Summary and Analysis of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals 1

Based on the Book by Michael Pollan

• Publisher: Worth Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781504044844
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Ecologia

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of The Omnivore's Dilemma tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Michael Pollan's book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of The Omnivore's Dilemma includes:

• Historical context
• Chapter-by-chapter summaries
• Profiles of the main characters
• Detailed timeline of events
• Important quotes
• Fascinating trivia
• Glossary of terms
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

About The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan: In the perennial bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma, acclaimed journalist Michael Pollan not only reports back from the frontlines of America's dysfunctional food industry, but gets down and dirty with the scrappy farmers and foragers who have decided to "opt out" of the industrial food chain. Informative, entertaining, and often alarming, The Omnivore's Dilemma examines dietary trends, the origins of what we eat, and the impact of our food choices on the environment and our health, and sheds desperately needed light on the saying "you are what you eat." The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Summary

Introduction: Our National Eating Disorder

Pollan sets out to answer a basic question: What should we have for dinner? But the question only seems simple. To answer it, we must sort through massive amounts of conflicting information and avoid countless products whose origins and ingredients are deliberately obscured.

How did we arrive at this place? Pollan pins the blame on “our national eating disorder,” and points to the recent demonization of wholesome, carbohydrate-rich foods, such as bread and pasta, as a primary example of the problem. Part of the confusion, he argues, stems from the fact that America is composed of so many different cultures and ethnicities. As a result, there is no “deeply rooted” food culture for Americans to draw on. People in France, Italy, Spain, and Japan—all wealthy industrialized countries with old food traditions—don’t have this problem.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an attempt to provide clarity. The book is driven by the premise “that like every other creature on earth, humans take part in a food chain, and our place in that food chain, or web, determines to a considerable extent what kind of creature we are.” Pollan identifies three principle food chains of modern America: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. In each of the book’s three parts, he follows one of these chains from beginning to end, from plant to meal, in an effort to understand the relationship between what we eat and how we interact with the natural world.

Need to Know: Research psychologist Paul Rozin first used the phrase “omnivore’s dilemma” 40 years ago, but the concept appears in the works of 18th-century writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Throughout human history, the tension between our ability to eat anything nature has to offer and our awareness that some of those things will sicken or kill us has always created anxiety.

I

INDUSTRIAL: CORN

One: The Plant

Corn’s Conquest

Most people are unaware of the dominant and remarkable role that corn plays in the modern American food system. Industrially grown corn feeds beef cattle, chickens, dairy cows, and fish, and serves as the basis for an untold number of sweeteners and additives included in supermarket staples, such as mayonnaise, Coca-Cola, and salad dressing. All in all, byproducts of industrial corn can be found in approximately a quarter of the products in the typical American grocery store.

Corn’s preeminence is based on its biology and American history. Most plants during photosynthesis create compounds that have three carbon atoms. Corn, however, makes compounds with a fourth carbon atom, giving the plant an advantage in environments with high temperatures and scarce water. Corn is amazingly well-suited to the North American climate: In New England it saved the colonists after their wheat harvests failed, to central Mexico, where corn’s ancestor, Zea mays, is believed to have originated. It’s also an incredibly versatile grain. It can be eaten off the cob, turned into alcohol, ground into flour, and used as a commodity—corn was both the currency traders used to buy slaves in Africa and the food the slaves ate during their passage to America.

Corn has benefitted enormously from the relationship with man. The plant’s unique biology makes it very difficult for it to reproduce on its own. (Female organs are contained inside the closed husk, which makes self-fertilization and wind-pollination, or “corn sex,” as the author puts it, challenging.) Enter humans and their opposable, husk-opening thumbs. By opening up the husk and allowing the (male) tassel to mate with the flowers contained in the ear, we make it much easier for corn to reproduce. Eventually, humans began deliberately mating desirable corn plants together; this hybridization led to greater corn growth and success—and greater human reliance on the plant. Thus began the symbiotic relationship that has continued to this day.

Need to Know: Descendants of the Maya in Mexico refer to themselves as “the corn people” because the plant makes up such a large part of their diet, but recent research identifying carbon isotopes in human tissue reveals that modern Americans have more corn in them than their Mexican counterparts. According to one biologist, “when you look at the isotope ratios, we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.”

Two: The Farm

Pollan begins his dive into the industrial food revolution by going directly to its modern incarnation: a corn farm in Iowa. George Naylor is a curmudgeonly but colorful third-generation farmer. When Naylor’s grandfather began farming the land in 1919, he raised a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and animals (and some corn) on 320 acres. At the time, approximately one out of every four Americans worked on a farm. Fast forward to today, when grandson George—one of the less than two million farmers left in the United States—grows nothing but corn and soybeans on 470 acres. For all of his hard work, Naylor is barely scraping by, relying in part on his wife’s office salary. Pollan wants to know: how did this happen?

He finds two main causes. The first is a bit paradoxical: efficiency. In the 1920s, farmers averaged around 20 bushels of corn per acre; thanks to advances in seed breeding and the development of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, some years Naylor gets 200. Over the years, the prospect of such a big harvest was too enticing to pass up, and the Naylor family began planting more and more corn on its property. The same goes for most of the other farmers in Iowa and neighboring states: livestock fences were pulled up, and fruit and vegetable plots and pastures became cornfields. An agricultural state with some of the richest soil in the world, Iowa nevertheless imports roughly 80% of its food.

The second major cause is government policy. New Deal farm programs set a target price for commodities such as corn—whenever overproduction caused the market price to drop below that target, farmers could take a government loan in exchange for storing their corn until prices recovered. This had the effect of keeping supply (and thus prices) relatively stable. During the Nixon administration, however, the support system was restructured. Under the direction of Secretary of Agriculture Earl “Rusty” Butz, the government scrapped the loan program and started paying the difference between target and market prices directly to farmers. The new subsidies effectively encouraged farmers to overproduce, which contributed to a steady decline in corn prices—which was the goal all along. Butz believed that large farms concerned chiefly with “agribusiness” would both contribute to national food security and make US corn more competitive in overseas markets. Family farms collapsed or were consolidated into huge, industrial operations growing one or two crops. Our national glut of corn is the result, explains Naylor: “Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more.”

Need to Know: Fritz Haber’s invention of synthetic nitrogen exponentially increased crop yields and revolutionized farming. Haber won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1920, but has fallen into obscurity due to his connection to the German effort in World War I. He directed the...