The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan: A Book Review

The Omnivore's Dilemma and the Problem of Choice

Having too many choices can be confusing. One of the advantages of being a koala bear, says Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma, is that the bear's food choices are relatively simple: it subsists on eucalyptus trees and little else. Humans, on the other hand — along with a few other omnivorous species like pigs and dogs — can eat nearly anything. But natural omnivores also require a dizzying array of vitamins and minerals to survive. The quest to satisfy these complex nutritional needs, and to manage so many choices, means that quite often an omnivore makes the wrong nutritional decision. A careless hunter-gatherer may consume poisonous berries that, unlike strawberries or blueberries, would kill a human but not a bird. A careless modern individual, lured by the cheapness and easy satisfaction of an Extra Value Meal, may choose a Big Mac for dinner and suffer the dietary and health consequences as a result.

These examples illustrate how, on one hand, the size and complexity of the human brain may be partly due to the need to figure out what is edible and what is not. On the other hand, an overwhelming number of choices can lead to poor decision-making. The over-engineering of the American diet — through bad legislation, the corporatization of the American dining table, and well-meaning but misguided "nutritionism" that treats a meal as a series of dietary requirements rather than a communal experience of savoring tastes and flavors — has contributed to the current obesity crisis in America. Americans have become confused about what to eat, having been assured during the 1980s that oat bran and avoiding dietary fat would prevent heart disease, and during the early 2000s that avoiding carbohydrates and consuming Omega-3 fatty acids were the keys to health.

Over the course of the book, Pollan describes four distinct meals he consumes: a fast food meal at McDonald's, a commercially produced but organic meal sourced from the popular supermarket chain Whole Foods, a meal from a farm run by individual farmer Joel Salatin according to traditional modes of production, and finally a meal of game meat from an animal he killed himself. Although Pollan toys with the idea of vegetarianism at one point, he ultimately does not see abstaining from meat as a viable solution. Rather, he is in search of how to be omnivorous in an ethical fashion.

Corn, Subsidies, and the Industrialized American Diet

Pollan begins his journey where food presumably begins — in a corn field. But not just any corn field: one financed by farm subsidies. One of the most surprising facts Pollan reveals is how industrialized corn has found its way into almost everything Americans eat, from Chicken McNuggets to beef to Twinkies. The most wrenching transformation of America into a corn monoculture began when Earl Butz, Richard Nixon's second Secretary of Agriculture, made corn a heavily subsidized crop in order to lower food costs during the hyper-inflation of the 1970s. American agriculture had already undergone substantial change when industrial fertilizers and pesticides became widespread. Chemicals like ammonium nitrate, originally developed for bombs and chemical agents during World War II, were repurposed as agricultural inputs. With the subsequent shift to a corn monoculture, the effects on the American diet were seismic: food costs fell, particularly for highly processed foods, and portion sizes exploded. High-fructose corn syrup, a highly concentrated corn-derived sweetener, began replacing more costly sugar in mass-produced foods — from McDonald's French fries to tomato sauce — spiking the nation's sugar consumption and appetite for sweet, fatty "junk" foods.

Corn is now used to fuel cars and to feed the beef Americans eat. Corn fattens calves unnaturally fast and forces farmers to administer antibiotics to prevent illness, because a young animal's immune system is not designed to process corn. When Pollan has a typical McDonald's meal analyzed, he finds that virtually every component is corn-derived: the beef in the McNuggets came from corn-fed cows, the potatoes were fried in corn oil, artificial thickeners in the milkshakes are corn-based, and the soda is sweetened with corn syrup. Seventy-five percent of the carbon Americans now consume from food comes from corn, and one in three American children eats corn-processed fast food at least once a day.

The Hidden Cost of Cheap Food

Today, Americans do not spend much money on food — but they are paying a heavy price in other ways. As Pollan writes: "As a society, we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves — about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world . . . Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?" (Pollan 243). Corn-based products supply large quantities of cheap, non-nutritious calories, which is one reason why low-income Americans are more likely to be overweight than wealthy ones — yet even the wealthy are not immune, given how ubiquitous corn-derived ingredients have become. There is also a cost in pleasure: Pollan describes his McDonald's meal, eaten with his son and wife in their car, as palatable for the first bite or two but tasteless thereafter. He deliberately eats the meal in the car because one in every five American meals today is consumed in a vehicle rather than at a family dinner table.