I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I think I’m going to become a vegetarian. The overarching task of the book is to trace 4 meals from their beginnings on the farm (or in the wild) to the dinner table, the meals being (1) a McDonald’s lunch, (2) an industrial organic meal made from ingredients from Whole Foods Market, (3) a ”sustainable” organic meal freshly slaughtered on a small family farm in Virginia, and (4) a meal made entirely from ingredients he hunted and gathered himself.
The first part of the book is a story about corn, how it is overproduced in this country, how the government subsidizes its overproduction, how that excess supply leads to falling prices, which in turn leads farmers to supply still more corn to maintain income. (The economics of this is somewhat hazy to me, because according to Pollan, the government essentially pays farmers a fixed price per pound of corn, regardless of the market price. So the farmer always gets, say $1 a pound, with the government making up the different between $1 and the market price. So why market prices effect corn farmers is something of a mystery, since under this arrangement it should only effect the cost to the government, although perhaps over time the government sets its fixed price lower and lower — this is unclear though.)
The government’s current policy of encouraging overproduction began in the early 1970s, when the government actually paid farmers to restrict output, to protect the fertility of land and because there was only a fixed amount of corn humans could actually consume. But at some point food prices skyrocketed, and Nixon — worried about the consequences of that for the 1972 campaign — acting through his agriculture secretary, reversed course, paid farmers to step up production and prices fell. Ever since, however, we’ve continued to encourage more and more production, and all that product needed someplace to go.
As a result, corn is in everything now — high fructose corn syrup began to replace sugar cane, and most notably corn is used to feed beef cows. A corn diet allows them to grow fat quicker, reducing the time from birth to slaughter, and it also allows large slaughterhouses to warehouse many more cows, since there is no need for them to have room to graze grass. The problem is that cows aren’t made to eat corn. They are exclusively evolved to eat grass, as they have a number of stomachs and bacteria in the stomaches that can digest the cellulose in grass to something the cow’s body can make use of. Unlike humans, a cow’s stomach is naturally at a pH of around 7, to allows those special bacteria to live. Feed a cow corn, and it acidifies the stomach, causing the cow a number of painful health problems, the most notable of which is liver failure. Industry counters this by preemptively feeding the cows antibiotics and high nitrogen diets. The result is a calculation where cows get fat enough quickly enough that they can be killed for meat before they die of liver failure or some other disease. Apparently some studies estimate that 25-50% of beef cows have severe liver problems at death. And it is a sickness that is painful to the cow.
In the course of the industrial organic meal, there is a long section discussing the birth of the organic movement among hippies in the 60s and 70s. Over time, there became a larger demand for organic food, which led to the growth of chains like Whole Foods — but the problem is that with increased nationwide demand came the need for large manufacturing facilities, trucks to transport the food everywhere, etc. The upshot of all this is that so-called “organic” food today is hardly what one would imagine from the pictures of the packages. “Organic” chickens are required by federal law to have “access to pasture,” but for the first five weeks of their lives, growers can’t let them out in the open for fear they’ll catch a disease, then from weeks 5-7 they are housed in essentially three wall warehouses where they look out into a beautiful open air lawn and may be free to move about in it but are to scared to venture out into it. At week 7 they are killed. The “organic” label comes mostly from the fact that they are fed organic grain rather than the fact they have some natural ability to wander about in the open air.
This is an improvement over industrial chickens, whose beaks are usually pried off their faces to prevent them from pecking at one another. They are stored 10,000 to a fenced warehouse, so tightly that they naturally attack one another — were they to be successful, they would damage each other’s meat, making it less marketable. Production of eggs is no more pleasant. Even free range chickens are stored 6 to 8 in a tiny cage, and many become so agitated they brush up against the walls: 10% scratch themselves to death, which is fine because this percentage of lost animals is built into the suppliers’ profit margins. And if the birds become too unruly, another solution is to deprive them of all exposure to light and open air, which triggers them to lay one last batch of eggs before they die.
Perhaps pigs are the ones who have it worst because they are more intelligent than the other animals, and so more likely to understand and feel the pain inflicted upon them. Pigs are also stored in close confines, and each has its tail cut most of the way off when very young, because the pigs bite at each other’s tails because they are so upset at being in such close proximity to one another. Biting can cause infection, so to prevent it, the tails are cut. They are not cut all the way off, however, because the supplier wants to leave enough on so that it will be incredibly painful for a pig to be bitten on the tail, causing it to fight back and prevent future biting. If the whole tail were left on, it would not be very painful, and the pigs are so depressed from their confinement, that they would not put up the energy to fight off the aggressor.
But the description of these conditions is not the main focus of the book, they are just mentioned as one part of what it takes for meat to end up on our plates.
I’d have to say that it’s a pretty balanced book. At points Pollan is demonstrably uncomfortable with eating meat (even becoming a temporary vegetarian), but he never reveals how things turn out for him: where he’s staying vegetarian or not. He also is somewhat sympathetic to the industrial organic chains like Whole Foods. It is clear that these places are dominated by 2 or 3 major suppliers, that the conditions of the meat those suppliers raise isn’t much better than mainstream industrial suppliers. But they do produce less pollution, tend to treat their workers better, etc. So while it’s far from a utopia, it is progress.
A theme that resonates with me is how are industrial food system works against nature. It is more efficient to produce a ton of cows in one place, a ton of corn in another, a ton of chickens in another, but this segregation disrupts a well-evolved beautiful ecosystem. In earlier times, everything was raised together on the farm — cow manure fertilized the fields, chickens walked along and distributed the manure equally across the entire landscape, as well as moving seeds to help regrow the grass. It was all a very self-contained cycle. Now, cows are stored by themselves, are fed high nitrogen diets, producing piles of environmentally manure that infects rivers and streams, rather than fertilizing the open pasture (which are nowhere to be found near the slaughterhouse).
There is more. We’ve been trained to expect all types of meat and produce year-round. This results in having to fly it in from exotic places. Pollan tracks how many calories of fossil fuel are needed to bring a given calorie of food energy to our plates (depending on the source of food energy), and Whole Foods is actually a big offender, consuming absurdly high amounts of greenhouse producing gases to bring us off-season asparagus.
One last interesting point from the book — he talks about how the demand for food is inelastic, how America has, essentially, a fixed amount of food each person can consume. As prices drop, food companies need to think of creative ways to increase gross profits, and one way is food processing. By processing foods, they are “adding value,” and thus appropriating a great percentage of each dollar spend on food to themselves (and away from the farmer), and increasing the amount of money they can get us to spend on food. Processed foods tends to be worse for us, have more calories, etc, but there’s a strong incentive for companies to push these foods since they increase profits.
So on to why I’m going to become a vegetarian. I don’t think eating animals per se is wrong. Indeed, humans are evolved to be omnivores, our teeth are made to cut meat, they contain proteins we need to survive. But I think the way in which the modern food industry treats animals makes it wrong to partake in that system. Animals are treated like any other widget — our slaughterhouses are designed to produce as much meat as possible as quickly as possible, and the consequences to the feelings of animals be damned. I guess this should come as no surprise. That’s generally what we want the free market to do — to encourage economies of scale and increase efficiency, allowing consumers access to a greater choice of products at lower and lower prices. But this model really is unacceptable when animals are involved, because these creatures feel pain, and the way we’re treating them is barbaric.
Were there a way to ensure that each piece of meat I eat came from a humanely raised animal, it would be ok to continue as a meat eater. But there’s really no way to tell. Labeling are so mushy, that you have no idea what you’re getting, and most companies have a vested interest in discouraging transparency, since consumers are bound to disapprove of what they see if the information is available to them.
Vegetarianism also seems a unique way to take a stand against the system. There are very few matters of public importance that the individual can do much about. I hate the war in Iraq, but I have no real ability to stop it. I can vote against Bush, I can join a protest, but I can’t really opt out of the system. I pay taxes to the U.S. government, a large portion of which wind up in the Defense Budget, so I’m contributing to something I think is an evil. I’m not going to up and move to Europe, but short of that I’m complicit in the wrong.
Diet is one thing that the individual has a unique level of control over. It is true that if I stop eating meat, slaughterhouses aren’t suddenly going to shut down or release all their animals into green pastures. But at least I won’t be funding the system; at least I won’t be supporting something I think is morally wrong, complicit in industry’s debasement of nature. It won’t change the world, but it’s notably better than doing nothing, and also more likely to have an impact than many other forms of protest.
There are painful line drawing problems though. Beef, chicken, pig, and turkey clearly must go. The industrial harvest of fish is on the rise (Pollan mentions that salmon farmers are now teaching the fish to eat corn — yuck), but conditions for them are probably not as bad as for other animals. Eggs should be out as well, given the horrible cruelty caged chickens endure, but eggs wind up in some many things that that could be a hard one to police. Does that mean I can never have another pancake because there’s an egg in the batter? Do biscuits contain eggs? Cake? (I’m sure there are a million other things that contain eggs that I haven’t the faintest clue do.) And then there’s dairy. While the book doesn’t touch this one in much detail, it doesn’t much extrapolation to understand that the lives of dairy cows must be pretty miserable too.
And I was talking this over with Adam the other day, and he made the valid point that most vegetables are harvested by underpaid migrant workers. So even if I were the strictest vegan, would I be contributing to their degradation? (The counterargument, I suppose, is that they are happy to have the work, and that maybe a few of them can use it to make better lives for their children, etc. Immigrants have to start working somewhere.)
But the inherent arbitrariness of line drawing is not a reason to refuse to draw any line at all, to continue to eat anything as if I’d never read this book. I think for now a fair course is to stop eating beef, chicken, pigs, and turkey, to stop eating plain eggs (omelets, hard boiled eggs, etc) but continue eating things that incidentally contain egg as an ingredient — although not go out of my way to eat them. And to still eat dairy. I’ll continue thinking about whether to eat fish, but will temporarily stop eating fish pending more information. I think that arrangement allows me to cut out a significant amount of food derived from cruelty to animals while being practical enough to not reduce myself to eating nothing but fruit, vegetables, and nuts. (Were I do try that, I’d probably fall of the wagon altogether.)
Two loose ends. First, I think the New York Times review of Pollan’s book is flawed for a number of reasons. For one thing, the reviewer complains that Pollan isn’t more prescriptive about solutions to reform our industrialized food system. But I think this misses his point, which is that there’s not a whole lot we can DO about the system other than to educate people as to how food is produced and let them make their own decision to complain about it or otherwise opt out. As it is, the market pushes things in the direction we are going precisely because consumers lack information. Although, if there’s one solution you can take from the book, it is that the government needs to rethink its farm policy, a point Pollan makes more explicitly in a later NY Times article of his own. For another thing, I think the review unnecessarily takes Pollan to task for being too “nice,” like for being something of an apologist for big industrial organic companies, but this is precisely why his book is trustworthy. He doesn’t have an agenda necessarily — he’s TRYING to be fair, and does a decent job of it. Not everything is black and white. Also, I don’t think the sustainable organic farmer is necessarily the “hero” of the book — indeed, elsewhere Pollan acknowledges that this kind of food production is probably impractical as a nationwide solution, and mentions that the farmer is overly suspicious of big cities.
Second, and back to my newly adopted vegetarianism, I really LIKE meat. I don’t want to never have another steak again. To the extent I give up fish permanently, I will really miss sushi! I don’t know if this will stick forever, or even for more than a couple months, but I think it’s worth a try.
Recent Comments