THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA

I recently finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which was excellent. The book addresses several topics:

• the state of industrial agriculture based around endless production of cheap corn;
• the origins of the organic food movement;
• the industrialization of the organic food chain;
• what it means for a farm to be truly sustainable;
• the ethics of eating animals; and
• whether it's still possible to hunt (pig) and gather (mushrooms) today and what the experience might teach about us eating

I collected a long list of passages, predominantly from the parts describing the industrial organic food chain and Polyface Farms, a local and sustainable farm featured in Pollan's work.

Even though the additive promises to diminish air quality in California, new federal mandates pushed by the corn processors require refineries in the state to help eat the corn surplus by diluting their gasoline with 10 percent alcohol. (p.111)

Polyface Farm stands about as far from this industrialized sort of agriculture as it is possible to get without leaving the planet. ... Before my journey through the organic food industry I would have that virtually any organic farm would belong on the Polyface side [of a comparison with industrial agriculture]. But it turns out that this is not necessarily the case. There are now "industrial organic" farms that belong firmly on the [industrial] side. Then there is this further paradox: Polyface Farm is technically not an organic farm, though by any standard it is more "sustainable" than virtually any organic farm. Its example forces you to think a lot harder about what these words -- sustainable, organic, natural -- really mean. (p.130-131)

I enjoy shooping at Whole Foods nearly as much as I enjoy browsing a good bookstore, which, come to think of it, is probably no accident: Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary experience, too. That's not to take anything away from the food, which is generally of high quality, much of it "certified organic" or "humanely raised" or "free range." (p.135)

But what about the "free-range" lifestyle promised on the label? True, there's a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five of six weeks old -- for fear they'll catch something outside -- and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later. (p.140)

Throughout its history, the sharpest growth of organic has closely followed spikes in public concern over the industrial food supply. Some critics condemn organic for profiting time and again from "food scares," and while there is certainly some truth to this charge, whether it represents a more serious indictment of organic or industrial food is open to question. (p.132)

After Arthur Harvey, a Maine blueberry farmer, won a 2003 lawsuit forcing the USDA to obey the language of the 1990 law, lobbyists working for the Organic Trade Association managed in 2005 to slip language into a USDA appropriations bill restoring -- and possibly expanding -- the industry's right to use synthetics in organic foods. (p.156)

To the eye, [the industrial organic farms in California] look exactly like any other industrial farm in California -- and in fact some of the biggest organic operations in the state are owned and operated by conventional megafarms. (p.158)

Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing on its fidelity to organic principles, and that unless organic "scales up [it will] never be anything more than yuppie food." (p.159)

Yet [Drew Goodman's] success, like Gene Kahn's, has opened up a gulf between Big and Little Organic and convinced many of the movement's founders, as well as poneering farmers like Joel Salatin, that the time has come to move beyond organic -- to raise the bar on the American food system once again. (p.169)

Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good: They get a few more square inches of living space per bird. ... and because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth, they get to live a few days longer. Though under the circumstances it's not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon. Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide, not nearly big enough to accommodate all twenty thousan birds inside should the group ever decide to take the air en masse. Whichm truth be told, is the last thing the farm managers want to see happen, since these defenseless, crowded, and genetically identical birds are exquisitely vulnerable to infection. This is one of the larger ironies of growing organic food in an industrial system: It is even more precarious than a conventional industrial system. But the federal rules say an organic chicken should have "access to the outdoors," and Supermarket Pastoral imagines it, so Petaluma Poultry provides the doors and the yard and everyone keeps their fingers crossed. (p.172)

And while it is true that organic farmers don't spread fertilizers made from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy-intensive process involving extra irrigation and extra cultivation. All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally. ... Yet growing the food is the least of it: only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around. (p.183)

Grass farmers grow animals -- for meat, eggs, milk, and wool -- but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat. ... One of the principles of modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible farmers should rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured everyday by photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum. (p.188)

"You can't let your cows take a second bite of a grass before it has had a chance to fully recover." If the law of the second bite were actually on the books, most of the world's ranchers and dairy farmers would be outlaws, since they allow their stock to grze their pastures continuously. ... Grass farming done well depends almost entirely on a wealth of nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite: on the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines. (p.189-191)

The animals fanned out in the new paddock and lowered their great heads, and the evening air filled with the muffled sounds of smacking lips, tearing grass, and the low snuffling of contented cows. The last time I had stood watching a heard of cattle eat their supper I was standing up to my ankles in cow manure in Poky Feeders pen number 43 in Garden City, Kansas. The difference between these two bovine dining scenes could not have been starker. The single most obvious difference was that these cows were harvesting their own feed instead of waiting for a dump truck to deliver a total mixed ration of corn that had been grown hundreds of miles away and then blended by animal nutritionists with urea, antiobiotics, minerals, and the fat of other cattle in a feedlot laboratory. Here we'd brought the cattle to the food rather than the other way around, and at the end of their meal there'd be nothing left for us to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good. (p.194-195)

A diverse enough polyculture of grasses can withstand virtually any shock and in some places will produce in a year nearly as much total biomass as a forest receiving the same amount of rainfall. (p.197)

In fact, grassing over that portion of the world's cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably. For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States becoame well-managed to pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. We seldom focus on farming's role in global warming, but as much as a third of all greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow. (p.198)

But if all that energy has been drawn from the boundless storehouse of the sun, as in the case of eating meat off this pasture, that meal comes as close to a free lunch as we can hope to get. (p.199)

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that true meal's cost -- to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibily, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. If not for this sort of blind-man's accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does. (p.201)

This is what Joel means when says the animals do the real work around here. "I'm just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time." (p.212)

I began to understand just how radically different this sort of farming is from the industrial models I'd observed before, whether in an Iowa cornfield or an organic chicken farm in California. Indeed, it is so different that I found Polyface's system difficult to describe to myself in an orderly way. Industrial processes follow a clear, linear, hierarchical logic: First this, then that; put this in here, and then out comes that. But the relationship between cows and chickens on this farm (leaving aside for the moment the other creatures and relationships present here) takes the form of a loop rather than a line, and that makes it hard to know where to start, or how to distinguish between causes and effects, subjects and objects. (p.212)

Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. ... The idea is not to slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species "fully express their physiological distinctiveness." He takes advantage of each species' natural proclivities in a way that benefits not only that animal but other species as well. So instead of treating the chicken as a simple egg or protein machine, Polyface honors -- and exploits -- "the innate distinctive desires of a chicken," which include pecking in the grass and cleaning up after herbivores. The chickens get to do, and eat, what they evolved to do and eat, and in the process the farmer and his cattle both profit. What is the opposite of zero-sum? I'm not sure, but this is it. (p.215)

"This is the sort of farm machinery I like: never needs its oil changed, appreciates over time, and when you're done with it you eat it." (p.217)

But the cliche that kept banging around in my head was "happy as a pig in shit." Buried clear to their butts in composting manure, a bobbling sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails, these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen. (p.217-218)

"Learned helplessness" is the pyschological term, and it's not uncommon in CAFOs, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. It's not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig would get depressed under these circumstances, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Tail docking is the USDA's recommended solution to the porcine "vice" of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most -- but not quite -- of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail biting so much as to render it even more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it's not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency. (p.218)

"Part of the problem is, you've got a lot of D students left on the farm today," Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. "The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There's been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the arm and put them to work in Dilbert's cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems." This isn't just the farmer's problem, either. "It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons." (p.220-221)

At Polyface no one ever told me not to touch the animals, or asked me to put on a biohazard suite before going into the brooder house. The reason I had to wear one at Petaluma Poultry is because that system -- a monoculture of chickens raised in close confinement -- is inherently precarious, and the organic rules' prohibition on antibiotics puts it at a serious disadvantage. Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn't easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Indeed, that's why these chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing. Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back. (p.221)

So the carbon from the woodlots feeds the fields, finding its way into the grass and, from there, into the beef. Which it turns out is not only grass fed but tree fed as well. (p.224)

The fact that Polyface can prove its chickens have much lower bacteria counts than supermarket chickens (Salatin's had them both tested by an independent lab) doesn't cut any mustard with the inspectors, either. USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don't set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.) (p.229)

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling. (p.233)

Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface's -- if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls -- the cruely, the carelessness, the filth -- would simply have to stop. (p.235)

Joel is convinced "clean food" could compete with supermarket food if the government would exempt farmers from the thicket of regulations that prohibit them from processing and selling meat from the farm. For him, regulation is the single biggest impediment to building a viable local food chain, and what's at stake is our liberty, nothing less." ... He believes "freedom of food" -- the freedom to buy a pork chop from the farmer who raised the hog -- should be a constitutional right. (p.236)

Having seen what happened to last year's pile, and all the piles before that, Joel can see the future of this one in a way I can't, its promise to transubstantiate this mass of blood and guts and feathers into a particularly rich, cakey black compost, improbably sweet-smelling stuff that, by spring, will be ready for him to spread onto the pastures and turn back into grass. (p.238)

They were paying a premium over supermarket prices for Polyface food, and in many cases driving more than an hour over a daunting (though gorgeous) tangle of county roads to come get it. But no one would every mistake these people for the well-heeled urban foodies generally thought to be the market for organic or artisanal food. (p.241)

It's true that cheap industrial food is heavily subsidized in many ways such that its price in the supermarket does not reflect its real cost. But until the rules that govern our food system change, organic or sustainable food is going to cost more at the register, more than some people can afford. ... There are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to ... So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority? (p.243)

"Why is it that we exempt food, of all things, from that rule? Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true. But it's downright un-American to suggest that one egg might be nutritionally superior to another." Joel recited the slogan of his local supermarket chain: "'We pile it high and sell it cheap.' What other business would ever sell its products that way?" (p.244)

Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring -- to the carelessness of both producers and consumers. (p.245)

When I asked how a place like New York City fit into his vision of a local food economy he startled me with his answer: "Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?" ... Though when I pressed him, pointing out that New York City, den of pestilence and iniquity though it might be, was probably here to stay and would need to eat, he allowed that farmer's markets and CSAs -- "community supported agriculture", schemes in which customers "subscribe" to a farm, paying a few hundred dollars at the start of the growing season in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the summer -- might be a good way for urbanites to connect with distant farmers. (p.245)

Bev was nearing the end of his financial rope while the USDA dilly-dallied on the approvals he needed to open. Yet when he'd finally secured the necessary permits, hired a crew, and begun killing animals, the USDA abruptly pulled its inspector, effectively shutting him down. They explained that Bev wasn't processing enough animals fast enough to justify the inspector's time -- in other words, he wasn't sufficiently industrial, which of course was precisely the point of the whole venture. I realized Joel had wanted me to see Bev's predicament as proof of his contention that the government is putting obstacles in the path of an alternative system. (p.246)

Joel was even higher on metropolitan buying clubs, a scheme with which I was not familiar. A group of families gets together to place a big order once or twice a month; a lead person organizes everything, and offers her home as a pickup site, usually in exchange for free product. The size of the order makes it worth the farmer's while to deliver. (p.248)

"The biggest problem with alternative agriculture today," Nation writes, "is that it seeks to incorporate bits and pieces of the industrial model and bits and pieces of the artisanal model. This will not work. In the middle of the road, you get the worst of both worlds." (p.249-250)

But for local food chains to succeed, people will have to relearn what it means to eat according to the seasons. This is especially true of pasured animals, which can be harvested only after they've had several months on rapidly growing grass. Feeding animals corn in CAFOs has accustomed us to a year-round supply of fresh meats, many of which we forget were once eaten as seasonally as tomatoes or sweet corn: People would eat most of their beef and pork in late fall or winter, when the animals were fat, and eat chicken in the summer. (p.253)

This informal alliance of small farmers and local chefs is something you find in many cities these days. ... Chefs like Waters have also done much to educate the public about the virtues of local agriculture, the pleasures of eating by the season, and the superior qualities of exceptionally fresh food grown with care and without chemicals. (p.254)

Why should food, of all things, be the linchpin of this rebellion? Perhaps because food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity. ... Indeed, the most powerful protests against globalization to date have all revolved around food: I'm thinking of the movement against genetically modified crops, the campaign against patented seeds in India, and Slow Food, the Italian-born international movement that seeks to defend traditional food cultures against the global tide of homogenization. (p.255)

Of course the problems of our food system are very different -- if anything, it produces too much food, not too little, or too much of the wrong food. But there's no question that it is failing many consumers and producers, which is why they are finding creative ways around it. (p.257)

Today the total economy, astounding in its ability to absorb every challenge, is well on its way to transforming organic from a reform movement into an industry -- another flavor in the global supermarket. It took capitalism less than a quarter century to turn even something as ephemeral as bagged salads of cut and washed organic mesclun, of all things, into a cheap international commodity retailed in a new organic supermarket. Whether this is a good or bad thing people will disagree. (p.257)

By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as new agriculture -- new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. (p.257)

All of which is to say that a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore. (p.259)

Deciding whether that future should more closely resemble Joel's radically local vision or Whole Foods' industrial organic matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside. We may need a great many different alternative food chains, organic and local, biodynamic and slow, and others yet undreamed. As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplace, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket. The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock. The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails -- when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away -- we'll still have a way to feed ourselves. (p.260-261)

The yolks were a gorgeous carroty shade of orange and they seem to possess an unusual integrity: separating them from the whites was a cinch. ... I could see why pastry chefs in Charlotesville swore by Polyface eggs: What Joel had called their "muscle tone" made baking with them a breeze. (p.265)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the large quanitities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh of the the animals that eat grass. ... As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat. (p.266-267)

One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seed of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. ... Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. As our diet -- and the diet of the animals we eat -- shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrouth by the industrialization of our food chain. (p.268)

Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on graint, we might actually be better off eating the beef. The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you're eating has itself eaten. (p.269)

[To the argument that] animals on factory farms have never known any other life. The rightist rightly points out that "animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this." The proper measure of their suffering, in other words, is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts. (p.310)

Egg operations are the worst, from everything I've read; I haven't managed to actually get into one of these places since journalists are unwelcome there. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they are bred for such swift and breast-heavy growth they can barely walk, at least don't spend their lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. (p.317)

From the point of view of the individual prey animal predation is a horror, but from the point of view of the group -- and of its gene pool -- it is indispensable. So whose point of view shall we favor? That of the individual bison or Bison? The pig or Pig? Much depends on how you choose to answer that question. (p.323)

But surely a species has interests -- in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat -- just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animals rights' exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in human nature? (p.323)

If American was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn't at all clear that the toal number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated cow crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished streaks for everyone. (p.326)

It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. (p.327)

Grandin told me that in cattle slaughter, "there is the pre-McDonald's era and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and day." We can only imagine what night must have been like. (p.329)

Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there's any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look. ... Such farms exist; so do a handful of small processing plants willing to let customers on the kill floor, including one -- Lorentz Meats, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota -- that is so confident of their treatment of animals that they have walled their abattoir in glass. (p.332-333)

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to and end -- for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve. (p.333)

A cynical person might say that cooking like this -- with ambition -- is really just another way of showing off, a form what might be called conspicuous production... No doubt there's an element of truth to this, but cooking is many other things too, and one them is a way to honor the group of people you have elected to call your guests. Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. (p.404)