Book review: The omnivore's dilemma

A natural history of four meals

by Zach Vandenberg, Guest Writer

Students do not always eat as they should. Ramen noodles, PB and J, breakfast cereal, and instant pizzas were standard fare for me in college, with occasional supplements from the canned soup aisle. Maybe you're a regular at the food pantry; I hear the guacamole chips are tasty. Perhaps you shop at the farmers market? If you're married you might eat better - my diet certainly got healthier after I married: less junk and more vegetables.

The gross-out documentary Supersize Me helped vault questions about food issues beyond fad diets and weight-loss pills, but the movie showed a lot less about where food comes from than about what it can do to you. The Omnivore's Dilemma goes the opposite direction. This book looks at the lives of the plants, animals, and people that make your meals possible.

Michael Pollan is an expert on food, but he is not a nutritionist or a food scientist. In fact, he doesn't think that knowing the nutritional breakdown of each serving size of food is particularly helpful. This is not only because most people are pretty darn bewildered by the stats on the side of the cereal box,, but because statistics alter our understanding of food from being a means of fellowship and wonder into an end filled with the anxiety of incomprehensible numbers and unpronounceable words. To him, evaluating the quality of food based on the numbers on the label would be like judging the quality of this article only by counting how many adjectives and adverbs were in it. It's the sort of exercise that might be useful on one level, but it's limited, and not useful for knowing about the things that we really care about.

The omnivore's dilemma comes down to the basic question we all ask almost everyday: What should we have for dinner? Pollan got interested in this question a few years ago when Americans decided, almost overnight, to reject an ancient staple in a spasm of carbophobia known as "The Atkins Diet." Bread was off the menu. The fact that a culture could reject something as basic as bread was bewildering to Pollan, as was the very fact that humans are adapted to eat almost anything. Can you imagine eating hay for every meal, with occasional supplements of oats, carrots, and lumps of sugar? Or, like the koala bear, eating only eucalyptus leaves?

How much of the food we eat today can we trace directly to its source, which is, "the fertility of the earth and the energy of the sun?" In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan is keen to trace the links between three food chains: from humans back to their source in the ground. In each case he begins with a plant and ends with a meal. Specifically, he examines the industrial food chain, the organic food chain, and a food chain in which he hunts or gathers all the food in the meal.

Despite its ubiquity, the industrial food chain remains largely hidden from the public view. And frankly, do we really want to know how many cows contributed beef for one burger? Or how much corn syrup is in a can of soda? (Yes, it's corn, not sugar cane.) Pollan gives us a tour of Iowa farms, Kansas feedlots, and speculates about what happens from harvest to final product (the food companies wouldn't let him into their production facilities). Rest assured that these chapters are stuffed with disgusting facts (FDA rules allow cattle to be fed products rendered from the blood products and fat of other cows) and marketing schemes (you can't brand fruit, but you can brand fruit snacks) that might induce nausea. However, Pollan, and I admit this of myself, still gets nostalgic for fast food: "the familiar meaty perfume of the french fries filling the car; and the pleasingly sequenced bite into a burger - the soft, sweet roll, the crunchy pickle, the savory moistness of the meat." It's scary how good that sounds.

The next section of the book addresses the benefits and problems of organic foods. Organic food is, of course, more expensive, and justifies the expense by claiming to factor in the expense that food can cost the planet. As appealing as this narrative sounds in the aisle of the grocery store, many organic food products deliver something different from what they promise. And can you really have an organic TV dinner? Isn't that some kind of contradiction in terms? Pollan actually divides this section book in two: first he examines the "big organic" products made by large companies typical in the supermarket, then he spends some time on a farm that eschews the organic label in favor of something that is basically organic, but strictly local. This very memorable, even raving farmer is obsessed with treating his Virginia farm with the utmost respect and care, waking before the crack of dawn in a labor of love for his land, animals, family, and customers, who drop by on appointed days for eggs, cuts of pork, and veggies.

Finally, Pollan decides that he needs to get in touch with his hunter-gatherer past, resolving to make a meal for his friends constituted entirely of food he grew, collected, or hunted with his own two hands. Thus he learns the grimy but delicate delights of mushrooming and the thrill of the hunt as he shoots a wild boar. He supplements this meal with goods from his garden and some San Francisco sourdough. A success, all in all, but a lot of work. Pollan reckons that normal people wouldn't ever want to hunt and gather an entire meal; but for the purpose of the book, it was instructive in showing how difficult and interesting was the task of gathering food for our ancient, omnivore ancestors.

I ate a lot of macaroni and cheese when I was in college - Velveeta shells are my favorite. I had a roommate at Calvin who bought a case of Kraft (Cheesiest) when it was on sale at Meijer for 25 cents a box, and he ate it every night for a month. Clearly, food habits like this are not healthy, but in our hurried culture, all too normal. Pollan claims that 19% of all American meals are eaten in the car! America does not have a settled food culture, in contrast to nearly every other culture on earth. Instead, too many of us eat hastily prepared foods and, when we attempt to change, despair in the thickets of food statistics and fad diets. This book can help us get past the confusion to something that respects food, the people who grow it, and the land it came from.

Pollan advises something quite simple as a solution - eat whole foods. And what could be better than eating exactly the stuff that God gave us? Cultural mandates notwithstanding, some food products are better left uninvented, and I'm sure we could all name something we know should never have been shown the light of day. So if food is stressing you out, slow down, eat an apple or munch some vegetables, and let The Omnivore's Dilemma put things into perspective.

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