Over the weekend I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book I highly recommend, both to those who, like me, are deeply interested in the social and cultural context of food production and consumption, and to those who up until now haven't spent much time thinking about the implications of the choices we, as a society and as individuals, make every time we go to the supermarket--or abjure it.
Pollan sets out to discover just where our food comes from, and to that end, he journeys to the cornfields of Iowa, a feedlot in Kansas, a farm in Virginia, a Whole Foods supermarket, "big organic" farms in the Northwest, and a California forest (where he hunts wild pig, of all things!), exploring how we, as consumers, engage with food and with nature. For, as Pollan says, "even the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."
But use petroleum we do, in our processing of food and in our raising of cattle. That will be the topic, I hope, of a future post (although my track record on promised future posts is dismal, at best). In fact, there are a number of questionable practices in the way most of our food is grown, and a number of questions we should be asking ourselves as we wolf down that Big Mac or buy that 79-cents-per-dozen carton of eggs. The questions Pollan raises can't always be answered unambiguously, and that's one of the things that make this book such a compelling read.
To take just one example, Pollan decides to read Peter Singer, the animal rights advocate who wrote the seminal Animal Liberation, just before his first foray into hunting. In both reading the book and in the experience of the hunt, he is anything but one-dimensional. He goes vegetarian for a few weeks, feeling that he can't properly judge the arguments he's reading if he's still behaving carnivorously. And then he goes out and shoots a pig.
While I admit that I couldn't read all of the hunting bits, I did appreciate Pollan's willingness to go to great lengths to "look." He says (and I agree completely) that most of us don't want to look at where our food comes from, how it is raised, the costs that standard agricultural methods exact from the environment and human health, the ways animals are treated in a system that views them as nothing more than production units, and so on. Instead, we cultivate a willful blindness, for to acknowledge such things would make us conscious. And this is exactly what Pollan wants to do: to eat consciously, refusing to look away. Thus he finds himself slaughtering chickens in Virginia (something he knew was coming, dreaded, but felt he had to do) and killing a pig in California (feeling first euphoria, and then shame).
He doesn't ask any of that of his readers, but the entire book is a call to consciousness and a challenge that we omnivores refuse to be ignorant about our food and, instead, come to understand that when we eat, we are connecting in a most basic way with nature. That Big Mac was once a cow. The cow fed on plants (however transformed) that, in turn, got their energy from the sun (but also, in modern agriculture, from fossil fuels as well). Just as much, we need to understand that our food is usually altered in substantial ways by the human practices and processes that most items in the American diet undergo, and which place a distance between us and our food.
Understanding that, seeing the factory-farming practices that so damage animals, soil, water, and air, should make some of Pollan's readers think about their food choices--and their buying habits. That's a possibility that will put off some potential readers, perhaps, and that's too bad. Not only will they miss a terrific book by an engaging, and engaged, writer; they will also be turning down an invitation to understand and appreciate a little better our human relationship to the natural world and the plants and animals with which we share it.
[cross-posted at View from the Loft]
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