The Omnivore’s Dilemma...
bookshelf...
The Omnivore’s
Dilemma:
A Natural History
of Four Meals
The Penguin Press, 2006
Pollan -- whom I have always thought had a particularly apt name for someone writing about nature – deftly weaves together botanical history, agricultural politics, global economics and dinner as he explains how our modern food options came to be.
In a nutshell, the longer the distance “from farm to fork,” and the more processing involved, the more convenient and less healthy food is. Pollan’s tales about the burgeoning organics industry, small-scale agriculture and hunting and gathering are fascinating, but it is the story of the first meal, a fast-food feast eaten on the fly from McDonald’s, that is the most memorable. And disturbing.
Just about everything his family eats turns out to be mostly corn, in one form or another:
“It would not be impossible to calculate exactly how much corn Judith, Isaac and I consumed in our McDonald’s meal. I figure my 4-ounce burger, for instance, represents nearly 2 pounds of corn (based on a cow’s feed conversion rate of 7 pounds of corn for every 1 pound of gain, half of which is edible meat). The nuggets are a little harder to translate into corn, since there’s no telling how much actual chicken goes into a nugget; but if 6 nuggets contain a quarter pound of meat, that would have taken a chicken half a pound of feed corn to grow. A 32-ounce soda contains 86 grams of high-fructose corn syrup (as does a double-thick shake), which can be refined from a third of a pound of corn; so our three drinks used another 1 pound. Subtotal: six pounds of corn.
From here the calculations become trickier because, according to the ingredients list in the flyer, corn is everywhere in our meal, but in unspecified amounts. There’s more corn sweetener in my cheeseburger, of all places: The bun and the ketchup both contain HFCS. It’s in the salad dressing, too, and the sauces for the nuggets, not to mention Isaac’s desert. (Of the sixty menu items listed in the handout, forty-five contain HFCS). Then there are all the other corn ingredients in the nugget: the binders and emulsifiers and fillers. In addition to corn sweeteners, Isaac’s shake contains corn syrup solids, mono- and diglycerides, and milk from corn-fed animals. Judith’s Cobb salad is also stuffed with corn, even though there’s not a kernel in it: Paul Newman makes his salad dressing with HFCS, corn syrup, corn starch, dextrin, caramel color, and xanthan gum; the salad itself contains cheese and eggs from corn-fed animals. The salad’s grilled chicken breast in injected with “flavor solution” that contains maltodextrin, dextrose, and monosodium glutamate. Sure, there are a lot of leafy greens in Judith’s salad too, but the overwhelming majority of calories in it (and there are 500 of them, when you count the dressing) ultimately come from corn. And the French fries? You would think those are mostly potatoes. Yet since half of the 540 calories in a large order of fries come from the oil they’re fried in, the ultimate source of these calories is not a potato farm but a field of corn or soybeans.
The calculation finally defeated me, but I took it far enough to estimate that, if you include the corn in the gas tank (a whole bushel right there, to make two and a half gallons of ethanol), the amount of corn that went into producing our movable fast-food feast would easily have overflowed the car’s trunk, spilling a trail of golden kernels on the blacktop behind us.”
It is an almost beautiful image, though the details are somewhat less bucolic. Cows aren’t built to eat corn. In fact, it makes them so sick, antibiotics are routinely mixed into their feed. That, in turn, has been linked to problems with drug-resistance and the emergence of “superbugs.” Meanwhile, HFCS has been linked to obesity.
The acrid whiff of fossil fuel hangs over everything: Oil is used to produce nitrogen fertilizer so critical to the production of bumper crops of corn. Fertilizer run-off flows from streams in the Midwest all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico where it helps produce bumper crops of oxygen-sucking algae that create aquatic dead zones.
Pollan’s telling of the corn story is full of odd, disturbing details such as the decision in 1947 to convert a Muscle Shoals, Alabama munitions plant producing ammonium nitrate for bombs to packaging it as fertilizer. Then there is the development of high-yield hybrid corn that can be sown 30,000 plants to an acre, almost quadrupling harvests. Both innovations led to a glut of corn, which led to the development of new corn-based products, including HFCS.
Pollan boldly delves into the politics of farm subsidies, explaining why, boom or bust, farmers can barely manage to squeak by, while agribusiness giants such as ADM and Cargill thrive. Still, alternatives to business-as-usual aren’t so simple. Even organic production, when scaled up for mass consumption, loses some its healthy green luster.
A must read.
– j.a.g
