Book Surgeon No. 4

Where does our food come from? When was the last time you thought seriously about this question? Michael Pollan’s deep dive into the uncomfortable truth of our food system may not be for the faint of heart but offers incredibly unique insights into what is perhaps the most important good on our planet—food. The book is broken into three main sections, each focusing on one of the three main food supply chains that feed our country: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. 

In part one, Pollan investigates the industrial food chain by following “a bushel of commodity corn from the field of Iowa where it grew on its long, strange journey to its ultimate destination in a fast-food meal, eaten in a car on a highway in Marin County, California.”

In part two, Pollan “explores some of the alternatives to industrial food and farming that have sprung up in recent years (variously called ‘organic’, ‘local’, ‘biological’, and ‘beyond organic’), food chains that might appear to be preindustrial but in surprising ways turn out in fact to be postindustrial.” To do so, this section features two very different “‘organic’ meals: one whose ingredients came from [a] local Whole Foods supermarket (gathered there from as far away as Argentina), and the other tracing its origins to a single poly culture of grasses growing at Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia.”

In part three, Pollan “follows a kind of neo-Paleolithic food chain from the forests of Northern California to a meal [he] prepared (almost) exclusively from ingredients [he] hunted, gathered, and grew [himself],” which allows for a profound comparison to how we eat most of our food today. Confronting animals’ blood on his own hands, Pollan spends part of this section introducing the current philosophical considerations of eating meat, illustrating some of the dilemmas that arose as he killed, prepared, and consumed a live animal. 

Across the book’s three parts, by tracing four distinct meals to their origins, Pollan sheds light on a critical conclusion with implications for health, nutrition, national policy, and individual food philosophy: “at either end of any food chain you find a biological system—a patch of soil, a human body—and the health of one is connected—literally—to the health of the other. Many of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific government policies few of us know anything about.” 

If we could explicitly see and understand how much of our food is currently produced, we would surely change our eating habits. Knowing this, the industrial food system and its largest corporate beneficiaries spend a ton of money and effort keeping us in the dark. What are natural preservatives? Artificial preservatives? What does organic even mean? Should we exclusively eat grass-fed meat? Is it worth the higher price? Is raw or pasteurized milk better for our health? Creating consumer confusion is extremely profitable since it allows industrial food producers to take advantage of our insecurity and to market an excessive number of food products. In turn, The Omnivore’s Dilemma offers a small but powerful opportunity to have an honest conversation with our source of energy and life, advocating not for a particular eating behavior but rather more transparency around the food we eat every single day. 

I greatly enjoy Pollan’s journalistic style and would recommend anyone interested in the details of our current food system to pick up The Omnivore’s Dilemma. However, my overall hope is to spark a general curiosity to confront our food choices and to better understand our food’s journeys to our plates since, ultimately, we are what we eat.