The Omnivore's Dilemma 1

Michael Pollan's book - The Omnivore's Dilemma - begins by pointing out the fact that as humans, we can eat whatever we want. Whereas many animals are forced by their biology to eat only a few things (for example, koala bears eat little more than eucalyptus leaves), humans can eat anything from tomatoes to chicken to Twinkies. And so Pollan sets out in this book to answer the question "What should we have for dinner?"

He tries to answer this question by looking at where our meals come from. The first meal that Pollan picks is the fast food meal. He easily could have picked any meal that you might grab out of the local grocery store's freezer (aka, processed foods), too, since most of them have a similar journey. If I had to sum up this portion of the book in two words, I'd have to pick the words "corn" and "oil."

Pollan spends about 100 pages talking about corn. That sounds boring but it really wasn't. Much of the corn story takes place on a small Iowa farm. Most of the corn grown in the U.S. really can't be eaten by humans. It is either fed to animals (which we then eat) or it is processed in to various chemicals and used to make all kinds of processed foods. Pollan writes that a 32 ounce container of soda that you might get at McDonald's contains 86 grams of high fructose corn syrup. That means a large portion of the soda you drink comes from the corn fields by way of a processing plant. Pollan estimated that when he, his wife and his kid went to McDonald's, the food they ordered required 6 pounds of corn. So, for example, besides the corn used to make the soda, the cow that his hamburger came from needed to eat 3.5 pounds of corn just to gain a half point of edible meat. In addition, many of the processed foods we eat from the supermarket are made from products of corn. Pollan list all kinds of chemicals (which are made from corn) that are in the foods we eat every day.

"So what?" you might ask. Does it matter that a lot of our diet originates from corn? Well, it depends. Pollan points out that in order to grow and process all the food his family ate in that fast food meal, 1.3 gallons of oil had to be used. (Interesting fact: The average item in your average grocery store has travelled an average of about 1500 miles to get where it is at. That's one reason food prices can go up when the price of gas goes up.) He also points out that the reason corn is so cheap is because we make too much of it. For many farmers it costs more to grow a bushel of corn than to sell one. But because the corn industry is so huge, the U.S. government offers subsidies to encourage farmers to keep planting it. Unfortunately, the way these subsidies are set up, they tend to discourage farmers from switching to other crops - essentially forcing many farmers to farm only corn (and soy beans). Pollan says that these types of government policies have turned us into a nation of koala people, with very little variety in our diets (since most things contain some variety of corn). And this lack of variety, Pollan argues, is also bad for our health. But I'll save that for another blog post.