The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
I’m less than a hundred pages into Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and, as I expected, I love it. I haven’t gotten past the section about corn, which is being set up as a theme for the industrial food section.
In no particular order, here are some of the totally amazing things that I’ve learned thus far:
- Most of those crazy ingredients on packages (lecithin, citric acid, xanthan gum, etc.)? Corn derivatives.
- A quarter of all items in the grocery store contain corn.
- All that corn grown in the midwest? Totally inedible to humans. It’s only for cows and chickens and pigs, or for extracting chemicals from. Iowa is a food desert.
- Corn cannot survive in the wild, thanks to its thick husk. It evolved with humans, for humans. It exists only so long as humans cultivate it.
- Plants (most notably corn) used to derive most of their energy from the sun, but no longer. The “green revolution” was simply a conversion to using petrochemicals to make fertilizer. Thus western agriculture is now as reliant on foreign oil as our cars. We’ve traded free energy — sun — for very expensive energy.
- The amount of nitrogen on earth is very limited, easily calculable, and can only support a finite number of humans. (Nitrogen is the basic ingredient of DNA.) Were it not for Fritz Haber’s 1909 discovery of how to extract nitrogen otherwise-inaccessible from the atmosphere, humankind would have hit a hard ceiling, and the global population would have peaked out at 3.6B, for better or for worse. Haber’s biography is quite something, worth taking three minutes to read).
- Cows aren’t meant to eat corn. It makes them sick, turning their neutral pH stomachs into an acid bath, among many other nasty things. The only reason they’re given so many antibiotics is to suppress their illness from eating corn, which they eat because it’s cheaper than grass.
- Raising a cow to slaughter requires thirty-five gallons of oil.
- Cows only get E. coli if they eat corn. Grass-fed cows don’t. If cows are fed grass for the week before slaughter, the E. coli leaves their system. But the meatpacking industry would rather irradiate all beef than go to the trouble of feeding cows grass.
Pollan writes a great deal about the bizarre federal subsidies for farmers, which once made a lot of sense, but have been modified so much that they could be shown to be fundamentally flawed by anybody who has passed economics 101. I don’t think I can do justice to this situation within the context of this blog entry, but perhaps I’ll muster up a piece on it by the time I wrap up this book.
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