No one book has ever had a more profound impact upon my daily life than The Omnivore's Dilemma. If that makes me an insufferable snob, well, fine. I'll plead guilty to the charge and happily serve my sentence. But I challenge anyone to read this book and come away unmoved, not only by the awful plight of the animals ground up by Big Agro, but by the lengths to which modern, processed food has been debased almost to the level of trash. But with all this said, the greatest virtue of Mr. Pollan's revelatory book is the attitude with which he approaches his controversial subject. It's clear that, to the extent anyone can, he has not ventured out with intellectual blinders on. In fact, though he arrives at many harsh conclusions about the state of modern food, he does not have a ready solution to the problem. There's an honesty here, the honesty of a researcher, not a proselytizer, and it is this which allows us all to take Mr. Pollan's work seriously and not dismiss it as just another flailing, wailing piece about modern food and its state of disrepute.
Like The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma is organized around a core principle, in this case, the creation of a home-grown, home-cooked meal. Mr. Pollan goes to admirable, and sometimes disturbing lengths, to trace the supply chain of each food in his meal back to its source. And it is these journeys with which The Omnivore's Dilemma is principally concerned. Though other foods are touched on, Mr. Pollan devotes a majority of his time to the consequences of corn which has, in the form of various sirups and compounds, found its way into almost every kind of processed food thanks to a massive overabundance of corn emerging from the American midwest. America has traditionally grown so much corn that it has been necessary for various presidential administrations to pay farmers to grow other crops, and to create for them a kind of grain exchange to help keep prices from crashing. When these forms of compensation collapsed in the 1970s, farmers were locked into a ruinous cycle in which they had to produce corn to financially survive. And that corn went to big Agro which gave it to scientists to create new sugars to sweeten the next generation of packaged foods and juices.
Cows too are impacted by the overabundance of corn. When a cow is fed corn, the cow fattens, increasing the yield of beef per beast. All this without any consideration for how unnatural a food product corn is for a cow, or how damaging it is to humans to consume so much saturated fat.
So what's the solution? Mr. Pollan endeavors to find out. He interviews indebted farmers who argue that the government should financially encourage them to grow crops other than corn. He travels to, and even works on, self-sufficient animal farms where nothing is wasted and each animal is killed by a human being and not a machine. But after all the legwork, it's unclear as to whether or not there's a workable solution to processed food, or whether this is nothing more than a liberal's hand-wringing over an unavoidable consequence of living in a world that has to feed seven billion people.
I cannot more highly recommend this book to anyone interested in food and its composition. The Omnivore's Dilemma is, at times, sobering, scary and disgusting, but before we can change any of our habits, we must recognize just what it is we are eating. We must experience the reprehensible nature of how the food is made. We must admit that we have not been diligent in maintaining our connection to the food we consume. Only when we've faced up to this can can we make changes for the better, not only for the health of our bodies but for the health of our souls. For yes, processed food carries a moral cost as well, a cost born in the lives of all the animals coldly and anonymously beefed up and slaughtered for our sustenance and for the profit of big Agro. (5/5 Stars)
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