Book Alert: The Omnivore's Dilemma (and The Jungle)

I recently read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.  I had been meaning to get to it for several years, probably since I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle which fascinated me.  Both books I would recommend to people who are interested in learning about food in the United States.  They're very different.  The Jungle was written in 1906 and goes into great detail about the living and working conditions for workers in the meat-packing industry.  It was appalling and an interesting way to learn a piece of American history.  I'm certain that if I was a meat-eater when I had read it, I wouldn't have been afterwards, despite how much the industry has changed (I hope!) since that time.  Most days I wish I was a vegetarian but I just can't get myself to do it.  You've been warned!

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan examines four different pathways to a meal.  He considers the sources of ingredients and what the go through to make it to your fork.  It starts as a story about corn and it’s impact on our food supply as well as contributing to the obesity epidemic, economics, and politics. Fun fact: There are about 45,000 items in a typical grocery store and 25% contain corn.  Looking at a chicken nugget: the chicken while it was alive was fed on a corn-based diet. Once the chicken is used for meat, the nugget is held together with corn starch, then breaded in corn and fried in corn oil.  My favorite quote from the book: "If you are what you eat, we are mostly processed corn." 

Corn evolved to be able to grow under a very wide variety of weather and soil conditions. Because it is used for so much, farmer's were almost forced into growing it and ultimately had difficulty feeding their families because they devoted all their land to corn instead of a variety of animals for meats, vegetables, and fruits.  When the cost of corn decreases, the government helps subsidize farmers so they can stay afloat.  I won't lie - I didn't understand all the political implications that were described, but I did comprehend that the government and politics are intermingled into farming and into our food and that makes things complicated for everyone.  

A huge portion of the corn that is grown becomes high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sweet form of refined sugar.   A lot of it goes into soda. A farmer gets the tiniest fraction of pay for the corn and the beverage companies get a much larger percentage for what they make from it.  In 1980 Coke changed from sugar to HFCS because corn is cheaper than sugar. Pepsi followed in 1984, and people couldn’t tell the difference in taste.  After a better understanding of how corn is the basic substance of so much of our food, meals from four different food chains were examined. 

First: The industrial corn chain followed to McDonald’s: With the advent of fast food, a family can eat separate meals while still eating together. Separate meals generally means larger portions. The nugget is the reason chicken is more popular than beef in America.  A meal for 3 people from McDonald’s was analyzed for how much corn was used to make it. The six Chicken McNuggets that Pollan’s son consumed used enough corn to feed a handful of people. And the 4,510 calories of the whole family's meal required processing that could have supplied tens of thousands of calories of corn to feed starving communities.  The cost of production of the products we eat is higher than the energy we're getting out of our meals.

The second meal is of mass-produced farming to stock our grocery stores.  This portion was interesting because it looks at some of the imbalances with fuel requirements to produce the food where that fuel could be used in an alternative means.  Similar to the energy cost of making the Chicken McNuggets only looking at the feeding of the animals that are then sold at the grocery store.  Pollan goes to a cattle farm and observes the conditions there, but he meets quite a bit of resistance from facility owners trying to protect their secrets. 

The third meal was based on organic farming. Pollan spends time on a smaller farm learning about the animals and their grass feed and even how to kill a chicken and prepare it. He cooks a meal from the chicken, corn, and eggs of the farm. It was interesting to learn that there are farmers who won't send their produce far from where it is raised, because they're not using anything to preserve the meat so the quality would be poor if it was shipped cross-country.  Pollan's experience participating in the chicken butchery was fascinating... like a new version of The Jungle - but so much safer for the workers and so much less gruesome for the animals.

The fourth meal was a hunter-gatherer-home grown meal. He learns how to forage for mushrooms - which doesn’t sound too hard until you’re holding a mushroom, unsure if eating it will kill you or not since they can be poisonous.  Then growing a garden and getting a hunters license and learning to shoot so he could hunt for the meat.  He kills and prepares a pig and makes the whole meal from ingredients he had grown or scavenged or hunted on his own. 

Overall I really liked learning about the different ways food can end up on the table.  If time constraints and money were no issue - it would be amazing to have a meal every night that was grown in my backyard.  I definitely couldn't hunt an animal and then eat the meat... I can't even fathom the idea of going fishing and on the few occasions when I've made lobsters and cooked them, I've felt terrible about my meal.  But I could see myself milking a cow to make my own cheese... because I love cheese and that doesn't hurt the cow.  If only there was enough time.

I'd recommend both of these books, just like I previously recommended Deep Nutrition here.  There are some other nutrition/food books on my list coming up, too, but any recommendations for what I should read next?