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Book Review
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
By Michael Pollen
It may seem predictable that someone who owns and manages a small, organic farm would give Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma high marks. I do. But I must admit that I didn’t expect to. I had certainly heard good things about the book, but I also had heard good things about his previous book (The Botany of Desire) which, though a much shorter work, I struggled (unsuccessfully) to get through.
But I was completely taken aback with my first exposure to The Omnivore’s Dilemma which happened to come not as a reading, but as a listening. I was on the campus of Bellevue Community College on night Pollen was speaking there. Someone mentioned it to me, so I slipped into the auditorium about halfway through his presentation and heard him read a section of his book that dealt the “industrialization” of corn. I was amazed that someone who self-identifies himself as a “journalist” has so successfully navigated the labyrinth of preferential governmental policies and corporate smokescreens to expose with unfailing clarity the ubiquity of corn in the American diet and the costs associated with our unknowing devotion.
In case you don’t know anything about The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it is (ostensibly) about Pollen’s efforts to track down the source of three kinds of meals; one from a fast food restaurant, one based on organic produce, and one that he scavenges from an atavistic (if not almost voyeuristic) attempt at “hunting and gathering.”
The first meal is from a fast-food restaurant. His research and travels lead him to and through what he calls the “industrial agricultural machine.” There are still many people who are completely unaware of the nature of the dominant (97%) mode of producing food in the US. Pollen chronicles in a readable narrative but in no small detail the degradation of human health, local economies, the environment, and the plethora of “hidden” and subsidized costs of our food system. If you are one of those people who have an inkling of all this but suspect you don’t know the whole story, you owe it to yourself to read at least this section of the book, in which Pollen describes the way in which most food in America is grown and processed.
If the “industrial machine” in food processing is a surprise to a certain percentage of readers, his discovery that not all “organic” farming is the same will likewise be a surprise to yet another segment of his readers. Most of us think of organic farming in terms of a small family farm, owned and operated by people who care about the environment and about producing healthy, nutritious food for their communities. When we purchase organic food from our local grocery stores, this is what we have in mind. And often the stores play to this deception, with plenty of photos of family farms and even the “stories” of family farmers.
The truth, however, as Pollen discovers and shares liberally with his readers, is that almost all of the organic produce on the shelves of grocery stores comes from three or four farms in California that average over 20,000 acres. They are high-tech, high energy-input, high carbon foot-print agri-business farms that also farm land non-organically. These farms have simply found profit in the organic boom and are “cashing in.” Pollen concludes that insofar as these farms (or at least the parts of these farms that the corporate owners farm organically) do not use toxic chemicals, there is an environmental “plus.” But insofar as people buy these organic products and think they are purchasing crops from small, organic, diversified farms, they are being blatantly deceived.
Fortunately, Pollen ultimately finds his way to the kind of farm that people think they are buying from when they get those “industrial organic” items from their grocery stores. They do exist, and there numbers are growing. But typically the best or only way to know what you are getting and what you are supporting when you buy “organic” is to buy directly from a farm. That, of course, is precisely what buying from a farmer’s market, and to even a greater degree joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm, is all about.
I was reminded of Pollen’s observations last week when I had an official “farm audit” by the Department of Agriculture. The examiner couldn’t hide his amazement (and exasperation) at the fact that on 20 acres of land we grow over 80 crops (I didn’t have the heart to tell him how many varieties of each crop we grow—I didn’t think he could handle it!). He finally looked at me and said, “Most farms grow one or two crops—how do you do it? How do you keep track of everything?” Well, as I told him, it’s not easy. It is radically different from the single-crop, “efficient” approach used by huge, agri-business corporate farms. But maybe we would do well to head Pollen’s suggestion that there is something wrong with our modern assessment of the word “efficient.”
“Efficient,” our grammarians will tell us, is a word in need of an object. That is to say, “efficient” simply means the expeditious attainment of some purpose or goal. On large, corporate farms (whether organic or not organic) when the word “efficient” is used it seems to always be used in relation to the goal of making more money. Of course farmers have to make money. But couldn’t one have other goals whose attainment (or not) could be a standard for “efficiency”?
Most small organic farms have as a goal farming “sustainably.” This means many things: keeping energy inputs as low as possible (not just as low as is “economical”); growing as large of a diversity of crops as possible to preserve soil fertility and avoid the need for pesticides (even though it’s easier and, in the short run, more profitable to grow one or two crops); using cover crops after each cash crop to enhance soil quality (an expense that large farms rarely accept); growing one’s own fertilizer by growing compost crops and/or animals for manure (even though, again, it is cheaper and easier to buy fertilizer by the bag!).
Pollen’s book is, I believe, accurate, informative, and very readable. It also makes the strong case that we “vote” with our food dollars, and that the best vote is to support local, organic, diversified, small-family farms when ever and as much as we can.
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