Everything you find in a supermarket begins with a particular plant growing in a specific patch of soil somewhere on earth.
To answer “what should I eat?” we might have to answer “what am I even eating?”
It turns out a lot of the time, your food started as corn.
Corn converts carbon dioxide to C-4, unlike most plants which convert to C-3. This makes corn more efficient, and helps to explain its success in the competition for energy.
“So that’s us: processed corn, walking.”
Corn also dries easily for transport and storage, making it both food and commodity.
Corn would die without people – the genetic mutations that make corn so appealing to us (cob-and-husk arrangement, large kernels) makes it unsuited for the wild.
Corn is now grown mostly as a monoculture – the only crop on a farm. Historically, farmers would have diversified crops and livestock. Now, specialization makes that unprofitable.
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer makes it possible to grow corn year after year.
But making fertilizer takes fossil fuels, so now corn farming does too.
Nearly half of net farm income comes from government subsidies.
By subsidizing corn, the government keeps prices artificially low and supply artificially high. There is more corn than the market would normally bear.
Most American-grown corn ends up in a factory farm, mostly for cows.
Cows are not natural corn-eaters, but they are fed corn anyway, along with beef byproducts (cows are herbivores). Grass-fed beef is healthier.
“So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass- powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.”
There is only so much food a person can eat, meaning that food companies have difficulty growing faster than the population. The only ways to do it? Increase profit margins, or get people to eat more.
“There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.”
Americans drank more from 1790 to 1840 than they ever have before or since – more than five times as much as they do now. The favorite drink at the time? Corn whiskey. Why? Because then, as now, we grew a ton of corn.
Now, we turn excess corn into high fructose corn syrup.
Part 2: Grass
Isaiah 40:6 – “All flesh is grass.”
For chickens to be free range, they must be allowed access to the outside. But the inside can be exactly like any industrial chicken farm, and the chickens don’t even have to leave.
60s counterculture embraced a back-to-the-land ethic of organic farming, environmentalism, and so on.
English agronomist Sir Albert Howard laid the philosophical foundations for the organic movement, later lionized in the magazine Organic Gardening and Farming.
Howard’s philosophy fought against the “NPK” mentality (the idea that agriculture can be industrialized by understanding the chemical nutrients for optimal plant growth – nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium).
Today, Howard’s organic ideas are mainstream. But the idea has been lost somewhat, as “industrial organic farming” for markets like Whole Foods is no longer an oxymoron.
“This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s just lunch.”
Grass-fed beef requires constant rotation to fresh grass. But while this is management intensive, the food chain is very straightforward: sun -> grass -> cow.
On slaughtering chickens: “That feeling, perhaps more than any other, was disconcerting: how quickly you can get used to anything, especially when the people around you think nothing of it.”
Part 3: Foraging
“There is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain.”
As omnivores, humans can eat just about anything – or at least, they can try it.
While humans have some biological dispositions telling us what to eat (sweet things good, bitter things bad), they only take us so far.
Much of what people eat has to come from culture – we learn what to eat from other people who have tried them, and through trial and error we create cuisines.
Often, but not always, cuisines have a biological basis for combining certain foods. But it’s often hard to trace what that basis was, or who (if anyone) discovered it.
America, with such a decentralized culture, struggles with major swings of “food faddism.”
Pollan then talks at some length about the philosophical arguments for vegetarianism. (I skimmed this section since I am already convinced by the arguments in favor of vegetarianism.)
Factory farming is indefensible, when considering the vast pain and suffering inflicted on these animals.
Pollan hypothesizes that cannabinoid receptors in the brain seem very well suited for hunting – like marijuana, hunting induces focus, a weak of sense of time, and hunger.
The book wants the reader to think about these things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. What it really cost.
Nick Beachy 