"I am the Allower of my own Wellbeing"

A monthly newsletter written by Sherry Dell, PhD, CN

Volume 2, Issue 4
October, 2008

Farmer in Chief 

For a shorter overview of Michael Pollan's thinking on the state of food in America, read his open letter to the next president in the October 9, 2008 article, "Farmer in Chief," in the New York Times Magazine.

This article is a fabulous description of the issues facing those who would attempt to re-design the American Food Policy, including a thorough set of very specific recommendations on how to accomplish the job.

One of my favorite pieces of this article is Pollan's recommendation regarding the need to define the word "food."  Referring to soda pop, Pollan makes a point I've agreed with for a long time:  "We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind."

The Omnivore's Dillemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, published in 2006 by Michael Pollan is an extremely well written, well documented, and well thought examination of the current state of the source and status of American food.  It has had a profound effect on my own thinking by reminding me of all the gorey details of modern agricultural practices.  

For example, one of these details is the fact that 3/5 of all corn produced in America is used to feed livestock, which in the case of cattle is something akin to feeding humans with the plastic versions of fruits and vegetables we see in table top centerpieces .  Cattle are ruminants meant to eat grass, not corn.  They can handle some corn, but when they're fed a full-time diet of it, they suffer bloat, acidosis, diarrhea, ulcers, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system resulting in things like pneumonia, feedlot polio, etc.; in other words they are sick.  This is why feedlot animals must be fed so many antibiotics.  Come to think of it, feeding corn to cattle is more exactly like feeding fast food to humans.  We can technically survive the ingestion of empty calories, rancid fats, and super high volumes of sugar, but it makes us sick and we end up needing a lot of antibiotics to stay alive.

More gorey details:  the cattle raised in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are routinely fed the fat and blood products of their own species as well as feather meal and chicken litter (bedding, feces, and discarded feed of chickens), chicken meal, pig meal, etc.  Or how about the "manure lagoons" that the CAFO cattle stand, eat, and sleep in.

But I digress.  The omnivore's dilemma refers to the fact that humans are omnivores who can eat a huge variety of foods and survive. This is as opposed to an animal like the koala who is only able to eat eucalyptus leaves.  The dilemma is in identifying which of those foods will make us flourish and which of those foods will make us sick or kill us.  To demonstrate the omnivore's dilemma, Pollan tracks four different meals all the way from the origins of the food through to its serving as a meal.  

The first meal he studies was prepared by McDonald's and eaten in a moving car.  Pollan makes the point that it could also have been eaten at KFC or Pizza Hut or Applebee's, or prepared at home from ingredients bought at the grocery store.  This meal is representative of the industrial food chain that makes up by far the largest part of the American diet.

The industrial food chain is characterized by grains grown in fields without the benefit of crop rotation or natural animal fertilizers.  This means the grains must rely on petrochemical-based insecticides and fertilizers to survive.  The animals in this food chain are largely grown in CAFOs, relying predominantly on corn, hormones, and antibiotics to survive.  

One of Pollan's central points about the industrial meal is that it is based primarily on corn; which is a result of government food policy that subsidizes and fosters an enormous over-production of corn.  This huge amount of corn is in turn used to create cheaper food in the supermarket and at McDonald's.  The CAFOs are actually able to buy corn for less than it cost the farmers to raise it.  Corn and its fractionated corn molecules, then, are used to feed the animals we eat, but also to make alcohol, to make chicken nuggets and Big Macs, to make emulsifiers and nutraceuticals, to make "natural raspberry flavoring," but more than anything, it is used to make high-fructose corn syrup to satisfy the ever-growing demand of the American "sweet tooth.".

To make the point of how corn is dominating the industrial food chain, Pollan asked the scientists at UC Berkeley to use the technology of the mass spectrometer to analyze Pollan's McDonald's meal to reveal the identity of the atoms in each individual food item.  And this is shocking:  the percentage of corn atoms in a soda is 100%, in a milk shake, 78%, in salad dressing 65%, in chicken nuggets, 56%, in a cheesburger 52%, and in french fries 23%.  As Pollan says, " what in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater.  But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn's koala."

The ingredients of the other three meals Pollan discusses at length include those from the industrially produced organic food that is represented by stores such as Whole Foods, the local food movement typified by the small, artisan farms, and finally, the food he was able to procure for himself through hunting and foraging.  The contrasts are fascinating.  I was especially saddened to learn how much Whole Foods suppliers have become industrialized and how negatively that change has effected the quality of their food.

Having been raised by a mother that kept a large garden and a father who was a life-long farmer and having always grown or wildcrafted food and medicines myself, I've always found the grocery store food sorely wanting.  There is a depth of relationship that comes from preparing the soil, planting the seeds, tending and harvesting food that is reflected in the quality of the results.  But more than the dangers of mutant bacteria evolving from the overuse of antibiotics in feedlots, more than the rampant increase in diabetes and obesity, and more than the heartbreaking mistreatment of animals, this loss of relationship with our source of life looms largest in repercussions of the last 30 years of American Food Policy.  Reading The Omnivore's Dilemma is a great tool for reflecting on your own relationship with food.  And your trip through the grocery store will never be the same.