The Omnivore's Dilemma

WARNING: LONG AND SEMI-POLITICAL POST AHEAD!!

I'm about halfway through a book called the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen. I was going to post my general thoughts on it when I was done, but it turns out that the book is far too interesting to leave it at that. The book is about food, what we eat, why we eat it and some of the potential consequences. I'm going to try to distill what I've learned so far into short, easy to understand thoughts.

Some time in the first world war a German scientist (Haber) trying to build bombs without the need from nitrates from Chile developed a way to artificially fix nitrogen, and make explosives artificially. Fixing nitrogen is something that has to happen for the nitrogen to be useful to plants growing in the soil. Usually animal feces or some kinds of plants do this in nature, which is why crops get cycled in tradiational agriculture. Anyway, this was a process by which a farmer could continuously grow the same thing on the same land.

Some time either just pre or just post cold war there was a depression and subsequent rise in the price of corn. As the effects of this rippled through the economy the government stepped in and began to stabilize, and then subsidize corn prices. The results of this led to the production of corn and nothing but corn (and some soybeans) by most farms in America's breadbasket, because you were guarenteed money by corn. The variety of corn produced by these Iowa cornfields isn't edible, it's just really starchy and provides the most calorie per square foot of any other grain or grass, that's why the grow it as opposed to other things.

So there's a big corn surplus that the food industry needed to find something to do with, so they started breaking it down and making high fructose corn syrup, glucose, ethanol, xanthan gum, corn starch, and animal feed.

This is where it gets a little wierd and nasty in my estimation. A steer's lifespan is 1200 lbs, slaughter weight. The natural diet of cattle is grass, they're rumen's, which means they can break down and digest the sugars in grass, corn is actually poisonous to them. Corn, as mentioned above in unparalleled in it's calorie density, so cows are brought up to weight with a diet of mostly corn and antibiotics as well as feed additives (inculding other cow bits). The idea being to get the cow fat enough to slaughter before it get's too sick.

What's the point and who cares you may ask fairly enough, if it's got protein, carbohydrates and fat, the macronutrients, then you're set. The thing is: you are what you eat, and you are what you eat eats too. Our meat eats corn, our soda is 100% corn, most preservatives we use in food come from corn. This leaves our diets remarkably lacking in most everything but corn, there's little to no 'biodiversity' in our diets.

Organic farming helps a little bit in this, since organic meats eat organic food (food not fetilized by Haber-ized nitrates, or with pesticides used on them). Pesticides and other ways we 'help' plants make them weak and low on all the vitamins and minerals that make plants good for us. Anyway, when an organically raised steer eats his food, he's getting a better deal in terms of nutrients than standarly raised steer. There's a lot more to say on this, but I don't want to go on too long.

The next bit is something that Al Gore spoke to a little while ago and was roundly ridiculed for, which is that eating meat contributes more to global warming than driving. Even if you don't believe in man-made global warming a reasonable person would certainly cede that America needs to get off foreign oil, or at least help the sky to be less brown. The reason I bring this up is 20% or the fuel used in the US is used to get food from one place to another, that's a lot. Certainly it takes a lot of fuel to get corn from silos in Iowa to feed-lots in Kansas, and meat from Kansas to most of the midwest, or California, where some of it ends up.

I don't want to fault people for what they eat, if the food is available and it tastes good to them and that's what they want to eat then that's their right. I'm certainly not going to start a new People's Park and stick it to the man, but the half of this book I've read so far has put a number of stones in my shoes in regards to how I eat. I curious now about buying local foods, and buying organic foods, not to mention trying some grass-fed beef. Anyway, buy the book and read the book, it's facinating.