The Omnivore's Dilemma - Part I

I just finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Perhaps you have read or heard of it - it was published in 2006 and won numerous awards, as well as being a New York Times bestseller. The premise of the book is that the author traces the pathway to four different meals, from their inception on the farm or via hunting/gathering, to the consumption of the actual meals by the author and his family/friends. Along the way, Mr. Pollan provides his personal insight into and critique of the agribusiness world in which we live, and which provides the bulk of the food we eat. While the book does not directly relate to the GFCF experience per say, it does make you think about what you are eating and feeding to your families. In that respect, I think it is worth sharing a summary, which I will do in four parts; each part corresponding to one of Mr. Pollan's meals. Today's first part involves the most common pathway used to obtain daily meals.



PART I: Industrial Foods



The industrial food chain, or at least how Mr. Pollan presents it, begins in the middle of cornfield in Iowa, surounded by acres upon acres upon acres of corn. The catch? Little, if any of this corn, will be directly consumed by humans. In fact, only a small fraction of the corn grown in this country is directly consumed by humans. The rest, like the corn in this field where the author is standing, is commodity corn, used for everything from animal feed to processed goods like high fructose corn syrup. Corn, the author contends, is a main driver of the industrial food chain.



Mr. Pollan's intent is to follow the 90,000 or so kernels that make up a bushel of corn from their inception in an Iowa cornfield to their end as a fast food meal for himself and his family. There are several stops along the way:



The Cornfield. At the cornfield, Mr. Pollan talks about the history of corn, which itself would make a great story for James Burke's classic Connections series. The history of corn involves soybeans (the preferred crop for rotating with corn), German Nobel Laureate Fritz Haber (who, in 1909, invented a process to artificially "fix" nirogen - that is, convert it into a form usable by plants), and World War II (after the war, former munitions plants were converted to make chemical fertilizer). The advent of chemical fertilizer ushered out the age of crop rotation and the use of livestock manure to replenish the soil and brought in an age where science replenishes the soil, not nature. Thus corn can be grown year after year on the same land. Augmenting plant genetics to create hybrid strains of corn to take advantage of this situation has resulted in corn becoming the most dominant force in industrialized agriculture. And yet, most of this is not for our direct consumption, but becomes a part of everything else that we eat.



The Feedlot. Of the roughly 90,000 kernels in a bushel of corn, Mr. Pollan estimates that about 54,000 of them, or about 60%, end up at feedlots, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) as they are called. So how does the author follow this chain? By buying a steer of course!



The steer Mr. Pollan buys actually spent the first 8 months of its life in a pasture in South Dakota, then was trucked to a CAFO in Kansas. In another year or so, the steer will be big enough to slaughter and send to market, a process that would take several years if the animal was grazing in a pasture. This is what you call fast food!



How is possible? Through the use of corn of course! At CAFOs, animals are held in pens - 90 or so to a pen the size of a hockey rink. Three times a day, a truck dumps feed into the feed bunk and the animals dutifully wander over to eat. But it's not just corn - the animal feed also could contain beef tallow from the slaughterhouse, or chicken litter. And then there are the drugs. For cattle evolved to eat grass, not grain, and without the drugs they cannot not properly digest the corn and are susceptible to ills ranging from diarrhea and inflammatory bowel diseases to even death.



And then there are the environmental concerns. Feedlots, to put it bluntly, are nasty places. It's not just the noxious odor that got to the author, it's the manure so laden with chemicals and fertilizers that farmers can't use it in their fields - it would kill the plants. And then the author thinks about his steer in terms of the amount of fossil fuels it takes to feed him and get him ready for slaughter. Consulting with an economist specializing in agriculture and energy, it was estimated that in his lifetime, the author's steer will have consumed roughly 35 gallons of oil, or approximately 60% of a barrel. And then you multiply that by the 64,000 head of cattle this particular feedlot can accomodate...



The Processing Plant. Mr. Pollan estimates that about 18,000 of the 90,000 kernels in a bushel of commodity corn leave the field and go to processing plants, where food science takes over. You are more than familiar with some of the end results of these processes - corn oil, corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, even xanthan gum. And let's not forget that the ethanol additives in some gasolines are derived from corn. Like Elvis in the classic Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper song, corn is everywhere.



And why is this? Why economics, of course. These days, we can plant more corn than ever before, mainly because modern corn does not need as much room to grow as before; hence, you can get more stalks per acre, and thus more corn. And the more corn on the market, the cheaper the price. And thus more profit for the food manufacturers, since the price you pay at the grocery store doesn't fluctuate like the price of corn or other cheap grains - you still pay the same price whether the corn costs 20 cents per unit or 4 cents per unit. The author gives the example of the industrial cereal industry. At the time this book was written, the cereal group at General Mills generated a higher profit for the parent company than for any other division. This is because the raw materials to make the cereals - most of them derived from cheap grains like corn, soy, or wheat - are extremely inexpensive. And yet, if I want to buy my kids a box of GF Corn Chex, I am still paying anywhere from $3.00 to $5.00 depending on where I shop.



The other factor the processing of food has overcome, according to the author, is our ability to only eat a certain amount of food. The author states that biologically, we can only eat about 1500 pounds of food per year. Which leaves a dilemma for the food industry - how to expand profits if we are only eating so much food. One answer lies in the processing, as well as econimics and marketing. I am guessing that it didn't take much to reformulate some Chex cereals into GF versions - many were already corn-based or rice-based - but by processing cheap commodities like corn into replacements for those GF containing products in the original Chex formulation, General Mills opened up a whole new market for themselves - the GF market. Even at $3.00 to $5.00 a box, Chex is still cheaper (on a per oz. basis) than most other GF cereals on the market- the economic factor. Plus, look at all the different types of Chex mixes you can make - the marketing factor. The other thing that processed food sells is convenience - how easy is it to get a frozen dinner and pop it into the microwave as opposed to cooking a full meal for yourself? You can get a Banquet frozen dinner for $1.00 - there are very few homecooked meals you can make for that price. Pay a little more, and you get larger portions - and eat more.



The Industrial Meal. The author's industrial meal he shares with his family is fast food from McDonalds, which just as esily could have come from Burger King or KFC or any other place. Fast food meals are the perfect example of a second way the limitation on the amount of food we eat is overcome - by tricking us into eating more that that 1500 pounds per year. A lot of this is clever marketing - McDonald's discovered that people won't buy two bags of fries, but would buy that same amount of fries if it was only in one bag. Sodas are a great example of this - Big Gulp at 7 Eleven anyone?



And, as the author demonstrates, this once again all goes back to corn. A great example is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the most common sweetener used today. By replacing sugar with cheaper HFCS (without sacrificing taste), soft drink makers began seeing more profits, and Americans began drinking more soda. But, Mr. Pollan states, this was not because Coke and Pepsi lowered their prices, but because they were able to convince consumers to buy a supersized amount for a few pennies more. Most people, if they go into a convenience store for a soda, would be more inclined to buy a 32 oz. soft drink at 99 cents as opposed to the 20 oz. drink that sells for 79 cents.



This overcomes our predilection for consuming only 1500 pounds of food per year, because researchers have found that people will consume up to 30 percent more food if they are presented with a supersized portion than they would otherwise. Just think about how much more food is eaten between Thanksgiving and Christmas (a time defined by large family meals, parties, cookies, etc.) than any other time of the year.



Of course eating more food means eating more calories. And typically, it's the energy-dense calories that are the cheapest. The author cites reserach that found that a dollar (back in 2006 or so)could buy 1200 calories of chips and cookies vs. 250 calories of carrots, or 875 calories of soda vs. 170 of fruit juice from concentrate. And neuorlogically, we tend toward the energy dense calories.



McDonald's, or any other fast food chain, embodies this principle. The meal the author and his family ate cost $14 back at the time the book was written, and included a cheeseburger, chicken nuggets (the white meat version), a "healthy" salad, a 32-oz Coke (which only cost 30 cents more than a 16 oz. Coke), a vanilla shake, large fries (as opposed to small), and a Dippin Dots type of dessert. The chicken nuggets, which at the time had been reformulated to include white meat chicken, still contained 38 different ingredients, thirteen of which the author could easily determine were derieved from corn. For the three people (the author, his wife, and their son) combined, an estimated 4510 food calories were consumed, some made possible in part by paying a little more for larger portions.



And then there's the corn factor. Given the additives (even in the grilled chicken found in the salad, as well as the salad dressing), most of the calories in the meal are derived from corn. In terms of actual corn, the author (using his knowledge of feed conversion rates and processing rates to make HFCS) figured that it takes about 6 pounds of corn to make just the cheeseburger patty, the chicken in the nuggets,and the three drinks that were consumed. The figure is much higher when you factor in all the other corn-derived additives in the meal. But to try and get a more definitive answer, the author worked with a biologist at UC-Berkeley who ran a chemical analysis on the various parts of the entire meal to look for the presence of corn. The result (with percent of corn listed in parentheses): soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56 %), cheeseburger (52%), french fries (23 %). The most astonishing figure here to me is that the cheeseburger - predominantly meat and a bun, with a slice of cheese, ketchup, mustard, and pickle - is 52% derived from corn.



If you have seen the movie Supersize Me, you know the ramifications of eating in this manner. You can easily see how that 1500 pound bioligical limit can be overcome. And it's not hard to extrapolate from that the impacts on health problems such as obesity and diabetes.



There is much more to the story of course - after all, this is only a summary. I didn't even go into the major role the Federal Government played in all this, or how this relates to the American love of whiskey in the early 19th century. Or perhaps the most important aspect of the industrial food pathway aside from the impacts on human health - the impacts to the environment and dependency on fossil fuels. I'll save that for you to read when you get the book. :-)



The author's next meal looks at the industrial organic industry - and a meal made from foods purchased from Whole Foods. Please stay tuned for Part II of The Omnivore's Dilemma.