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.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

19 replies on “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

  1. Man, I worry about you. You love a book about corn? I can’t imagine what you’ll be like when you get to the chapter on cabbage.

    If I may pick a nit, by the way, Iowa is not a “food desert.” It happens to be the hog capital of the world. And there’s nothing better than bacon and eggs for breakfast, sausage and biscuits for lunch and pork chops and mashed potatoes for supper.

    An opinion, of course.

  2. Sounds like an interesting book. My spouse is allergic to corn, and reading the ingredients in things is just not enough! We’ve had to do a lot of research, and found out that everything from Splenda to dextrose (in most TOOTHPASTES) is made from corn. We’re shopping at Whole Foods and eating a lot of organic now. The cool thing is when we go overseas, to Asia or Central America, corn isn’t in ANYTHING, except what is easily identifiable as being corn. Must be the corn subsidies here in the States. What a pain in the butt. We look forward to the day that corn is demand to make ethanol, and we go back to using sugar beets for our main sweetener.

    One last thing: trying to find the word for “corn” in a list of Japanese ingredients is a PAIN IN THE BUTT. We just gave up after awhile and ate away. No repercussions!

  3. You know reading that last bit, about feeding the cows grass instead of corn, ecoli, and the slaughter houses. Made me realize one thing.

    If I had to kill my own meat. I would probably be a semi-vegan (allowing things like eggs and cheese). And if I didn’t really hate to cook (and the clean up after), and was a better cook than I am, I might actually think about giving it (semi-veganism) a try.

  4. Will you just skip to the Index and see if he discusses the Greatest Food Mystery of Them All: “Reg. Penna. Dept. Agr.”?

    Sadly, I can find no sign of it. But since I read that Straight Dope column, years ago, I see that phrase all over baked goods now. :)

    You love a book about corn? I can’t imagine what you’ll be like when you get to the chapter on cabbage.

    Hey, I love a well-written book about anything. I read obsessively.

    If I may pick a nit, by the way, Iowa is not a “food desert.” It happens to be the hog capital of the world.

    That’s not my assertion, it’s the author’s, but you raise a good question. I haven’t gotten far enough in the book to know if he talks further about this, so I’ve just googled around.

    It turns out that the number of hog farms in Iowa was cut in half in the 90s, just as North Carolina began its rise. NC is now the #2 hog farming state; some years it beats out Iowa. Iowa still produces 25% of all hogs in the nation, but that’s quite a drop, thanks to NC, Minnesota, and Illinois producing millions more hogs each year than they did a decade ago.

    Though it’s a decade out of date (Iowa production has dropped precipitously since then), see the Iowa State Department of Economics “How Iowa Compares to Other States.”

    Finally, hog production has moved to an industrial practice. There’s no such thing as a family hog farm in Iowa. So while there are still millions of hogs in Iowa, they’re all packed into tiny areas. If Iowa is a food desert, there are just a few pork oasises. :)

  5. If you’re liking The Omnivore’s Dilemma then you should definitely check out The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.

    Disclosure: I’ve yet to read either but I’ve heard a lot about both and I think Singer draws quite a different conclusion from Pollan.

  6. Oh, man…when you start reading about the corn industry, Archer Daniels Midland (yeah, the ubiquitous “ADM, Supermarket to the World” ads on NPR sound just so benign, don’t they?) and all the corn that’s showing up in EVERYTHING nowadays, the only thing scarier is to contemplate just how much of that corn — and we’ll NEVER know how much since it is completely and totally unregulated — is genetically modified corn.

    Play with the DNA of one species, splice it with another, strip off all its properties which have since time immemorial prevented cross-species transmission of countless genetic traits to say nothing of viruses, etc., and you’ve unleashed…well…we don’t know what this splicing of “naked DNA” is unleashing on the world.

    Personally, as someone with a deadly peanut allergy, I get more terrified the more I read about it. There have already been many cases of people with food allergies who have had anaphylactic reactions to previously “safe” food because that food contained a benign ingredient that had been genetically modified with tree nut properties. But there are no requirements to label food — especially corn, which is so ubiquitous — as genetically modified.

    On a completely separate manufactured food topic, I am absolutely fascinated with a food that I encountered first in Virginia and never knew growing up in CT: Potted Meat Food Product.

    When I taught high school, one project I used to do with my students was on Doublespeak in advertising. We first focused on the food industry, and kids learned how nouns used as adjectives could hide all sorts of scary truths…like how “Cheese Food Product” is not cheese. Or really even food. It’s a product. And it may not contain any cheese at all. (Actually, there are laws about what percentage of actual dairy product must be present in “cheese food”, which is more than what must be included in a “cheese food product”.)

    But we had the most fun with Potted Meat Food Product…another product which is not actually meat, but contains meat. I absolutely loved that one of the leading ingredients was “partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue”. (Yes, I remember it by heart.) What, pray tell, is partially defatted cooked pork fatty tissue? If you parse it, we’re really talking about partially defatted fat. If I lose a few pounds at weight watchers, I guess I can say my ass is partially defatted fat, too, but at least it’s not cooked.

  7. Waldo — two nits to pick.

    1. Haber developed a process for synthesizing ammonia, not nitrogen.
    2. Corn, and all plants that live in sunlight, uses sunlight for their energy source. The photosynthesis cycle uses chlorophyll to capture sunlight and turn carbon dioxide and water into glucose. There is no other way in which plants take an inflow of energy. Fertilizer is important because it contributes ammonia (and therefore nitrogen) to the plant, not because it provides energy. Ammonia is not involved in the photosynthesis cycle.

    And now for some substance — some folks are talking up corn-derived ethanol for car fuel. The energy costs associated with producing a barrel of ethanol are significant, so that the real cost of the gallon of ethanol becomes prohibited without government subsidies.

    Instead, folks should listen to Al Weed when he plugs the use of switchgrass, and even (dare say it?) to Geoerge W. Bush in his State of th Union speech this year. Switchgrass’s power use in production are MUCH smaller.

    Go Al!

    Lloyd Snook

  8. I heard a couple of interviews with Pollan on NPR, and thought he was great. One thing that stuck with me was if you take clippings of hair and nails from a modern human and assess the carbon molecules, they resemble the carbon in corn which is different from most others.
    Re: hog farming, I remember a few years ago massive flooding in N.C. and a lot of pigs died, reading questions about the health of the hogs that were turned into bacon in the aftermath, and whether they had died peacefully in their beds.

  9. This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while, so I appreciate you putting it back on my radar. It seems odd to me that Nitrogen is in limited supply, given that it comprises about 3/4 of our atmosphere, but I’m probably overlooking something obvious.

    For about five years my diet has been organic. The more I read the more I’m convinced that one can’t simultaneously maximize industrial farm profit and quality, therefore I patronize the latter.

  10. Haber developed a process for synthesizing ammonia, not nitrogen.

    Quite right — I got that one all wrong. What he figured out how to do is extract nitrogen from the air that would otherwise be inaccessible, which is borne in an ammonia molecule. I have corrected that section accordingly.

    Corn, and all plants that live in sunlight, uses sunlight for their energy source. The photosynthesis cycle uses chlorophyll to capture sunlight and turn carbon dioxide and water into glucose. There is no other way in which plants take an inflow of energy.

    My usage of the term “energy” was an oversimplification of the energy cycle for the sake of keeping things brief. Perhaps an excerpt from the book will clear things up:

    When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel. […] True, these fossil fuels were at one time billions of years ago created by the sun, but they are not renewable in the same way that the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. […] What had been a local, sun-driven cycle of fertility, in which the legumes fed the corn which fed the livestock which in turn (with their manure) fed the corn, was now broken. Now [the farmer] could plant corn every year and on as much of his acreage as he chose, since he had no need for the legumes or the animal manure. He could buy fertility in a bag, fertility that had originally been produced a billion years ago halfway around the world.

    I hope that makes more sense than my distillation.

    It seems odd to me that Nitrogen is in limited supply, given that it comprises about 3/4 of our atmosphere, but I’m probably overlooking something obvious.

    Not obvious, Duane, but certainly something interesting. :) It turns out that all of that nitrogen is utterly inaccessible to life through natural processes. Pollan describes them as “tightly paired, nonreactive, and therefore useless.” So have to “be split and then joined to atoms of hydrogen” to do any good. The entirety of the accessible nitrogen on earth has been bound to hydrogen “by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants…or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning.”

  11. Duane,

    Once you read Pollan’s book, you’ll have to rethink whether organic is the most important element to consider in making your dietary choices. Since the federal government got involved in credentialling exactly what can be labelled as organic, industrial agriculture has focused on organic production in a big way.

    Pollan spends a lot of time with Joel Saletin (owner of Polyface Farms in Swope, Virginia) and comes away with the conclusion that humane, integrated family farms, selling to local customers, may be the more sustainable model, as well as the one that delivers the best quality.

  12. Harry,

    Thank you for the suggestion. In fact I’ve been looking at several CSA (community supported agriculture) options in the area. As you point out, the cache of the organic label has drawn attention which may dilute the value of the product. Maybe soon we can expect a new terminology (really really organic?) for health-conscious people to make good selections.

  13. Waldo,

    When you’ve finished the book, can I borrow it? Cotton works the same way, which relates (of course) to my research on organic cotton denim.

    Max

  14. Waldo,

    Your explanation that “the entirety of the accessible nitrogen on earth has been bound to hydrogen ‘by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants…or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning,” is bringing up a good deal of guilt in me. I remember learning in science that clover have the ability to fix nitrogen from the air (or perhaps that clover is in a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria) and that on the clover roots are little nodules that do the fixing. Well, I’ve been wondering if I should be pulling up those little clovers that grow in my garden, and especially the ones that grow in my driveway. I’m convinced I shouldn’t, but I can’t seem to help myself, and I’m feeling particularly burdened by guilt right now.

    I also kill spiders. -shame!-

  15. When you’ve finished the book, can I borrow it?

    On behalf of my father, from whom I’m borrowing it and with whom I haven’t consulted, sure!

    I remember learning in science that clover have the ability to fix nitrogen from the air (or perhaps that clover is in a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria) and that on the clover roots are little nodules that do the fixing.

    The fact that you a) learned that in science and b) remember it is astounding. :)

  16. Waldo,

    Thanks for the superb tip. I picked up the hardback at B&N last night and have torn myself away from it long enough to write this comment. A string of borrowers is already being established… :)

    I have a copy of his The Botany of Desire on loan from someone and am sorry to say I hadn’t taken time to read it yet. I suspect that will change once I finish this.

    – Aaron

  17. “When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.”

    Let me beat this dead horse one more time — the author here has telescoped (clumsily) two concepts.

    First, he suggests that before Haber figured out how to fix nitrogen artificially in man-made ammonia, the limiting factor in agriculture was solar energy. This isn’t really true, given that for thousands of years farmers have been rotating crops so that crops like soybeans and clover (that can fix nitrogen themselves) can re-fertilize impoverished soil, but I think I understand what he is getting at.

    Second, he suggests that in modern agriculture, the limiting factor is now not solar energy, but the ability to give the crop nitrogen. That is a legitimate possibility, and it is at least not scientifically wrong.

    This passage is confusing because fossil fuels don’t contribute energy to the corn. As a matter of English Composition technique (thank you, Mrs. Henley in 12th grade), the author should not use parallel structure to pair two dissimilar concepts. Fossil fuels enter the picture only because they can be cracked to get hydrogen, which then combines with the nitrogen to allow the nitrogen to be taken into a plant in usable form.

    Having kicked that dead horse enough, I’ll add that what I take to be his ultimate “truth” here — that the limiting factor has changed from sunlight to nitrogen from fossil fuels — is probably accurate.

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