I was curious to see how Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, would kickstart the discussion in his book. I've read a fair number of nonfiction tomes like this, on the topic of the industrialization and commodification of food, so I'm perhaps a little jaded. Our food system is screwed up, obesity rates are still climbing, and a whole host of other health- and food-related problems exist; what else is new? It's a wasteland of fake food and commercials for fake food out there . . . and if this current state doesn't scare me, will reading more gory details do anything to wake me up?

Perhaps I've read too much science fiction! While things might look bad now, theoretically, how could any of it compare to the dystopic things imagined for the future by alarmists like John Brunner? I don't think I can qualify this as a good thing, but The Omnivore's Dilemma reminds me, to a creepy extent, of science fiction, even though it talks about the present. The book says something about the intersection between vast commodity systems, hidden and pernicious interests, and the human body (and sweeping changes to the body). More and more, I'm convinced that these corporeal bodies we have will be the battleground of the future; our perceptions, our pathologies, our neurodevelopment, and, not least, what we eat. If there's no abandonment of these useless meatsacks—as the cyberpunks sometimes envisioned it—then the body as locus of struggle will only become a more frightening thing.

Right at the beginning of the book, Pollan uses an example that flipped on that science fiction light in my head. It's also a good lead-in for a hardcore schooling in just where our food comes from now. Present day be damned—the future has already happened:

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I'm talking of course about bread. (1)

He goes on to note:

So violent a change in a culture's eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. (2)

Two more quotes help lay out where the book is going. On this thing called 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. (3)

And why the problem gets worse in a society like ours:

The lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientist and the marketer, for whom the omnivore's dilemma is not so much a dilemma as an opportunity. It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products. (5)

While he might not see it this way, I think Pollan draws a neat line from where we were—the body's evolutionary history—to where we already are and soon will be even more so: the body as hapless cog in an industrialized apparatus.

Pollan does all this with a simple project: find out where all the food is coming from. I'm joking, since the project is anything but simple. At one point, he has to use molecular analysis on a fast-food meal to find out what's in it. The surprising answer in a minute.

I love this whole idea of tracing the life cycle of foodstuff, since I'm a great fan of Brunner's A Shockwave Rider. I've been wanting the reveal-all computer virus from that book for a long time (for more details, see what I wrote about the book at The Cultural Gutter, or even better, read the book yourself). Brunner was a hopeful person, in that he seemed to think that this information was possible to discover and that people might want to know.

But ignorance is a little different in the case of food. So many things about modern life are disconnected from our understanding, or completely impossible to comprehend to the ordinary person, like the chip in a computer. But no one ever ingests a computer—at least people who want to live out the week. So what happens when you are eating things that you don't comprehend, three times a day? Pollan refers several times to chicken nuggets as an example of industrialized food. Chicken McNuggets have thirty-eight ingredients, complete with "several completely synthetic ingredients" (the full analysis is on page 113 for brave readers). Another example would be the Twinkie.

A handful of reasons dictate why this ignorance exists: corporate interests are implicated, as is the "convenience" of the more processed items. A basic reason is that the food production is far away, with the corollary that the division of labour has allowed such an enormous population of non-farmers to exist such a great distance away.

All this is to say that Pollan has some heavy lifting ahead of himself if he wants to write "a natural history of four meals," as the subtitle of the book puts it. After a brief introduction, he structures his book in three segments, each focused on a certain type of meal. He begins with the industrial—a fast-food meal—and ends with the hunter-gatherer—a meal he put together from scratch. The middle section contains two meals; he calls it the pastoral section, but it's mainly about organic food, which he splits into big organic—the kind you find in a grocery store—and local food from a farmer so dogmatic he won't even ship any samples to Pollan. I offer only a summary; the book is worth reading if any of this sounds pertinent to your food experience. I probably had more fun dreaming up some SF-style speculation than reading the book, but it's still a valuable document.

We're Drinking 100% Corn

Pollan starts with a McDonald's meal, and his answer for its origin is simple. It's corn, heavily processed, heavily modified, and hidden everywhere—soda is 100% corn sweetener, while other items such as chicken nuggets or cheeseburgers are only (!) about 50% corn. Worse, corn represents a startling investment of fossil fuel, at least in its current growing configuration, so it's not foodstuff so much as oilstuff that makes the Happy Meal possible.

There are historical reasons why corn has become so ubiquitous, and Pollan takes us through these so that we can actually understand the price of corn and the consequences of subsidies.

It's the problem of abundance, or at least a false abundance. It's also what happens when food becomes commodified. As Pollan points out, a big company has shareholders to answer to, and no-growth basic foods are not what drive the stock prices up:

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products—CDs, say, or shoes—there's a natural limit to how much food we can each consume without exploding. (94)

The material in this section has been handled in a more in-your-face way, or more detailed investigative journalistic way, in other books. The example is Fast Food Nation, which broke a lot of ground in this area. But if you're expecting Fast Food Nation Part 2, this is not that book. Pollan wraps up his look at industrial agriculture within 100 pages. As a unit, it feels relatively incomplete, despite all of the material, but Pollan is already moving on to his next target. Not every meal in our society comes from the industrial agriculture complex, the best efforts of this complex notwithstanding.

Big Organic vs. the Dream

If the first section of the book was not ground-breaking (however startling), then this is where Pollan gets into uncomfortable territory.

Is organic food really a panacea? Can we do something good in the world by buying organic, or is it just a sop to our guilt and/or ignorance?

While it seems like Pollan is going to answer all of these things in a way that disparages organic as a concept, the question actually resolves into something quite different: do we really want to know where our food comes from?

And the answer that recurs—not from Pollan but in the mind of the reader—is that everyone should just get more involved in the production of their own food. But how feasible is that at this stage in society? We're so far away even from seeing where the food comes from. As Pollan puts it:

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—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, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away. (136-137)

Pollan goes on to argue quite forcefully that Big Organic (as he calls it) is destroying its own roots as a movement in the quest to scale up to Wal-mart size. Is it scale itself that is the problem? That has some fairly serious consequences for our civilization. Organic or not, growing something like 1 pound of lettuce and then bringing it from field to plate takes "4600 calories of fossil fuel energy" for "80 calories of food energy" (167). It doesn't seem like we've moved far from fast food to nutritious salad—the salad might not be made specifically from petrochemicals, but it wouldn't be fresh all year round without all that petroleum to ship it around.

The second half of the Pastoral section tries to find an answer to this problem of scale. The answer here won't suit everyone. Pollan visits a small, intensively managed, fiercely local farm in Virginia, with a charismatic farmer who has many convincing stories to tell. A wonderful cycle of rotating crops and healthy animals is on display, and one that seems more sophisticated than all of the industrial machinery in the first segment: "what makes this pasture's complexity so much harder for us to comprehend is that it is not a complexity of our making." (195)

However, the solution on offer seems inapplicable in a wider context, despite its proven sustainability within its own tight border. Not every agricultural area has the climate of Virginia! In the next section, it actually gets worse, as Pollan pursues an ideal, however interesting it happens to be.

Gun and Mushroom Basket

I don't have much to say about the last section of the book: here Pollan treads further into mystical and cheesy territory, taking some left turns that don't entirely serve his argument. He discusses, at great length, the ethics of killing animals. Then he goes hunting and eventually kills a wild Californian boar. He gathers some mushrooms, and puts it all together with some other ingredients into a rather fancy home-cooked meal.

Both the boar-hunt and the mushroom-gathering are dangerous, and the sheer amount of thinking required goes a long way to prove Pollan's conjecture that the mental challenges of an omnivorous diet helped increase the size of human brains. But going on a hunting and gathering expedition seems like the ultimate vanity, an ornamental or hobbyist way of life (like one of those "simple" societies in James Patrick Kelly's Burn or Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes). Pollan is not an expert, but even the experts he accompanies spend an inordinate amount of time on a relatively small return.

All the same, while the section on Pollan as hunter-gatherer is the one most often criticized, these criticisms often miss Pollan's point. Most pertinently, he doesn't seem all that interested in solutions to the problems he is presenting. This book is, deliberately, an investigation of the options out there currently, and it's not Pollan's fault that they are all bad or useless options. And the hunting/gathering makes a handy contrast with the industrialized segment at the beginning of the book.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is written in a personal tone, and it's one that can be off-putting if you are expecting something more scholarly. I came to appreciate the mix of personal and public in The Omnivore's Dilemma; yes, Pollan is writing about the big picture, but he's also writing about a topic that faces every one of us three times (or more) a day.

It's the micro and macro: this book has very real implications for the day-to-day life of an attentive reader, and it also makes me ponder the consequences for our civilization (and subsequently, what it might mean for an invented civilization in a book). This kind of globalization and mechanization is almost always taken for granted in science fiction books—but what is the texture of that life really like? It's easy just to wave the "advanced science = magic" wand and say human bodies will be different in the future, but that's not anytime soon.

Food pills? We're eating them right now, and they're not nourishing us, they're making us sick.

One question that I often ask myself after reading a book like this: well, what do I do now? In one sense, Pollan has only made my food-related anxiety worse. He seems to regard Big Organic as unmitigatedly bad. So when Wal-mart markets organic food, as it plans to do soon, that's not a good thing in any way?

There's not much closure in the broader picture either. Pollan's extremely brief concluding chapter has this to say, in reference to McDonald's and hunting-gathering: "Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable."

That leaves the middle section of the book, where he spends equal time deconstructing Big Organic and canonizing one small farm in a fertile area of Virginia. Neither seem sustainable or broadly applicable, respectively. It's still a world with nearly 6.5 billion people. I'm reminded of another book by John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up, in which the 300 million most over-consuming people die off, thus saving the earth. Pollan doesn't have the answers to help avert the disaster written about by Brunner. Who does?

I seem to have argued myself into a corner, or at least back to where I started. This book is clearly a challenge, and all I can do is trust that smart people out there will take up the challenge and find a way to make the "system" of food sustainable enough for a global civilization.