The Omnivore's Dilemma, reviewed by Jarod Wilson

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Michael Pollan - 2006

Important Quotes:

·         “Descendents from the Maya living in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves as ‘the corn people’ . . . meant to acknowledge their abiding dependence on this miraculous grass, the staple of their diet for almost nine thousand years.”

o   “For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggest either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.”

o   “When you look at isotope ratios, we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.”

·         “. . . Butz set to work dismantling the New Deal farm regime of price supports . . . He abolished the Ever-Normal Granary and, with the 1973 farm bill, began replacing the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payments to farmers.”

·         “Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn.”

o   “But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget r the inside of the box it comes in to ‘help preserve freshness.’  According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food.”

o   A Chicken McNugget is actually 56% corn derived.

·         “’Organic’ on the label conjures up a rich narrative, even if it is the consumer who fills in most of the details, supplying the hero (American Family Farmer), the villain (Agribusinessman), and the literary genre, which I’ve come to think of as Supermarket Pastoral.  By now we may know better than to believe this too simple story, but not much better, and the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.”

·         “. . . In an industrial society, most people haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.”

·         “[In the 70’s,] organic’s rejection of agricultural chemicals was also a rejection of the war machine, since the same corporations—Dow, Monsanto—that manufactured pesticides also made napalm and Agent Orange, the herbicide with which the U.S. military was waging war against nature in Southeast Asia.  Eating organic thus married the personal to the political.”

·         “Yet for the great majority of us the story is not quite so simple.  As a society we Americas spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves—about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s.  Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world.”

Conclusions and Thought-Provoking Questions:

·         We have become a society that is highly reliant on monoculture—specifically the monoculture of corn. 

·         Corn is the staple food in nearly every piece of Americans’ diets.  This is largely because of government subsidies and the political-driving system that is Dow and Monsanto.

·         People in the US eat more food than any other country in the world (per capita), but spend less on average for that food.  Our priorities are out of line.  Our economy—and our environment and bodies—are suffering because of it. 

·         Even with the rise of “organic” farming, much of this farming is more sustainable than actually organic.  No, there are not pesticides being used, but we are still operating on the monoculture idea when we create organic factory farms.  Even organic chicken (that is “free range” and “cage free”) does not lead a life that is as peaceful as you would be led to believe.

·         How has this shift in food affected our environment?  Health?  Economy?

·         Is there ever going to be a way to move away from corporate farming and back to a more “pastoral” way of farming?  If so, what will it take?

·         What do you think the biggest issue with the food system today is?  Can we, as a small group of people, truly make an impact on it?