.
What makes us in the U.S. especially vulnerable to this
dynamic, Pollan says, is that we lack a key cultural notion that humans all
over the world have always used to buffer against this natural insecurity: a cuisine.
We have never yet settled into a series of accepted foodways that we can
rely on to relieve the burden of decision making that accompanies the omnivore’s
dilemma. What is right to eat?, the
world asks, and the human usually answers:
What I grew up eating, of course!
What my religion tells me to eat, what my taste buds are tuned to enjoy,
what is safe and available and familiar.
But here in the home of the brave we are emboldened by no such
security. We are an amalgam, for better
or worse, of so many foodways from so many places, and that amalgamation has
happened within the part of history that has been strongly influenced by
capitalist economics. It has long been
recognized by food corporations that getting people to change their habits
constitutes an opportunity; they have been deeply involved in official
recommendations, legal schemes, and honest and dishonest research results for
as long as such things have been done.
Nowhere in the world are the effects on our psyches and bodies so
evident as here.
In the end, not too many solutions are proposed. He sets up the dilemma nicely and details a
few of the efforts to defend or continue or establish some alternatives. I admire his honesty, though, in not holding
out fictitious carrots to tempt us forward:
If we would only change this law,
or buy from this place, or boycott this product hard and long enough, we could
turn this thing around. If there is
to be a solution to this, it will be as varied and diverse as the landscapes
and peoples that make up the places of this fine land. The people of each place must respond in
their own way, with the resources they have at hand. And it won’t happen instantly. Efforts to explore alternatives may seem
symbolic, frivolous, or inadequate, but my view is that those are terrible
reasons not to try them out, to exercise those long-atrophied cultural
muscles. I’ll end with one long quote
from the end of the book, when Michael Pollan is reflecting on the meal he made
from foraged foods:
“Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily; certainly this one wasn’t
that. Though I had spent the day in the
kitchen (a good part of the week as well), and I had made most everything from
scratch and paid scarcely a dime for all the ingredients, it had taken many
hands to bring this meal to the table.
The fact that just about all of those hands were at the table was the
more rare and important thing, as was the fact that every single story about
the food on that table could be told in the first person…Perhaps the perfect
meal is one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which
is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this
meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a
kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to
make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only to remind us of the
true costs of the things we take for granted.
The reason I didn’t open a can of stock was because stock doesn’t come
from a can; it comes from the bones of animals.
And the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a pack but from the
air we breathe. The meal was more ritual
than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much
nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as
much as the meadows. If I had to give
this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore’s Thanksgiving.”