May 2006 | Whole Life Review
The Trouble with Corn
Writer and food detective Michael Pollan explains how our food chain is fattening America and melting the planet
by Ellie Winninghoff
As an author, former Harper’s editor and contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan has taught us a lot about our food. He uncovered that the Environmental Protection Agency classifies certain genetically modified potatoes as pesticides, traced the devolution of American cattle farming over the last three generations (thus popularizing grass-fed meat) and described the New Organic Industrial Complex (not exactly what you may think it is). Pollan, author of the acclaimed “plant’s eye view of the world,” Botany of Desire, has invented a whole new field of inquiry: food detective.
His latest book continues the lessons. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press, $26.95) traces four land-based food chains—industrial, industrial organic, grass-fed (also called “beyond organic”) and hunter-gatherer—from their points of origin to your dinner table. Part food critic, part wry social commentator, Pollan mixes history, science, ecology, economics, adventure, feisty characters and common sense. The result is nothing less than the Silent Spring of its genre—a sort of Fast Food Nation 2.0.
This time, though, the story’s not beef—it’s corn. In fact, beef is corn. Corn feeds the steer that becomes beef. It feeds the cow that produces milk, which is turned into cheese and yogurt. Corn feeds chickens. It feeds the hens that lay eggs. It feeds pigs, turkeys, lamb, tilapia, catfish and increasingly—gasp!—salmon (farmed, not wild). These animals—who evolved to eat grass and other wild vegetation—must now take supplements and drugs in order to digest their all-corn diet.
The production of corn and corn-fed meat is one of the driving forces behind carbon emissions and global warming. In fact, Pollan writes, the production and transport of our food now accounts for 20 percent of this country’s total fossil fuel consumption, or 1/3 of man-made carbon emissions globally.
But that’s just the beginning. Take a chicken McNugget at McDonald’s. Each little nugget has 38 separate ingredients. Thirteen are corn-derived. In deadpan prose, Pollan recounts the tongue-twisting name of each lab-concocted corn product. Yummy.
He even goes so far as to have his family’s drive-through McDonald’s lunch scientifically tested to determine precisely the amount of corn it contains (not to give anything away, but it’s… a lot). Turns out, too, that even “healthy” products like the widely touted Paul Newman’s salad dressing line are made with the ubiquitous (and cheap) corn-derived ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn syrup and cornstarch. Also of note: In the 1980s, Coke and Pepsi quietly switched from sugar to the less expensive HFCS—about the same time portion sizes inflated, taking America’s obesity rate with them. Today, over 25 percent of the 45,000 items in the supermarket contain corn in one form or another.
Pollan compares four meals: the aforementioned McDonald’s lunch, a dinner made from ingredients bought at a Whole Foods Market, another dinner put together with items from a sustainable farm in Virginia and a feast of foods that Pollan himself foraged or hunted (including wild boar). So what are his major revelations? Well, for one thing, of course, it’s just how many of the ingredients in the industrial food supply are nothing other than subsidized corn (“welfare queen,” some Iowa farmers derisively call the crop). The federal government may warn on the one hand about America’s obesity and health problems, but its other hand is shelling out $20 billion per year to finance the continuity of the corn culture.
That’s just the direct cost, of course—the price of paying off industrial farmers. It doesn’t include the cost of pollution (which Pollan describes to some extent but does not price). Nor does it include the extra health care costs we all bear for the Republic of Fat, or the cost of going to Iraq in order to sustain the transportation fuels our food supply demands.
Organic Suspicions
How “organic” is the organic industrial food complex, really? Pollan raises doubts. Rosie’s Organic Chicken, for example, operates from a place called Petaluma Farm. But the digs more resemble a military barracks—an animal city otherwise known as a Confined Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. And CAFOs, Pollan reports, are dangerous places for animals that don’t imbibe antibiotics. The safety of organic food (generally safer than industrial food for a variety of reasons) is more precarious in an industrial system.
Then there’s Earthbound Farms (annual sales, $350 million), which Pollan deems industrial organic at its best. The company’s founders helped dethrone nutrition-devoid iceberg lettuce when they invented mixed salad greens in a bag. Pollan just can’t help mentioning that the company washes these “organic” greens in “lightly chlorinated” water.
But what really throws him for a loop is the stupendous amount of energy required to run the high-tech machines that pick the crops, chill the greens and pack and transport them in refrigerated trucks. He quotes Cornell ecologist David Pimental, who calculated it takes 57 calories of fossil fuels to transport one calorie of simple greens. “The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produce[s] a certain cognitive dissonance,” Pollan pronounces.
So is an organic dinner better than its conventional counterpart? It depends. It’s true, for example, that organic tomatoes generally register higher Brix scores, meaning they contain less water and more sugar (and thus flavor). But Pollan the food critic believes freshly picked conventional produce tastes better than organic that has been “riding the interstate for three days.” In fact—and this might sound like blasphemy to those loyal to the gospel of organic at all costs—Pollan contends there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that industrially raised monocrop “organic” is all that much better for your health than conventionally raised foods.
Nonetheless, there is hope. Pollan points to farmers like Michael Ableman, advocates for the “beyond organic” movement. Pollan brings us along on a visit to Virginia-based Polyface Farms, which he calls a “post-industrial enterprise.” While not technically organic, he finds it far more sustainable than most organic farms. Polyface owner Joel Salatin calls himself a “grass farmer.” But what he does is orchestrate a dance where he says the animals do all the work. The annual production is staggering. On 100 acres (plus 450 acres of woodland), Polyface produces 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits and 35,000 eggs.
And as far as Pollan can ascertain, the animals there live happy lives as they roam outside and feed on grass. Because they eat a variety of natural wild foods sources, their meat is healthier than the meat of industrially raised animals (both conventional or organic)—in fact, nutritionally-speaking, it’s almost an entirely different product. In grazing, these animals leave behind a pasture that’s been ecologically enriched rather than destroyed, countering global warming. It’s enough to incite Pollan to re-consider the ethics of meat eating.
Thought for Food
The industrial, industrial-organic and grass-fed sections of this book are chock full of investigative surprises. As for the hunter-gatherer section, it’s so decidedly different in tone that it’s almost a separate book, essentially boiling down to a highly personal (albeit amusing) adventure. The section on foraging mushrooms is lively, useful and informative, but I found myself a bit bored wending my way through the philosophy and ethics of eating meat, and I wondered why Pollan paid so little attention to the fish question. Overall, however, Omnivore’s Dilemma raises many essential questions, and is a must-read for anybody who cares about food, sustainability or health or simply wants to be a more conscious and considered eater.
Ellie Winninghoff is a freelance writer and former director of Slow Food Seattle.
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