The Omnivore's Dilemma: Fast Food, Agro-Business, and Rhetoric

Introduction: Pollan's Rhetorical Approach

Michael Pollan's award-winning exposé of human eating habits is effective not just because of its compelling content but also because of its sophisticated 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, Pollan points out, an extension of agro-business. Pollan begins Chapter 7 with the observation that "the meal at the end of the industrial food chain that begins in an Iowa cornfield is 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 actual ingredients found in McDonald's meals. By weaving first-hand personal experience with objective critical analysis, 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 addresses capitalist food enterprise directly. The second section delves into the impact of capitalism on the food industry from a different angle — namely, the inconsistencies of a business model built on non-localized organic food production. Although organic farming certainly represents an improvement over agro-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 he calls "the meal at the end of the shortest food chain of all" (277).

The Industrial Food Chain and Fast Food

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 costly healthcare procedures that remedy the ill effects of consuming industrially processed food. McDonald's meals are so far removed from their source material as to become shadows of real food. As Pollan puts it, a Chicken McNugget is "more like an abstraction than a full-fledged food, an idea of chicken waiting to be fleshed out" (112). What goes into the Chicken McNugget is shocking; Pollan details thirty-eight ingredients in what one New York judge referred to as "McFrankensteinian" (cited in 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 fed on overproduced corn from Iowa. In Chapter Seven, Pollan focuses on the ethics and feasibility of the fast food business model as well as its effects on dietary health and well-being. Without becoming didactic, Pollan points out the problems with fast food, such as high levels of fat and sodium, which are directly and causally related to heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. What Pollan highlights most pointedly are the hidden ingredients in McDonald's menu items. 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 is not cooked in any traditional sense; a McDonald's menu item is conceived in a corporate office and manufactured in a laboratory.

Organic Farming and Its Contradictions

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 she 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, becomes a "contradiction in terms" (Pollan 183).

Still, the "grass-fed" meal that Pollan recounts in Chapter Fourteen is palpably different from the fast food meal 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 resorting to jargon. Pollan also visits food industry businesses ranging from McDonald's to Whole Foods, listing quantitative data such as prices, production costs, statistics, and the long chemical names of the ingredients in a Chicken McNugget.

The argument Pollan makes about fast food in Chapter Seven does not yet include the philosophical elements he raises later when discussing animal sentience and animal rights. Pollan reserves his core arguments related to vegetarianism for later in the book, where he thoroughly analyzes the subject from multiple perspectives. He understands that by the time a person chooses to eat at McDonald's, the question of whether or not to eat chicken is largely 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 McDonald's by eating the token salads on the menu — though Pollan hints that those salads still support the same industries that sustain large-scale animal slaughtering.

Conclusion: Consumer Responsibility and Industrial Food

To sustain the business model that allows fast food to exist, McDonald's also needs to incorporate chemicals into its food production model. Those chemicals may potentially be harmful, especially for young children who consume fast food in alarming proportions: Pollan claims that one out of every three American children eats fast food every single day (109). Ultimately, Pollan urges readers to take full responsibility for the choices they make when they are hungry. Whether from a health, ethics, or environmental sustainability standpoint, industrial food is a problem — and The Omnivore's Dilemma makes that case compellingly without ever losing the reader's trust.

References

Pollan, Michael. Omnivore's Dilemma. Penguin, 2006.