The Omnivore’s Dilemma

I know I’m months behind other blogs talking about this book, but I just finished reading it the other day. This book, by Michael Pollan, is a must read for people interested in things this blog discusses.

I will never think the same way about what I eat again. Like some other blogs have said, where do you start to talk about it. There is so much information, and so many juicy facts, assertions and conclusions that it’s hard to know which are really my favorites.

First of all the book is primarily about food production in the US, but many parallels can be drawn no matter where you live, for example:

“Yet the potential boon of falling raw material prices — which should allow you to sell a lot more of your product at a lower price — can’t be realized in the case of food because of the special nature of your consumer, who can only eat so much food, no matter how cheap it gets.”

And then:

“What this means for the food industry is that the natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year — 1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is 1 percent will never satisfy Wall Street, which demands at the very least a 10 percent return on it’s capital.

This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald’s with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the food industry energetically pursues them both at the same time.”

Add to this the current farming and farm subsidy policies that have created a massive surplus of all types of food, but particularly grains like corn, and low and behold we all start getting fat.

The book explains how the surplus of corn came about in a similar way to what happened with coffee that I posted about before. Before WWII there was a sustainable and environmentally friendly system of crop rotation where farmers could save and replant their own seeds. Along came seed companies that first created F1 hybrid and later GM varieties both with higher yields. The trade off is you have to purchase these seeds from the seed companies every year instead of saving and replanting your seed. and use more pesticides and fertilizers that also had to be purchased every year from the same seed companies. At first this seemed like a good deal, because the profits from the higher yields more than offset the additional costs, but then the market became flooded with the excess corn, driving prices down to rock bottom levels meaning it was impossible to get a return on your investment.

It is a sad reality that after taking into account all government subsidies and monies paid for their crops, it costs Iowa corn farmers more to grow their crops than they receive. For those who choose to continue farming, they must simply make up the difference by taking a loan or working a second job. All they can do is try to grow a little bit more to try to minimize their losses, which of course floods the market further. The only ones that profit are the seed companies, who sell the seed and chemicals, and the food companies. Of course there is no way any farmer can make any money by returning to growing the older varieties of corn, even though that’s what many people would prefer to eat.

So what happens to this mountain of surplus corn that is grown every year in the US? In recent years technologies have been developed to process corn into an amazing number of foods and food additives, which are familiar to most of us: vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, ethanol (for beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, xanthan gum, modified and unmodified starches, dextrins, cyclodextrins and MSG. These are just a few and there are others. So many additives in fact, that it is almost impossible to find any processed food in the US that doesn’t have some corn in it. In addition to all of this better living through chemistry, almost all meat production in the US is based on corn. They have even developed a GM strain of salmon that can be raised on corn.

Corn is also made into many consumer products like automotive fuel and plastics.

The processing of corn is not without environmental costs. There are huge pollution problems caused by excessive antibiotic, pesticide and fertilizer use, the ‘manure lagoons’ and antibiotic resistant superbug infections generated by factory animal farms and where crops are grown topsoil is being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Above all, this whole system of processing grain is enormously energy and water intensive, and most of the energy comes from petroleum products. The US food industry consumes more fossil fuels than automobiles do every year. Fertilizers are made from natural gas. Huge amounts of energy are spent powering tractors and transporting all of these products around. Distribution is centralized, so products often travel large distances unnecessarily. Huge amounts of water are consumed by crops, livestock and all of the various processing plants.

As we were discussing on another blog recently, ethanol produced for automobiles in the US takes almost twice as much energy to produce than what is contained in the final product and running vehicals on ethanol is known to reduce air quality.

On the economic side of things, the key to getting us to pay more for food is usually to processes or improve it. If grain is turned into meat, as consumers we pay more for the original grain this way. The same is of course true if a fast food restaurant prepares the food for us, we would all expect to pay more. The phasing out of old foods, and introduction of new ‘improved’ ones is something we are all familiar with. There is also an increasing trend to get us to pay for certification like ‘Fair Trade’ or ‘Organic’.

What about getting us to eat more? This is a much trickier proposition, but the food companies have it figured out. One of the most important is the secret of supersized portions. It’s a fact that people eat about 30% more food if it’s in front of them and available to eat. When, for example, McDonalds offers us an extra large portion of fries (or maybe a large drink) for just a few cents more than we would pay for a normal size, McDonalds gets a little more money out of us and we end up eating more fries than we would otherwise eat. This principle is used by almost anyone who sells food, from supermarkets to restaurants.

Another trick to get us to eat more is substituting one product for another. For example since the 1980s soft drinks in the US have been made with high fructose corn syrup instead of normal sugar. You would think this would just be a direct replacement of one sweetener for another, but in fact that’s not the case. Since the 1980s consumption of normal sugar in the US has actually increased slightly, not decreased. That means people in the US are not only eating all the sugar they used to, they are eating all of this high fructose corn syrup on top of that!

Of course the food industry loves it when there is a new food craze; Atkin’s diet, Holywood diet, low fat, low calorie, whatever it is. It gives them a chance to make new and exciting foods, so we will eat more of them. Of course the food industry has it’s hand in what we are taught as well. For example, the constantly being rewritten food pyramid in the US.

In Europe we now have the eat more fruit and vegetable campaign. Never are we advised to eat less food, only more of the ‘right’ foods. This by the way is not in the book, but I thought it was relavent.

Some facts revealed by the book:

• 19%, or almost 1 in 5, meals in the US are eaten in the car.
• 1 in 3 children eat fast food every day in the US
• 1 in 3 children born today will develop type II diabetes in their lifetime
• It takes 38 different ingredients to make a McDonalds chicken McNugget, at least 13 of which are made from corn
• McDonalds french fries are made from 40% corn.
• For every $1 spent on food in the US, the middlemen, processors and supermarkets get 93 cents. The farmer only gets 7 cents.

We’ve all heard the stories about what livestock gets fed, everything from sewage to meat and bone meal from the same species. We all know it matters what animals eat. What has come out recently in different studies, is that in fact animals raised on corn and other grains may also produce meat that is very unhealthy for us. The Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a press release saying how much healthier grass fed beef and dairy products were to eat, not just for the animals but for us too.

Much of the remainder of the book is devoted to discussing the hijacking of the term ‘Organic’ by the food industry, as well as discussing several different systems for raising foods in a more natural way, including grass fed animals, with an emphasis on local distribution systems. He discusses how biologically we all have certain instincts for what is good to eat and what isn’t, how food companies have very effectively learned to manipulate these, and how this is probably contributing to the disintegration of eating customs like families sitting down and eating together and a multitude of other eating disorders. All of this is just as interesting as the earlier chapters, but writing about them is just too much for one blog post, and less relevant to the general subject matter of this blog. I am going to let you read about them yourself.