BOOK - "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

While discussing the industrial organic (an oxymoron realistically, but not legally), Michael Pollan, in his new book The Omnivore's Dilemma, connects browsing Whole Foods to Barnes and Nobles. Both sell attractive products that hook you in with clever designs and jacket quotes—the ones from Whole Foods just tell a different type of story, a story of happy farms and happy animals. Pollan calls this sales pitch Supermarket Pastoral, but then wonders, as he looks at how people manage these farms, at the rather lax standards on the governmentally owned word "organic," and at the battle between Big and Small Organic, whether their brand of "cutting edge grocery-lit" is more fact or fiction.

Well, as anyone who has ever read a non-fiction expose on the food industry before, most of what you believe about food turns out to be as fabricated as the synthetic (and sometimes "natural") ingredients. As it turns out, Pollan has invented a type of grocery-lit, one that likes to perambulate across aisles on historical fact, innovation, and digression. Unlike these corporate food writers, as much manipulators of the sentence as of meat, Pollan's heart really is in the right place, and though his book has a lot of repetition, it's surrounded by solid fact and enjoyable—often mellifluous—writing. I haven't been so thoroughly disgusted yet entertained since reading excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Pollan, who is prone to extending metaphors, is also a fantastic imagist, and his combination of the two is what makes him a thrilling journalist, one of the few people who can make nonfiction crackle. For instance, take his first impression (albeit fifth or sixth draft) of a farm he visits in the industrial chapter:

"A sloping subdivision of cattle pens stretches to the horizon, each one home to a hundred or so animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that, it eventually dawns on you, isn't mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedyard's thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of a teeming metropolis of meat."

Is that Americana or what?

It's a pleasure following Pollan as he dissects the origins of four distinct American meals, from McDonald's "nuggets" (a food group all to itself) to Whole Foods to Polyface farm to physically hunting and preparing each item himself. (Pollan calls this last one “the perfect meal.”) This enjoyment makes his actual findings easier to digest: for example, we have not only transformed grass-eating ruminants into a bunch of corn-munching pieces of steak, but this process has increased the risk of our meat carrying a disease that our acid-riddled stomachs can't break down. “The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.” We recklessly use cheap corn at the cost of our soil, our increasingly indebted (and subsidized) farmers, and ultimately, our health. I take it back: it's plenty hard to digest; it's just not hard to swallow (and that, in a nutshell, is the problem with America's eating).

Pollan’s a reliable and knowledgeable journalist when it comes to all this data. He’s been covering food-related trends for years now, and his “grassroots” experience allows him to easily convey complicated facts about biomechanics or the benefits of a perennial ecology (not to mention what, exactly, that is). He’s also quick with a metaphor or parallel for every situation; rather than rely solely on quotes, he works as much from a storyteller’s perspective as from his characters, and his embellishments are light and sculptorly. Who else would compare the evolution of plant pesticides to how European nations acted during the cold war? Who’d describe bits of deadly nightshade, avoided by the natural intelligence of ruminants, as “forlorn florets of cauliflower languishing on a picky child’s plate”?

When it comes to conclusions, Pollan occasionally leaps beyond his facts. His simple questions (e.g., is organic food better? Worth the extra cost?) ramble to digressions (“better for what?”) and eventually conclude that while the industrial-organic food of Whole Foods is usually tastier and healthier, it is no more sustainable—the whole point of going organic—than a conventional TV dinner. (It is, however, a contradiction that is “possible to live with” and “sometimes...necessary or worthwhile” to hold.)

This is a flaw of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and other tell-alls): a lack of solutions, an abundance of critiques. (It’s easy to talk about our efficient inefficiency.) After exploring the beauty of a sustainable farm that practices polyculture and true organic practices, Pollan pinpoints what led to the favoring of “a biologically ruinous meal based on corn,” but doesn’t offer an economic recourse. Then again, that’s not really his job: you wouldn’t expect a author of a cookbook to make the dish for you; you can’t expect Pollan to reorganize agribusiness for the government. (I’d be willing to let him try.)

In the third and final segment of his book, Pollan forgoes making conclusions, and instead illustrates the trials and tribulations (and satisfactions) of hunting wild Sonoman pig and foraging through back forests for mushrooms (which includes a short digression on the “lunar energy” and so-called mystical properties of the fungi). Here, the prose flows away from facts to observation, to “hunter porn.” But these segments—which relate a more-primal experience that most of us are unfamiliar with—are as engrossing as they are irrelevant, since it’s a given that most people don’t have the resources, leisure, or ability to hunt and forage their own food anymore. (Even the author’s no expert, and relies on the expert opinions of his entertaining guide, Angelo, to overcome his crippling mycophobia and his lack of familiarity with rifles.)

We live vicariously through Pollan’s pictures instead:

“With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a rounded bloack form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge black pearls.”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a thoroughly engrossing and exciting read, the type of non-fiction that has social relevance that doesn’t come at the expense of personal exuberance. And wherever the book might linger too often in stark fact, the narration is driven by the underlying conceit: “It is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price.” This book is a rich literary meal that you can’t afford not to finish.

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[Note to the publisher: I don’t recall ever reading a book with so many typographical errors. Granted, I spend a portion of my days proofreading—I’m more disposed to notice these things than the average gadabout—but consider placing more care in your editing so as to avoid things like: “...though it may be that animals like us that eat morels do help them disperse their spores as we move then [sic] around on the way to our plates.”]