Thanks for the free lead-in, Cube_rat!cube_rat said:The movie, Super Size resulted in my cessation in eating fast foods. Shortly after seeing the movie, I read Fast Food Nation and never ate beef again.
If Eric Schlosser doesn't thoroughly gross you out with his abattoir tour, then Michael Pollan will make you feel horribly guilty about your supermarket meat consumption. However his solution isn't strictly vegan but rather a more humane version of the carnivore's diet (oxymoronic, I know, but lemme explain).
First, the author is way too impressed with his own prose (I'm jealous). Anyone who invokes Linnaeus as an adverb is probably alienating his customers-- but he does enjoy nature, he teaches journalism at Berkely, and this is his fourth book. However slogging through his highfalutin flights of fantasy is worth it for the factoids and his insights.
Second, the omnivore's dilemma is: "What's for dinner?" Pollan claims that only Americans, the great melting pot of immigrant cuisine, could be so dysfunctional about food. Because we imported all our food "traditions" and because McSupermarkets offer us way too many choices, we've effectively developed a national eating disorder. We are also overwhelmingly carnivores, but most of us just feel guilty about it without actually changing our behavior.
Finally, Pollan tours us through several different ways of getting dinner. He starts with corn which, unbelievably, is the biggest component of today's cuisine. Government policies have encouraged such huge corn overproduction that farmers can't make a living without subsidies. Corn that costs about $2.50/bushel to grow (U of Iowa) is only getting $1.45 at the elevator. Monolithic monoculture is stripping the prairie soils, encouraging fertilizer runoff pollution, and contributing to a fishkill area in the Gulf of Mexico known as "the Dead Zone". The corn surplus is choking American agriculture, and now 60% of the crop ends up on the feedlot. It turns out that cows are not corn eaters by nature so a lot of science, medical technology, and engineering goes into fattening cattle for slaughter. The results may be cheap but they are not pretty.
Pollan tracks corn's progress by buying a cow, paying a rancher to raise it, and visiting his cow while it's fattened at the feedlot. After he witnesses its butchering he visits a corn-processing plant and lists all of the products derived from its kernels. He tells the tale of McDonald's "super size" campaign (Ray Kroc didn't believe it would ever work) and gives us a guided tour of a fast food meal-- a four-ounce burger that required a cow to process two pounds of corn, six chicken nuggets requiring another half-pound of corn, and a 32-ounce soda containing 86 grams of high-fructose corn syrup refined from a third of a pound of corn. He has a scientist run the meal through a mass spectrometer to measure the sources of its carbon. The soda's carbon is 100% corn, the milk shake 78%, the salad dressing 65% (!), and even the french fries 23%. Their "typical" family fast-food meal for three was 4500 calories-- and that includes the Cobb salad! They eat it on the highway at 55 MPH since 19% of American meals are eaten in the car. Of course the car's engine is burning fuel partly composed of ethanol, another corn derivative.
But there's still hope for carnivores at Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. He's restored 500 acres of eroded Shenandoah wasteland by reforestation and by planting... grass. His system of admittedly complex grazing rotation on 100 acres supports 20 tons of beef, 15 tons of pork, 10,000 broiling chickens, 1200 turkeys, 1000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen eggs per year. He does it without fertilizer (other than compost) and without much of the heavy machinery used on industrial monoculture farms. In fact their farm is so self-sufficient that the only thing he buys at the store is toilet paper and diesel fuel. People drive over 150 miles each way to buy Salatin's chickens, and his eggs are snapped up by local chefs as fast as the hens can produce them. Salatin's system of grazing cows one day, then chickens the next day on the same pasture, and the innovative fencing & henhouses he uses, is the way Jefferson meant American farmers to make their living. Their sustainable-farm products are roughly 50%-100% more expensive but they're not destroying the topsoil, rivers, & Gulf to give us cheap corn. Polyface's eggs are more expensive than Safeway's 99 cents/dozen, but cheaper than Whole Foods' $3.59 organic eggs. Pollan surveys the rest of the American organic agricultural system and prepares a meal from Polyface Farms supplies.
The last part of the book is Pollan's experience of preparing a meal that he gathers entirely by himself, beginning with shooting a wild boar and foraging for mushrooms. You Bay Area people sure do live in an interesting part of the world...
If you started this book as a carnivore then you'll finish it as one, but Pollan makes you think about the crap that we're putting into our bodies under the guise of cheap, plentiful nutrition, and the damage that we're doing to the environment to invisibly subsidize our lifestyle.
I think I'm going to take care of our fruit trees after all, and maybe someday I'll figure out how to turn the lawn into an efficiently-irrigated raised-bed veggie garden. I only eat steak a few times a year and ground beef a couple times a week. Schlosser didn't make me a vegan, but Pollan might get us to throttle back on even that...
