Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma - A Natural History of Four Meals

A fab new addition to my list of interesting-reads, 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'-- a gift to me by a colleague, who is quite a foodie just as I am -- is a book about food. To elaborate, not just "about food", in fact it's all about food and about all food. Not just cooking and eating food, but it's also about the production, evolution, industrialization, emotion, environmentalization, consumption, digestion, and philosophization of food. While it is primarily a scathing look into all that's wrong with the food industry in the US of A, it's a good read for anyone who wants to nip the fowl in the bud, if the food industrialization crisis is just about hitting their country. What Michael Pollan, the author, set out to do was to describe the creation of 4 different meals. This would take him to farms, feedlots, grocery convenience stores, forests, and hidden mushroom gathering sites all over the Americas, while discussing the social, political, ecological, and economical aspects of the food chain. Following were the four meals that he focussed his writing on:

1) Industrial - A fast food meal dinner brought at a McDonald's drive-through and consumed in the car itself
2) Industrial Organic - Organic food bought at a local Whole Foods, and cooked at home with other organic produce
3) Local - A farmer’s market meal from Virginia’s Polyface farm, cooked at home with other local produce (things produced and consumed within a defined geographic boundary)
4) Hunter-Gatherer - A meal for which Pollan hunts the meat and gathers the mushrooms himself

While 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' is by no means an iconic book, or even quite a literary achievement, I would still deem it as a must-read for all. Absolutely essential, especially for Americans, and Indians who are fast driving into the fast-food lane. With increasing nuclearization of our traditional Indian joint family system, we are coming to depend more-and-more on McDonald's and KFC for our daily bread and more. With this book, Pollan aims to throw more light on all that's wrong with the lifestyle of comfort that we are choosing for ourselves. While food in India has still not reached as much a state of remote-control as it has in the USA, it is interesting to read how we are falling preys to the consumerization of food and in turn harming our own lives, and the world as a whole.

How did we reach this situation?

Where to begin from? Maybe from corn (Meal #1 starts with the evolution of corn), starting from how the American government subsidizes the corn industry at the expense of the land and, most disturbingly, the health of its people; to how scientists at places like McDonald’s conspire to turn corn-—which is outrageously cheap and plentiful-—into millions of different products, from Chicken McNuggets to the stabilizer in the dressings you put on your “healthy” salad, not to mention the zillions of chemicals derived from corn—-from HFCS (high fructose corn stabilizers) to xantham gum to edible essences.

The cornification of our body and lands is an important issue, yes. The bigger issue, though, is the treatment meted out to the poor animals that go into making our fast food -- the tortured, diseased animals whose miserable lives are rendered into that flavorless disc called the tikki or the patty. That meat comes from a cow that’s fed an unnatural diet of the plentiful and really cheap corn, as opposed to its biological and evolutionary propensity for grass. This change in its eating pattern leads it to break out in numerous diseases while crammed mercilessly into lots, standing in piles of their own shit. Which again means numerous antibiotics that go into their feed to prevent them from falling ill and falling into a "depression" which might trigger them into riots. As one could expect, there aren't many positive sides to the industrial meal, the production and consumption of which is a waste of money and energy, topped with disgraceful animal living conditions, exploitation of labor, absurd government subsidy structures, and vast ecological damages leading even to global warming.

However gruesome the scene that Pollan tries to portray with beef and pork, he doesn't try to push for a vegetarian agenda. Human beings are actually animals with a carnivorous evolutionary pattern, and hence it is but natural for mankind to be eating meat. The fact is that with the discovery of agriculture, mankind found an easy access to a vegetarian diet, and hence turned omnivorous. It’s only a new phenomenon that with the industrialization of agriculture and animal farming, we are getting into a harmful pattern of producing and consuming food.

Meal #2 wasn't exactly a remarkable read, except for some pertinent issues raised by Pollan. For example, is it better to eat a "conventional" apple from a farm down the road, or an organic one flown in from New Zealand? And just what is "organic," or "free range"? And does all "organic" food actually mean good?

For meal # 3, Pollan spent a week working on Polyface Farm, a self contained grass farm run by a man named Joe Salatin that raises cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits, etc. Salatin describes himself as a "grass farmer", the ideology behind it being that the grass sustains most of the living beings in his farm, starting from the ruminating cows to his customers who end up buying the commodities from his farm. The idea is that instead of importing nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers, Salatin uses a very well planned and intricate system of animal rotation to raise everything using only his own forest and pasture land. According to Salatin, grass grows better if it is nibbled on (but not overgrazed), and with this system Salatin has turned an overgrazed wasteland of a farm into a very efficient and productive plot of pasture and forest. So the cows graze on one part of the land just right, and then he moves the cows to another part. They are followed by the chicken who nibble on the cow dung, to take out its nutrients and spread the grass seeds further; which are then followed by the rabbits and the pigs in a very systematic and proven dance. What it results it is in eggs with the most carrotish orange egg yolks, and thick muscle bound whites, and farm produce with not even the slightest bit of artificially produced fertilizers or pesticides. This was my most interesting portion of the book, and I would recommend this book to all just to go through this particular section. At the end of one particular cycle, when Salatin begins selling his produce at the local market, people come driving all the way from about 50 miles afar to buy things from him. This is what Pollan stresses as "putting a face" to your farm; trying and learning more about where your food comes from. Sample this writing: "But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a manner of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we chose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world"

The final meal was about as close as one could come to the whole hunter-gatherer model. Pollan hunted mushrooms, wild pigs, and random greens and fruits to make a dinner focused on things that he "found" himself. This was quite an easy read, and again raised some pertinent questions.

There are so many more interesting points that were highlighted in this book, that, if nothing, I at least came out enlightened by the reading of this book. And hence I would recommend this book as a very essential read for everyone. If you want to live healthy and eat good, start with eating what's right - for yourself and for the environment. As for the money part of eating right, let me defend it with Pollan's argument "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. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. After all, it isn't only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones (now owned by more than half the U.S. population, children included) or television, which close to 90 percent of all U.S. households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?"