The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The preliminaries

• You can eat pretty much anything, and deciding what to eat can cause anxiety, especially when some foods might sicken or kill you. This is the omnivore’s dilemma.
• The food industry has a vested interest in exacerbating anxieties about what to eat–organic, or fast food, or keto, or something else
  • Industrial agriculture has supplanted a reliance on the sun for calories with a reliance on corn (transported using fossil fuels) for calories.
  • This abundance of industrial food deepens the omnivore’s dilemma.

Industrial Corn

• The supermarket’s seemingly great offerings of variety actually rests on a narrow biological foundation that consists of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by corn.
  • Corn feeds the steer that becomes the steak; it also feeds pigs, lamb, and even salmon (a carnivore that farmers reengineered to tolerate corn). Milk, cheese, and yogurt come from corn-fed cows.
  • Corn appears not only in processed foods and soft drinks, but in a variety of other things: modified or unmodified starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, ascorbic acid, lecithin, dextrose, lactic acid, lysine, maltose, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), caramel color, and xanthan gum.
  • It’s also in toothpaste, cosmetics, diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, and the shine on magazine covers.
• Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter from the same quantities of sunlight and water as corn. 97% of a corn plant comes from air, 3% from the ground.

George Naylor’s farm – Iowa

• ¼ of Americans lived on a farm in George Naylor’s grandfather’s time. Now, fewer than 2 million Americans farm, and they grow enough to feed the rest of the US.
  • For Naylor’s grandfather, the typical Iowa farm was home to many different plants and animals: horses, cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears.
    • This diversity allowed the farm to feed itself, the soil, and the livestock, and withstand a collapse in the market of any one of those items.
• But then corn became the cash crop, and it needed more land than other crops.
  • At Naylor’s farm, corn and soybeans now take turns in the field—the classic Corn Belt rotation since the 1970s.

How corn exploded – biologically

• In 1947, the US government had a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in explosives.
  • It’s also an excellent source of nitrogen for plants; thus, the chemical fertilizer industry was born.
  • Corn greatly benefited, as it consumes more fertilizer than any other crop.
  • So, in the 1950s, corn yields exploded. Farmers could plant corn every year with special chemical fertilizer.
  • Farmers end up wasting lots of fertilizer, up to hundreds of pounds a year.
    • Some of it evaporates, acidifying the rain and contributing to global warming. Some seeps into the water table.
• This flood of cheap corn made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of grass, and chickens in factories rather than farmyards.

How corn exploded – economically

• Crop surpluses collapse prices and bankrupt farmers.
  • The government, through New Deal farm programs in the 1930s, established a target price (based on production costs) for storable commodities like corn. Whenever the market price dropped below that target, the farmer had a choice.
    • Instead of dumping corn onto a weak market (weakening it further), she could take a government loan, use the corn as collateral, and store the grain until prices recovered.
    • At that point, the farmer can sell the corn and pay the loan; if corn prices stayed low, she could keep the borrowed money and in repayment give the government her corn.
  • This system did a fairly good job of keeping corn prices from collapsing.
• Then came Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s second secretary of agriculture, who did more than any other single person to orchestrate the overflow of cheap corn.
  • In 1972, Russia suffered a series of disastrous harvests and purchased 30 million tons of US grain.
    • Butz arranged the sale. The unexpected surge in demand, with a spell of bad weather in the Farm Belt, drove prices to historic heights.
    • By the following year, those prices reverberated through the food chain and by 1973 the inflation rate for groceries reached an all-time high.
  • Butz exhorted farmers to enlarge their farms and he dismantled the New Deal farm programs, replacing them with a new system of direct payments to farmers.
  • But paying farmers directly—for the shortfall in the price of corn—removed the floor under the price of grain. These new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any price since the government would make up the difference.
• Farm income has since declined along with corn prices, forcing millions of farmers deeper into debt and bankruptcy.
  • Farmers desperate to boost their crop yield plow marginal land and apply nitrogen.
    • Yet the more bushels each farmer produces, the lower prices go.
  • The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a company’s.
    • The demand for food is inelastic because people have to eat but there is a limit on how much a person can eat–people don’t eat more just because food is cheap, and laying people off doesn’t reduce supply.
    • Why plant corn and not something else? Corn is simply the most efficient way to produce energy. And the government subsidizes it.
• So corn impoverishes farmers, degrades the land, pollutes the water, and bleeds the federal treasury, which now spends up to $5 billion a year (2006) subsidizing cheap corn.
• Dealing with excess corn explains the rise of factory farms, the industrialization of food, the obesity epidemic, and the prevalence of food poisoning.

How corn transforms into meat

• The biggest portion of a bushel of corn (around 60%) goes to feeding livestock.
  • Many cattle are confined to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO). This wouldn’t have happened if not for cheap corn.
  • CAFOs produce lots of environmental problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens.
  • Cows have evolved the special ability to convert grass (single-stomached creatures like humans cannot do this) into high-quality protein.
    • Growing meat on grass makes ecological sense: It is a sustainable system that transforms sunlight into protein.
    • But cows raised on grass take longer to reach slaughter weight (5 years) than cows raised on a richer diet (14 months).
• Pollan purchased steer number 534 from a beef company and followed its life.
  • 534 was born in March and spent six months in the pasture with his mother. 
  • In October, the calf was weaned (sows separated from their calves will bellow for days, and the calves are stressed and prone to getting sick).
    • The sow can then produce more calves, and 534 prepares for the feedlot.
    • 534 was then confined to a pen, taught to eat from a trough, and gradually grew accustomed to eating an unnatural corn diet.
• A million pounds of feed pass through a feed mill every day; the food includes thousands of gallons of fat, protein supplements, liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen, and antibiotics.
  • Corn-fed meat is less healthy for humans since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than grass-fed animals.
    • Many health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
  • Lots of cows get sick. Bloat is the most dangerous side effect of eating corn, as it causes the rumen (a special organ that digests grass) to inflate until it presses against the lungs and the cow suffocates. 
  • CAFOs result in enormous manure lagoons. Farmers don’t want it for fertilizer because the nitrogen and phosphorous levels would kill crops.
    • The lagoons also contain heavy metals and hormone residues from the cow’s diet that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
• When animals live on farms, the idea of waste ceases to exist—the farmer feeds the animals the waste products of the crops, and feeds the animals’ waste products to the crops—it’s a clean, efficient ecological loop.
  • Animal feedlots take this elegant solution and create two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (rarely remedied at all).

The corn consumer

• Obesity costs the healthcare system an estimated $90 billion a year.
• Researchers trace America’s rising obesity rates to the 1970s, when the US embraced a cheap-food farm policy and dismantled programs designed to prevent overproduction.
  • Corn, in many forms, accounts for most of the surplus calories grown and eaten.
• One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale is that the food industry made energy-dense foods the cheapest, when measured in terms of cost per calorie.

Pastoral Grass

• Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm raises chickens,cows, turkeys, eggs, rabbits, pigs, as well as tomatoes, corn, and berries on 100 acres of pasture next to 450 acres of forest. Polyface Farm uses a pastoral method: perennial, diverse species; solar energy; local markets; and local fertility.
  • Study after study has demonstrated that, measured in terms of the amount of food produced per acre, small farms are actually more productive than big farms, but its higher transaction costs make dealing with them much more difficult.
  • Organic and otherwise sustainably grown fruits and vegetables contain significantly higher levels of vitamin C and a wide range of polyphenols.
  • Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composted soils; polycultures are more productive and less prone to disease than monocultures.

Big Organic

• The principal alternative to the general industrial approach is “organic.”
  • But there is now “industrial organic” as well. A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. Growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting it across the country takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy. Eating local food significantly lowers that number.
• Storied food appears in supermarkets everywhere, and Whole Foods offers the most cutting-edge grocery literature (words written on products to make them seem more appealing to consumers).
  • The word “organic” is one of the supermarket’s most powerful words, now an $11 billion industry, and growing.
  • Agribusiness fought to define “organic” loosely to make it easier for companies to get into organic and out of fear that anything not organic would be stigmatized.
    • Some organic milk comes from factory farms where thousands of cows never encounter a blade of grass and are raised in feedlots.
• Although organic is overall better for the environment and public health, it still leaves deep footprints—the entire food industry burns ⅕ of all the petroleum consumed in the US.

The benefits of pasture-raised animals

• When multi-stomached herds move onto fresh ground, following the cycles of the grass, it creates an excellent cycle.
  • They eat everything in the area and move on, allowing the grass to recover.
  • Native grasses evolved to thrive under such grazing patterns and depend on them for reproductive success.
    • Animals spread and fertilize seed with their manure, and their hoofprints create little pockets of exposed soil where water collects, ideal for germinating a grass seed.
  • This is why the population of ground-hugging clovers increases in a well-grazed pasture, a boon to grasses and grazers.
    • These legumes fix nitrogen in the soil, fertilizing grass from below while supplying nitrogen to the grazers; the bacteria living in the animal’s rumen will use the nitrogen to construct new molecules of protein.
• The pasture substantially changes the nutritional profile of chicken and eggs, as well as of beef and milk.
  • The large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the animals that eat it. The animal also has less fat, and the fat created in grass eaters is the best kind for humans to eat, evolutionarily.
  • Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals.
    • Meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of omega-3s, essentially fatty acids created in the cells of green plants that play an indispensable role in health.
  • One of the most important changes to the human diet has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food.
    • As our diet, and the diet of animals we eat, shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain and corn, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 went from 1:1: to more than 10:1. 
    • This is one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of agriculture. Changes in fat composition accounts for many diseases: cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.
• Corn, a dense source of calories, produces meat more quickly than grass.
  • To dispose of cheap corn, the government helped wean cattle off grass and onto corn by subsidizing feedlots (through tax breaks) and promoting a grading system based on marbling (streaks of fat in lean meat) that favored corn-fed over grass-fed beef.
    • Corn-fed animals have higher levels of atrazine, a herbicide commonly sprayed on cornfields. 
  • Grain and corn support the larger economy: chemical, biotech, oil, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, and trade.
    • In contrast, grass farmers don’t buy many pesticides or fertilizer; they rarely buy pharmaceuticals, and grass farming involves so much skill that it’s difficult to systematize.
• “Efficiency” is usually invoked to defend industrial farms, and it usually refers to the economies of scale that can be achieved by technology and standardization.
  • Yet Salatin’s farm makes a case for a different sort of efficiency: the one found in natural systems, with coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops.
  • The simplest, most traditional measure of a farm’s efficiency is how much food it produces per unit of land, and Polyface is impressively efficient.
    • 30,000 dozen eggs, 12,000 broilers, 800 stewing hens, 25,000lbs of beef, 50,000lbs of pork, 800 turkeys, 500 rabbits.
• For example, raising pigs in pasture versus in a warehouse offers many benefits.
  • There are no pigtails in industrial hog production. Farmers snip off the tails at birth. Piglets in CAFOs are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth because they gain weight faster on their drug-fortified feed than on sow’s milk.
    • This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to chew, a need they gratify by biting the tail of the animal in front of them.
    • A normal pig would fight, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring.
    • In CAFOs, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives underneath a metal roof standing on metal slats, it’s not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection.
    • Since treating sick pigs is not economically efficient, they are typically clubbed to death on the spot.
    • Tail docking is the USDA’s recommended solution to tail chewing. It makes the rear much more sensitive, so the bite is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it.
  • On Salatin’s farm, the pigs are clearly happy, rooting around in the mud and chomping on what they want. His system is designed around the pig’s natural predilections—pig happiness is simply the by-product of treating a pig as a pig.
    • Pigs also create good compost, which feeds the grasses, which feeds the cows; it’s a world where grass eats sunlight and animals eat grass.
    • And Salatin has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that come from monoculture.
      • Every government study has shown that food-borne illnesses stem from centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transportation of food.

The ethics of eating animals

Industrial slaughter

• Pollan requested various industrial slaughter companies access to view the slaughter process and was denied by all. He heard about the process from a professor who spent years studying the food industry.
  • Steers go into a special chute, single file. He passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he’s straddling the bar, the ramp declines and he’s transferred to a conveyor belt.
  • Above him is the stunner, a gun that fires a seven-inch steel bolt. A worker leans over and shoots it in the middle of the steer’s forehead. When done correctly, it kills on the first shot.
  • The worker then wraps one of the steer’s feet and hooks it to an overhead trolley. He’s then carried into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat.
• Salatin encourages an open-air killing area, which is a morally powerful idea. Any customer who so desires can see how the animal meets its end.
  • If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe it’s the right to see how our food is treated and slaughtered.
    • Right now, most people are not allowed to see how these processes take place–we should fight for more transparency.
  • Were the walls of our meat industry transparent, we would hopefully not raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

The philosophical discussion of eating meat

• The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on brutality. 
• Take the premise of equality among people, which most people accept.
  • Some are smarter, more handsome, whatever. This means that equality is a moral idea, not a fact, as utilitarian Peter Singer says.
  • The moral idea is that everyone’s interests should receive equal consideration, regardless of their abilities.
  • If possessing a higher degree of intelligence doesn’t entitle one human to use another for their own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit animals?
    • The principle of equality demands that animals receive the same consideration, as all animals have an interest in avoiding pain. 
    • The question isn’t ‘Can they reason?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’
• Comment: Because he’s a cow, and we’re humans!
  • Response: Excluding a cow from moral consideration simply because he’s not human is no different than excluding a black slave simply because he’s not white.
• Comment: But the difference between blacks and whites are trivial compared to the differences between a human and a cow.
  • Response: Imagine a society that discriminates on the basis of something nontrivial, like intelligence. If that offends our sense of equality, then why is the fact that animals lack X human characteristic any more a basis for discrimination?
• Comment: Why should we treat animals any more ethically than they treat one another?
  • Response: Do you really want to base your moral code on the natural order? Besides, humans can choose because we don’t need to eat meat to live.
• Comment: Animals on factory farms have never known any other life.
  • Response: Animals feel a need to exercise, stretch, turn around, regardless of whether they’ve ever lived in conditions that permit it.
  • The measure of their suffering shouldn’t be their prior experiences, but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts.
• Comment: The world is full of problems and solving human problems must come first.
  • Response: You can deal with the world’s problems while being vegetarian.
• Comment: Doesn’t the very fact that we could choose to forego meat for moral reasons point to a difference between animals and humans that justifies our speciesism?
  • Response: Then what of infants and advanced Alzheimer’s patients who cannot participate in ethical decision-making anymore than a cow can, yet we grant them rights?
  • Comment: Yes, but they’re one of us. Isn’t it natural to give special consideration to one of your own?
    • Response: Only if you’re a speciesist. Many white people used to say the same thing about being white. 
• When it comes to pain, the higher animals (like cows and pigs) are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons.
  • Comment: Human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. Humans can imagine what is not, and our pain can be amplified.
    • Response: A CAFO treats animals as machines, incapable of feeling pain, which most know is simply untrue. Industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes.
      • For instance, an industrial hen spends her brief days piled with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted. 10% of the hens can’t endure it and simply die. 
      • It’s cruelty and blindness to cruelty that’s required to produce eggs that can be sold for $0.79 a dozen.
• It’s true that places like Polyface Farm are a speck, but their existence implies that there’s a way to throw the whole argument for animal rights into a different light.
  • Animal happiness, like animal suffering, is unmistakable, too. Animal happiness seems to come from allowing the creature to act as it wants in the wild.
  • This is where Pollan thinks animal rights activists betray an ignorance about nature. To think of domestication as slavery miscontrues that relationship because it projects a human idea of power onto what is really natural symbiosis.
    • Humans provided animals with food and protection in exchange for what the animals provided, even flesh. 
    • These animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves, and humans became agriculturalists.
• Yet how we go about this says a lot about us, too. So, people who care about animals should ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer and that their deaths are swift and painless: for animal welfare, rather than rights.

• The history of corn and how it became one of the world’s most successful species
• The background of the organic movement, stemming from sixties’ radicalism, as well as the rise of Gene Kahn (the founder of Cascadian Farm, now a General Mills brand)
• The makeup of a McDonald’s McNugget, including tertiary butylhydroquinone (an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed onto the nugget or inside the box to “preserve freshness”)
• Pollan’s experience slaughtering chickens at Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm 
• Pollan’s hunting adventures, both for pigs and for mushrooms
• The enormous importance of fungi for decomposing and recycling organic matter—without fungi to break things down, the earth would have suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter long ago
• The Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen (a chemical process that converts atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can use) as the most important invention of the 20th century