Omnivore\'s Dilemma Michael Pollan\'s Award-Winning

Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan's award-winning expose of human eating habits is effective not just because of its poignant content but also in the author's rhetorical strategies. The Omnivore's Dilemma details agro-business and its impact on American consumption habits. In the first of three parts, Pollan focuses on industrial food including the fast food industry. The fast food industry is an extension of agro-business, Pollan points out. Pollan begins Chapter 7 of The Omnivore's Dilemma with "The meal at the end of the industrial food chain that begins in an Iowa cornfield is prepared by McDonalds and eaten in a moving car," (109). Deftly incorporating vivid imagery and personal anecdotes is one of Pollan's most admirable rhetorical strategies. His personal stories, coupled with strong descriptors create a persuasive text. However, Pollan's "The Meal: Fast Food" chapter is neither self-indulgent nor superficial. The author bases all his inferences on factual data including the ingredients in McDonald's meals. By weaving first-hand personal experience with objective critical analysis, Michael Pollan offers a scathing critique of the American fast food industry.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is not just about fast food, though. In fact, only the first section of the book is about capitalist food enterprise. The second section also delves into the impact of capitalism on the food industry. Only, in part two Pollan points out the inconsistencies of a business model built on non-localized organic food production. Although organic farming certainly represents an improvement over agri-business, even the organic food industry becomes a tool of the petroleum industry in order to get products to market. In the final section of the book, "Personal: The Forest," Pollan undergoes a fascinating experiment in hunting and gathering his own food: what the author calls "the meal at the end of the shortest food chain of all," (277).

At the other end of the spectrum is what can arguably be called the longest food chain of all: the chemical manipulation of corn products to create food additives and preservatives for the fast food industry. The fast food industry is profitable, but at the expense of expensive health care procedures that remedy the ill-effects of consuming soulless food from McDonalds. McDonald's meals are so far removed from their source material as to become shadows of food. As Pollan puts it, a chicken McNugget is "more like an abstraction than a full-fledged food, and idea of chicken waiting to be fleshed out," (112). What went into the chicken McNugget is shocking, and Pollan details the thirty-eight ingredients of what one New York judge referred to as "McFrankensteinian," (cited by Pollan 112).

Those thirty-eight ingredients represent the gaping chasm between the American consumer and the sources of American food. A chicken McNugget contains some chicken, yes. Yet even that chicken is a product of the corn industry: an animal feeding off of overproduced corn in Iowa. When Pollan details the organic farming industry in part two of The Omnivore's Dilemma, he finds a similar gap between source and table. For instance, Rosie the "organic free-range chicken" was far from free range, and organic only in the sense that Rosie ate organic corn (Pollan 169). Pollan suggests that in spite of the lofty intentions of consumers, eating organic chicken is only incrementally more ethical than eating McNuggets. The organic food industry, when it reaches the scale of capitalist enterprise, is a "contradiction in terms," (Pollan 183).

Still, the "grass fed" meal that Pollan recounts in Chapter Fourteen is palpably different from the fast food one he and his family ate in Chapter Seven. The main reason for the visceral difference between fast food and grass fed is Pollan's persuasive writing: his use of visual imagery and illustrations and his down-to-earth language that engages readers without any jargon. However, Pollan also visits food industry businesses ranging from McDonalds to Whole Foods. He lists quantitative data such as prices, costs of production, statistics, and the long chemical names for the ingredients in a chicken McNugget.

The argument that Pollan makes about fast food in Chapter Seven does not include the philosophical elements the author raises later when he discusses animal sentience and animal rights. Pollan reserves his core arguments related to vegetarianism later in the book, where he thoroughly analyzes vegetarianism from multiple points-of-view.

However, Pollan understands that by the time a person deigns to eat at McDonald's, the decision of whether or not to eat a chicken is moot. To insert a vegetarian argument as early as the first chapter would unnecessarily clutter it and diminish its rhetorical merits. Moreover, vegetarianism is theoretically possible at McDonalds by eating the token salads on the menu. The token salads might still be in keeping with the tenets of agro-business but they do not contain meat products. Still, Pollan hints at how those salads support the same industries that sustain large-scale animal slaughtering.

In Chapter Seven, Pollan focuses on the ethics and the feasibility of the fast food business model as well as its effects on dietary health and well being. Without droning didactically, Pollan points out the problems with fast food: such as high levels of fat and sodium. The nutritional content of fast food is directly and causally related to heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Pollan needs not delve into great detail about that which most Americans should already be aware. What Pollan does point out are the hidden ingredients in McDonald's menu items, especially in the chicken McNuggets. By the time Pollan wraps up the chapter, readers will wonder why he allowed his son to eat the McNuggets in the first place. The McNuggets contain "several completely synthetic ingredients, quasi-edible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant," (Pollan 113). McDonald's food isn't' cooked in the sense that a home-cooked meal is; a McDonald's menu item is contrived in a corporate office and manufactured in a laboratory.

Pollan's ability to refrain from shrillness is one of the greatest strengths of The Omnivore's Dilemma. By eating McDonald's himself, Pollan does not speak from a pulpit and readers will not feel judged. They will think harder and more critically about what they eat and where their food came from, which is the primary objective of Pollan's writing The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan's self-experimentation serves two distinct but related rhetorical functions. First, the method lends credibility to The Omnivore's Dilemma just as a case study would. Pollan is not speaking theoretically but rather, from a perspective of qualitative research. Second, the method of self-experimentation connects Pollan with the reader on an emotional level. His pathos is enhanced further by Pollan's command of the written word and his use of poetic devices that do not include discrediting hyperbole. Not once does Pollan use alarmism; he simply allows the facts to speak for themselves.

Pollan approaches the sample fast food meal from three different perspectives. First, Pollan leads up to Chapter Seven by describing the conquest of corn as a cash crop and the effects corn production have had on local ecosystems, the farming industry, and the ability of fast food to proliferate. Second, Pollan concludes Chapter Seven by showing what lengths companies like McDonalds as well as their suppliers in the agro-business world must do to sustain themselves. Third, Pollan mentions the effects of industrial food on the end-user, the consumer. Pollan includes a global assessment as well, and does not ethnocentrically assume that American eaters are the only ones affected by the fast food industry or agro-business. Indeed, agro-business has literally changed the food landscape of the world. Agro-business has altered the nature of farming and changed the relationship between human beings and the food we eat.