Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Hello all,

Anyone else read this book?

I have to say it's quite an eye opener. I haven't quite finished it, just got to the start of his hunting adventure.

I've been focused on environmental/climate crisis issues over the last couple of years and I read many pieces about the environmental problems posed by industrial agriculture and I have tried to alter my food consumption accordingly. But I think it took this book to put all the pieces together, including some pieces I didn't have, to give me a full appreciation of the dangers of the existing industrial food chain to the ecology, our health and happiness not to mention our treatment or rather our relationship with the plants and animals that are our food.

For example, when I thought of all the fossil fuels that went into the production of beef and corn I would think about the machinery used in production. That certainly is a significant component, but I had no idea that we are literally growing our corn (which is feed to the cattle) from fossil fuels. Literally fertilizer natural gas goes in one end of the factory and fertilizers comes out the other (nitrogen extraction). How crazy is that!? If nothing else needs to be sustainable it certainly has to be our food supply and we're using a non-renewable source of energy to grow it. It has got to be a form of cultural insanity.

Before reading this book this committed carnivorous omnivore ate meat without being overly morally disturbed. But this book got me seriously questioning my carnivorous habits. I don't think I'm headed toward vegetarian but I'm thankful someone finally got me to question and face my choice from a moral perspective. And I will be making much more serious changes to my food consumption including a reduction of meat, including a possible limiting of which animals I will eat, and certainly I'll be buying my meat from local farmers using sustainable practices including grass feeding. I've wanted to join a CSA for a while but have been dragging my feet due to some difficulties picking one, but I will rededicate my efforts to get over those difficulties and just get off my ass and get it done.

Got it as a gift.

I also found it to be quite an eye-opener. In particular, I was surprised to learn of the intensive use of fossil fuels in modern industrial farming (not just the tractors and trucks, but the fertilizer!), the absurd over-production and over-use of corn, and (most distressing) the fact that modern industrial organic farming isn't particularly different from convential industrial farming.

That book definitely made me think a lot about what ends up on my plate. A great example from the book that I like to share with people: If you buy asparagus that was grown organically in Chile but then flown by jet airplane to the United States, can that really be considered organic or environmentally sustainable?

On a related note: It turns out that Polyface Farms (the "beyond organic" local sustainable "grass farmer" in the book) has a stall at our local farmer's market -- just a ten minute walk from my home here in Washington, DC. It's been fun to try some of the products described in the book. (But so far we haven't yet arrived early enough to get any of the eggs.)

And good point about industrial organic vs local and sustainable.

I'm jealous of your access (at least potential access if you get up earlier enough :) ) to Polyface products. And there's another great theme in that book. The Salatins are, from the description in the book, are conservative xian and I'm a progressive atheist. But there is a lot of common ground between my values and goals and Mr Salatin's. I suspect I could spend a non-confrontational, even friendly, week on the farm just as Mr Pollan did.

Another good bit from the book is the story Joel Salatin related about the guy that pulled up to his open air chicken processing facility with a PETA bumper sticker on his car. The conservative xian farmer and the animal rights advocate made a connection and learned 1) not to lump everyone into categories, particularly categories that are based on your differences 2) that there are choices beyond what the government and big industry give us and that those choices can actually bring us together

Jet-planed food can't be considered sustainable if it could just as easily be grown locally. I can see the case for exotic/ethnic crops being grown in the region where people have traditionally grown them, or certain products being produced by groups of people who have been the only ones making them for generations, but things that can be grown / manufactured just about anywhere are best made locally, you're right. But one important difference with an organic vs. non-organic farm in a far-away country: Working on an organic farm doesn't increase your risk of getting cancer.

...into a commitment to real food, and a vigorous avoidance of industrially-produced food-like products. I knew, vaguely, that agriculture in the US was broken, since I grew up in a state that relied a lot on agriculture, and lived through a couple of decades of farm foreclosures, consolidations, commodification, etc. But I'd never really examined the scope and impact of corporate agriculture, monocropping commodities, and industrial food production, and it scared the willies out of me.

I'm a gardener. I know from soil and what it can do when it's alive and healthy, and what happens when it's essentially a dead medium for the conveyance of chemicals. This book shocked me to the core. We are literally destroying our ability to sustain life on this continent, and everywhere else intensive, industrial monocropping and factory livestock production is taking over. And that is larger and larger proportions of the earth's total fertile areas.

Between that and the horrific energy costs, not just of transportation, but of the processing and production of food-like substances (including many "organic" foods and additives-- do you KNOW how much energy is used in the production of soy-based TVP and other meat substitutes?) we are setting up the next couple of generations for famine and disease on a scale that hasn't been seen on this earth for five or six centuries.

Fortunately, I live in an area that has a broad base of diversified, local, sustainable agriculture and livestock production, and one of the best Farmer's Markets in America. So now I'm learning to cook, and Lucy Ricardo had NOTHING on me-in-the-kitchen when it comes to comedy. But I'll keep at it until I can produce decent, edible, nutritious meals from basic ingredients, with a reasonable amount of time and effort.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who's already at least a step or so down the "what's REALLY on my plate" road. It's a little too scary for the totally unconcerned, though. It would probably turn them off and make them feel like it's just another alarmist tinfoil-hat lefty wacko rant, and there's nothing REALLY wrong with our food production system, since, after all, food is pretty cheap and abundant, right?

wryly,
Bright

Well said!

And yeah, it's one of those books you want to give to Everyone. I've been pestering my wife at least once a day with excerpts that I either read to her or ask her to read.

But you're probably right that it is a book that can scare away some by plunging them in to fast.

Still, there is some real urgency to the need to fix all this.

He says something early on about hormones and prophylactic antibiotics being given to pigs and chickens. Anyone who has any experience with hog and chicken raising (my family farm raises the former for market, the latter for personal and family use, but because we have more than 50 in our flock, we have to conform with USDA regs since we have hogs on the farm) knows that neither chemical can be used regularly on pigs and chickens. Only cattle are allowed to have growth hormones and only cattle are allowed to have prophylactic antibiotics. All other farm-raised, land based food animals can only get antibiotics when they're sick (and then are not allowed to be slaughtered until they have recovered and are off the antibiotics for the amount of time needed to purge the antibiotics from their bodies) and are never allowed hormones. This has been the case since 1951 and is prominent on the USDA food safety datasheets. It's an easy lookup that he should have done. (I cannot comment on farmed fish because I have no experience with them and don't know the regs.)

There was also a factual error about cannabinoids in the last part of the book; he omitted the fact that natural and drug-taken cannabinoids also cause paranoia.

I am an unapologetic carnivore, though a careful and picky one. The fact is that cows and chickens and pigs are far better at changing solar energy into muscle than I am. I cannot eat grass or most insects; cows and chickens can. I do not transform calories into muscle as efficiently as a pig does. I also live in a region where pure vegetarianism is actually destructive to the land and soil -- my region of the Rocky mountain foothills should never have become farmland. It's rangeland. We don't get enough rain to heal the land; we don't get a lot of rainfall, and our soil is fragile. Hooves and excreted seeds and chicken scratching make our plains and high valleys flourish; tractors don't.

I'm also picky about what gets shipped. The locally grown, non-organic tomato that comes from 20 miles away is better for me and the planet than the organic one shipped 4000 miles. We eat local wheat, and we look for local (beet) sugar, rejecting imported (cane) sugar whenever possible. (I think beet sugar tastes better, too.) We do eat imported rice and oats (imported from California and the midwest, respectively) but it balances out -- we trade meat and energy. Even during winter, I am pretty sure that our solar-heated, local greenhouse hydroponic tomatoes are better for us than those coming in from Chile and Guatamala.

...on sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in pig feed:

http://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/750/the-political-situation-surrounding-antimicrobial-use-in-agriculture

And from the same site (a ".com" domain, but that pig feed article referenced above was published by NC Cooperative Extension: hardly a bunch of alarmists), here is a reference regarding the 1997 European Union's ban of bacitracin, spiramycin, tylosin and virginiamycin in poultry feed.

http://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/471/assessing-the-results-of-the-eu-ban-on-antibiotic-feed-additives

This article goes on to urge that the USA KEEP ALLOWING the use of these drugs in chicken feed: i.e.- their use is still widespread here.

Your family may not be feeding your pigs and chickens antibiotics, but the practice is unfortunately still quite common. In fact, if you are using commercial feed on your farm, you may be feeding antibiotics to your pigs and chickens without even knowing it. No offense intended, 'cat, but please check your facts before accusing others of errors.

-app

Edited to correct a myriad of mistakes of my own, including initially omitting the second link.

:blush: :blush:

Oh, and as far as I know, you are correct that growth hormones are only used in cattle.

that doesn't have antibiotics in it. In fact, from what I can tell, there's no way commercial operations can pack all those chickens into those huge barns without disease running rampant, hence they use enormous amounts of medications.

They're supposed to wean the chickens off it before processing, though.

It is disturbing.

But I don't know what to do about it. I live in a place where I do not have access to anything other than industrial foods. No farmer's market, some organic produce. We have an organic food store but the last time I was in it, I was not impressed.

I also suck as a cook so I enjoy convenience foods because I hate, hate, hate, trying to decide what to eat for dinner.

And I am sorry, but I don't think the Salitins of this world are going to be able to feed 300 million people. It just is not feasible. And what about poor people? They are going to choose what is cheapest. They have no choice. As for me, I buy mostly frozen vegetables because a) I don't know how to cook and b) they don't spoil.

To help you find sources of local food and learn more about the benefits of sustainable agriculture. It can be done, in fact there've been studies showing that the kind of farming practiced by the Salitins is more efficient than the industrial chain. In fact the industrial chain came to being due to it's own inefficiencies, over production of unwanted nitrogen and produce and 'sustained' through subsidies.

http://www.localharvest.org/

http://100milediet.org/home/

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and am now reading Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I know it's an old book and I've known about it for a long time but never got around to reading it. I have In Defense of Food on request at the library, along with Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, both by Pollan. At the same time I am reading Putting Food By, a book about how to can safely. We are gonna shoot for a kick-ass organic garden this year and put up as much of it as we can.

Totally awesome read. Everyone should pick it up.

Laura's Kitchen.....thick solid paperback, my copy is, with lots of great natural recipes and how to's.
I spent 8 years living off an organic farm on 15 acres on an Island in the Pacific NW, the back to the land thing was going on, we had a food co-op, started a Framer's Market which is still going strong all these years later.
the way things are going, the books and know how may come n handy again.

Many of the books popular then are good now, I think Pollan lists some.
He's a great read, isn't he?

because he really gets out there and does the leg work...literally! Standing ankle deep in the muck at a feed lot and learning to "process" chickens and actually doing it.

Thanx for the rec on that book. I'll check the library for it. Another one is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. That's the one that really got me going on all of this to start with.

That's a pretty impressive past. I really feel it's going to become more and more important to learn to do all of these things again. We're now starting to order from the local co-op and this will be our third year at attempting an organic garden. Hopefully, results this year will be better than the last two years if the weather decides to cooperate this time.

Welcome to DU, dixie! :hi:

If we all gave up eating meat - what would happen?

First of all, the farmers and ranchers would kill off like 99.9% of all the critters - cows are just too expensive to keep if they aren't going to market and showing a profit.

Second, of all, if we got rid of all the cows - would we end up with dust storms? All the cow pee and poop serves to fertilize the earth and allow for plants to grow. Just as we had the dust bowls of the 1930's hit the great Plains after the mighty herds of bugffalo had disappeared for two or three generations - would cows demise mean soemthing that we need and count on would also disappear?

reducing the amount we eat is definitely mentioned as a good thing, advocating for changing the industrial practices of the meat industry definitely, eating locally and sustainably raised meat is also definitely advocated. Giving up meat is not.

And it is not just about meat by any means. Corn is probably the most discussed subject in terms of a particular food. But the whole range of food types is discussed.

I try whenever possible to buy locally sustained meat.

And of course, I eat no where near the amounts of meat that my family of origin did - we have meat every other day and only once. (Until a health condition stopped my body from producing red blood cells, I had been a vegetarian.)

But my concern is this - where I live now, there are meadows with horses and cows and gorgeous surroundings.

If we reduce the number of cows then what?

Some city dwellers believe, I am sure, that if we quit eating meat, farmers will just continue to have cows as pets. But that ain't gonna happen.

As I sit and type this, the glorious pear orchards are being clear cut - far more profitable for the old time pear farmers to sell off to the nouveau riche who want to plant vineyards. This is a major loss of habitat for many of the wildlife - the birds, raccoons, deer, badgers, rabbits, etc are displaced from the orchards by miles and miles of metal wires and overly pesticided acreage.


It takes several years for any greenery of significance to arise from this - a vineyard in the early years is very stark and barren. Even one of the local sports writers laments the fact that the vineyards are responsible for a huge loss in the deer population - maybe as much as 15% a year here in the state of California.

But people seem to have this concept that somehow life wil be Utopia if we quit eating meat!

..farmers will just continue to have cows as pets."

This city deweller and all his fellow city dwellers he knows have no such illusions.

You seem to be fixated on generalities and extremes of position that no one is advocating. Yes I'm sure a reduction and a change in the processes used to produce meat for everyone would be a benifit. No transition is without challenges and indeed the details will need to be examined and adjusted. But just continuing on as we are now is a dead end, literally for us and the cows.

Continuing to produce corn and meat with the use of non-renewable sources of energy, and using up more energy in shipping than is provided to us once it all gets on our plate, continuing to use methods of production that degrade rather than participate in the local ecology are not sustainable practices by definition.