[Marxism] The Food Industry

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, April 23, 2006
'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' by Michael Pollan
Deconstructing Dinner
Review by DAVID KAMP

Life is confusing atop the food chain. For most animals, eating is a simple 
matter of biological imperative: if you're a koala, you seek out eucalyptus 
leaves; if you're a prairie vole, you munch on bluegrass and clover. But 
Homo sapiens, encumbered by a big brain and such inventions as agriculture 
and industry, faces a bewildering array of choices, from scrambled eggs to 
Chicken McNuggets, from a bowl of fresh strawberries to the petrochemically 
complex yellow log of sweet, spongy food product known as the Twinkie. 
"When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer," Michael Pollan 
writes in his thoughtful, engrossing new book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," 
"deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety."

Nowhere is this anxiety more acute, Pollan says, than in the United States. 
Wealth, abundance and the lack of a steadying, centuries-old food culture 
have conspired to make us Americans dysfunctional eaters, obsessed with 
getting thin while becoming ever more fat, lurching from one specious bit 
of dietary wisdom (margarine is better for you than butter) to another 
(carbs kill). Pollan diagnoses a "national eating disorder," and he aims to 
shed light on both its causes and some potential solutions. To this end, he 
embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the 
very beginning ? in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners 
will emerge ? and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald's repast consumed by Pollan with his 
wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a "Big 
Organic" meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a 
beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a 
wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, 
antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a "hunter-gatherer" feast 
consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or 
foraged himself.

Even if the author weren't a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and 
therefore by definition a liberal foodie intellectual, you could guess how 
this scheme will play out: the McDonald's meal will be found wanting in 
terms of nutrition and eco-sustainability; the Whole Foods meal will be 
decent but tainted with a whiff of corporate compromise; the Virginia farm 
meal will be rapturously flavorful and uplifting; and the hunter-gatherer 
meal will be a gutsy feast of wild boar and morels, with a side of guilt 
and some squirmy philosophizing on what it means to take a pig's life.

But for Pollan, the final outcome is less important than the meal's journey 
from the soil to the plate. His supermeticulous reporting is the book's 
strength ? you're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where 
your food comes from. In fact, the first quarter of the book is devoted to 
a shocking, page-turning exposé of the secret life of that most seemingly 
innocent and benign of American crops, corn.

The species Zea mays, for all its connotations of heartland goodness and 
Rodgers and Hammerstein romance ("as high as an elephant's eye"), has been 
turned into nothing less than an agent of evil, Pollan argues. Expanding on 
his articles for The New York Times Magazine, he lays out the many ways in 
which government policy since the Nixon era ? to grow as much corn as 
possible, subsidized with federal money ? is totally out of whack with the 
needs of nature and the American public.

Big agribusiness has Washington in its pocket. The reason its titans want 
to keep corn cheap and plentiful, Pollan explains, is that they value it, 
above all, as a remarkably inexpensive industrial raw material. Not only 
does it fatten up a beef steer more quickly than pasture does (though at a 
cost to ourselves and cattle, which haven't evolved to digest corn, and are 
therefore pre-emptively fed antibiotics to offset the stresses caused by 
their unnatural diet); once milled, refined and recompounded, corn can 
become any number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of 
edible, if not nutritious, products, like the thickener in a milkshake, the 
hydrogenated oil in margarine, the modified cornstarch that binds the 
pulverized meat in a McNugget and, most disastrously, the ubiquitous 
sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Though it didn't reach 
the American market until 1980, HFCS has insinuated itself into every nook 
and cranny of the larder ? in Pollan's McDonald's meal, there's HFCS not 
only in his 32-ounce soda, but in the ketchup and the bun of his 
cheeseburger ? and Pollan fingers it as the prime culprit in the nation's 
obesity epidemic.

Against this backdrop of cynicism and big bellies, Pollan finds his hero in 
Joel Salatin, an "alternative" farmer in Virginia who will sell his goods 
only to local customers. A cantankerous self-described 
"Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic," Farmer Joel 
has ingeniously marshalled the rhythms and symbioses of nature to produce a 
bounty of food from his hundred acres. For example, his cattle graze a plot 
of grass for a day or two and are then succeeded by several hundred laying 
hens, which not only nibble on the clipped grass but pick grubs and larvae 
from the cowpats, thereby spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. 
The chickens' bug-laden, high-protein diet results in fantastically 
flavorful eggs, while their excrement enriches the pasture with nitrogen, 
allowing it to recover in a matter of weeks for the cows to revisit.

Salatin seems to have found the secrets of sustainable agriculture. The 
shocker is that he doesn't want to be part of any national solution. He's 
an off-the-grid crank who hates the government, home-schooled his kids and 
declares to Pollan: "Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is 
it?" But Pollan, a nice-guy writer whose awe of Salatin is palpable, lets 
the farmer off lightly, saying that his provocative words "made me 
appreciate what a deep gulf of culture and experience separates me from 
Joel ? and yet at the same time, what a sturdy bridge caring about food can 
sometimes provide."

If I have any caveats about "The Omnivore's Dilemma," it's Pollan's 
tendency to be too nice. He doesn't write with the propulsive rage that 
fueled Eric Schlosser's blockbuster "Fast Food Nation," nor does he take a 
firm stand on figures like the "Big Organic" pioneer Gene Kahn, an 
ex-hippie farmer from Washington State who decided that the only way to 
sustain his company, Cascadian Farm, was to sell it to General Mills. 
Pollan wryly notes that Kahn drives a late-model Lexus with vanity plates 
that say ORGANIC, but he calls Kahn "a realist, a businessman with a 
payroll to meet." Does this mean that Kahn is striking the right balance 
between mammon and the mission, or does Pollan think he's a hypocrite?

Likewise, I wish Pollan would stick his neck out and be more prescriptive 
about how we might realistically address our national eating disorder. We 
can't all go off the grid like Salatin, nor can we just wish away 200 years 
of industrialization. So what to do? Is the ever-growing organic-food 
industry already on the right path? Or is more radical action needed? 
Should the Department of Justice break up giant, soil-exhausting factory 
farms into small, self-sustaining polycultural organic farms? Perhaps it's 
greedy to demand more from a book already brimming with ideas, but what can 
I say? I'm an American, and I'm still hungry.

David Kamp is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and GQ. His book about 
the American fine-food revolution, "The United States of Arugula," will be 
published in September.


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