The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan

Main Points:

• What is sustainability? Not an attractive word, a pallid social science word. Confucius once said, " Before you begin to make progress, you need a process of 'rectification of the names.'" What does it mean for something to be unsustainable? Means that something cannot go on, the way it has been going on indefinitely- because collapse and radical change is inevitable. With respect to our food system, our industrial food system is unsustainable. When it came to mainstream conventional industrial food- hamburger, soda, french fries- it's source was a farm field in the midwest where they were growing corn and soybean. Today 80% of our calories are coming from 4-5 plants and focus of this book is on corn. Corn is an industrial raw material. The Corn Industrial Complex- conquered our land, our food system, our animals, and our bodies. We grow 12 billion bushels of corn that are transformed into processed - high fructose corn syrup or fed to animals. We have taken our food system off of the sun and hooked it up with the fossil fuel economy. 
• Why is the corn system unsustainable? Energy. Before the rise of industrial agriculture, we used to get 2 calories of food energy for ever 1 calorie of fossil fuel energy (driving tractors, etc.). Now 10 calories of fossil fuel energy are required for 1 calorie of food energy. We are using oil to make corn, and using corn to make oil substitute. Did you know that 17% of our fossil fuel use is going to feed our self? Comparatively, 18% of fossil fuel is used for transportation. Food is an important part of the energy problem and the climate change problem. Each of us by eating meat is adding 4 tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. Our trade in food is exploding- the average item in a supermarket has traveled 1500 miles. We are selling sugar cookies to the Danes and buying sugar cookies from the Danes- it would be more sustainable to swap recipes. 
• Pollution? Pollution of pesticides, 80 million acres of corn are grown using atrazine- powerful weed killer. At 0.1 ppm these chemicals can change sex of frogs. Pollution of nitrogen is pumped into the grown via fertilizer- it runs into the Gulf of Mexico, thus creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey.
• Health? Our food system provides a lot of food- but does not keep the population healthy. We are suffering from an epidemic of diabetes, which threatens to make the generation being born today shorter than their parents. The monoculture diet (so many calories from a small number of plants) is not good. We are omnivores we need 50-100 chemicals to be healthy and we don't receive it from corn and soy. A highly centralized food system can cause there to be E. coli outbreaks in spinach across the country. 
• Money? Cheap food is very expensive. We spend up to $25 billion a year to subsidize this economy, 40% of the food income comes from government handouts. 
• Unsustainable because it depends on ignorance- it means that when people know what they are eating, they will lose their appetite for it. When you see how people live and how they die, you stop eating that food. More and more people do know- consumer behavior. Whole Foods is now the fastest growing supermarket in the country (2006), farmers markets are growing faster (doubled twice in 2005- an underground food market). 
• What are the alternatives? Organic food- the fastest growing segment in the food market. Organic is in danger of repeating the same mistakes of the industrial food chain. Rosy the chicken stays with 20,000 other chickens- organic feed, no antibiotics, no pesticide, no hormones- but the long shed that it is in is not really 'free range'. The birds are not allowed to leave the shed until they are 5 weeks old, and only live for 7 weeks- so they only get to go outside for 2 weeks. Organic food is traveling more than conventional food (1500 miles).
•  The grass farmer - when a grass plant is sheared by a ruminant (cow), the grass plant wants to keep its root mass in rough balance with its leaf mass (root-shoot ratio), and it sheds the roots. The roots are then set upon by the earth worm, protozoa, fungi, and bacteria and once they are done digesting it, it creates soil. This is the pulsing of the pasture- at the end of the year the hundred acres have more biodiversity, more fertility, and more soil despite the amount of food that is grown. A truly sustainable system can actually improve the soil and improve the biodiversity. This makes you question the tragic zero sum relationship with the natural world. 
• Reasons in support of local food. (1) Keeping farmers in our communities (2) Keeping land near us in production vs. strip malls (3) Eating food in season- picked in taste and nutritional value (4) The social aspect of the market square (10x conversations at farmer market than supermarket) (5) Like how the CSA or farmer's market connect us to the natural world. As the globalizers of food- they tell us we need to sacrifice things here and now for the promise of future prosperity and cheaper food. We are spending less than 10% of our income on food, less than any people in the history of mankind. 
• "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."- Michael Pollan

Read the New York Times' review of the book in their article Deconstructing Dinner!

Watch Professor Michael Pollan's lecture on the Omnivore's Dilemma at the Agriculture Sustainability Institute at the UC Davis Mondavi Center!  The book was named one of the top 10 books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

Read Michael Pollan's famous article "Why Bother?" which was mentioned in the book Drawdown.

As Wendell Berry once wrote, "Eating is an agricultural act."

Watch Joel Salatin's Ted Talk on "mob stalking herbivorous, solar-conversion,  lignified carbon sequestration" and his work as a organic farmer in Shenandoah Valley.