I have watched my dinner die.
To grow up in farm country is to have a better understanding of the connection between the meat on your plate and the animal you see grazing in the field outside the dining room window. While my parents weren't farmers, my grandparents and aunts and uncles were, and our rural Kentucky home was surround by fields: an uncle's field across the road, my grandfather's pasture along the creek, a second cousin's rows of corn out back. We all had gardens, from which we all traded fresh vegetables -- and, yes, home-grown tomatoes are superior to the generic ones you find stocked in your grocery's produce section.
I never saw a cow slaughtered -- though I did have a small hand once in helping convert a bull to a steer by slicing off his testicles -- but I understood the cow-to-hamburger process. Chickens, though, were a food source I understood even better. Granny had a chicken coop behind the house, where I would sometimes go with her in the mornings to collect the big brown eggs from the nests. And I watched from the kitchen window as Granny took a hatchet to a chicken's neck and the headless bird briefly ran around the yard in a bloody slapstick routine.
It really is the kind of chore where you want to be sure the dogs are put up before you start.
For Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, this up-close experience of the food chain should make me -- potentially, at least -- a better, more careful eater.
The first of Pollan’s two foodie books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, made a splash two years ago with its investigation into the origins of our modern meals. Basically, in today’s industrial farming everything comes down to corn. Farmers grow corn to the exclusion of most everything else. Food animals are fed diets of corn they’re neither genetically designed nor evolutionarily prepared to eat, necessitating massive doses of antibiotics, growth hormones and other man-made substances to keep the cattle “healthy” long enough to convert all that corn to meat -- meat that is substantially different in nutrition, taste and content than that of previous generations of pasture-raised animals. The processed foods that line the aisles of our supermarkets and tower to the ceilings of our price clubs are packed with corn in the form of sweeteners, stabilizers and texturizers that go by names unrecognizable in the ingredients list.
You are, whether you like it or not, a walking, talking corn product.
Pollan also traces the growth of organic farming -- while it may produce food superior in some ways to industrially processed foods, it’s not anything like what people imagine when they hear the increasingly heavily marketed word,“organic” -- spends time on a ecologically sustainable pasture farm in Virginia, and creates a meal from a wild boar, plants and fungi he hunted and collected himself.
Given the splash of his first book and the implications of his research into modern farming practices, In Defense of Food is a natural follow-up. It’s a necessarily slim book, given that he quickly admits his thesis boils down to, “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.” The approach only grows slightly more complicated as you get into definitions, the primary of which is “food,” which is not the same as “food products” that you find in boxes on the shelves of the grocery store and in the oversized and greasy paper bags you pick up at the drive-through.
What drives Pollan’s book is the odd state of the American diet. We obsess over the nutritional value and fat content of our food, yet we are a population increasingly prone to diabetes, heart disease and weight gain. “Nutritionism,” as he calls it, has reduced the act of eating to an act of fueling the body, stripped of any cultural or other context -- a food product is just a collection of nutrients to be tweaked, prodded or enhanced to encompass whatever “scientific” food finding happens to be in vogue. Yet the “healthier” science makes our food, the less healthy we turn out to be.
Front and center for Pollan is the war on fat in America’s diet, a war that’s replaced natural fat with hydrogenated fat in the name of good health, only to later discover that the “good” fat was actually bad trans fat. An obsession with low-fat foods has left an entire public with the idea that any fat in the diet is bad, when fats are a basic requirement for the human body to function.
Over the course of both books, Pollan lays the blame for the current state of affairs on the industrial food system and its marketing gurus. In Omnivore’s Dilemma, he makes a strong case for how the federal government’s policies from the Department of Agriculture following World War II and, more forcefully, during the rapid rise of food prices in the 1970s under Nixon, has pushed the once-varied American farm into endless fields of corn and soybeans from one Iowan horizon to the other. Yet Pollan’s In Defense of Food forgoes the case against government’s collectivization and subsidization of industrial agriculture and focuses the blame on a more politically attractive target, at least for the Whole Foods crowd: capitalism.
This, naturally, is where Pollan loses me. By his own work, it’s obvious that America’s agriculture market has been distorted into unreality by a farm policy that conducts such idiocies as paying farmers to not farm their land and crafting programs that ensure the only crops anyone wants to grow are corn and soybeans. Farmers, food producers, grocery stores and consumers are only operating in a system created by the government and sustained by a massive industrial agriculture lobby that is every bit the creation of our misguided government policies. Healthier alternatives such as organic and pastoral farms aren’t being squeezed out solely by “big agriculture” -- they’re stuck in a system in which they can’t fairly compete because the government’s rules and regulations preclude them from doing so. Almost two decades ago P.J. O’Rourke wrote in Parliament of Whores that America’s agriculture policy was the single government problem with a simple solution: “Drag the omnibus farm bill behind the barn, and kill it with an ax.”
It’s a solution that would still work today.
Pollan’s stress on capitalism to the exclusion of government is all the odder given his solution to the problem of America’s screwy diet: If you can afford to eat better, real food, then do it. Don’t keep yourself removed from the industrial food system that masks the actual processing of what we eat (Pollan was never able to gain entry into an industrial slaughterhouse, but he did take part in the slaughtering of pastured chickens during his stint at the Virginia farm where the independent owners openly allow observers to see how chickens become food). The more people take advantage of real food outside of the current industrial system -- patronize farmers markets, avoid processed foods at the grocery, buy organic foods that are really organic -- the more likely the industrial system is change. Or, at least, to lessen its more egregious practices, particularly around corn-fed and ill-treated livestock.
As someone who grew up with such a strong awareness of his food chain, from actually seeing the animals I ate to picking some of our foods from the garden, both of Pollan’s books have highlighted how easy it is for me to forget that chain. Despite an underemphasis on government’s role in In Defense of Food, Pollan is absolutely correct that Americans must think much more carefully about what they eat. You may not need to watch your dinner die, but understanding how and why it did will change your approach to the infrequently used American dining table.
Comments