The Omnivores Dilemma by Pollan

Ref: Michael Pollan (2006). The Omnivores Dilemma. Penguin Books.

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Summary­

  • An in-depth review of the science, economics, and psychology behind modern food markets and eating habits with a focus on the ground-truth of where our food actually comes from.

  • The 99 cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost- to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves.

  • “We should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture the solar energy.” One of the principles of modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible farmers should rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured every day by the photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum. “All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a food product that can then be turned into high-value human energy. There are only two efficient ways to do this,” he wrote in his column. “One is for you to walk out in your garden, pull a carrot and eat it. This is a direct transfer of solar energy to human energy. The second most efficient way is for you to send an animal out to gather this free solar food and then you eat the animal.

  • You hear plenty of explanations for humanity’s expanding waist-line, all of them plausible. Changes in lifestyle (we’re more sedentary; we eat out more). Affluence (more people can afford a high fat Western diet). Poverty (healthier whole foods cost more). Technology (fewer of us use our bodies in our work; at home, the remote control keeps us pinned to the couch). Clever marketing (supersized portions; advertising to children). Changes in diet (more fats; carbohydrates; more processed foods).

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Ecology

  • Ecology teaches that all life on Earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules.

    • Food Chain: A system for passing those calories on to species that lack the plant’s unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.

  • When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it- or around 50 gal of oil per acre of corn.

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Fertilizer

  • Haber-Bosch process: Combines N and H gases under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious amounts of electricity, and the H is supplied by oil, coal, or, most commonly today, natural gas- fossil fuels.

  • The N used by plants in nature is fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which trades a tiny drip of sugar for the N the plant needs.

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Corn aka Maize

  • Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are re-engineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh” can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980’s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.

  • Each of the 400 to 800 flowers on a cob has the potential to develop into a kernel- but only if a grain of pollen can find its way to its ovary, a task complicated by the distance the pollen has to travel and the intervening husk in which the cob is tightly wrapped. To surmount this last problem, each flower sends out through the tip of the husk a single, sticky strand of silk (technically its “style”) to snag its own grain of pollen. The silks emerge from the husks on the very day the tassel is set to shower its yellow dust. What happens next is very strange. After a grain of pollen has fallen through the air and alighted on the moistened tip of silk, its nucleus divides in two, creating a pair of twins, each with the same set of genes but a completely different role to perform in the create of the kernel. The first twin’s job is to tunnel a microscopic tube down through the center of the silk thread. That accomplished, its clone slides down through the tunnel, past the husk, and into the waiting flower, a journey of between 6-8 inches that takes several hours to complete. Upon arrival in the flower the second twin fuses with the egg to form the embryo- the germ of the future kernel. Then the first twin follows, entering the now fertilized flower, where it sets about forming the endosperm- the big, starchy part of the kernel. Every kernel of corn is the product of this intricate ménage a trois; the tiny, stunted kernel you often see at the narrow end of a cob are flowers whose silk no pollen grain ever penetrated. Within a day of conception, the now superfluous silk dries up, eventually turning reddish brown; fifty or so days later, the kernels are mature.

  • Corn supplies the carbohydrates (sugar and starches) and soy the protein; the fat can come from either plant.

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Fungi

  • Fungi: Lack chlorophyll and differ from plants in that they can't manufacture food energy from the sun. Like animals, they feed on organic matter made by plants, or by plant eaters obtaining nutrients by absorbing organic compounds from their surroundings through a network- or mycelium- of fine hyphae.

  • Most of the fungi we eat obtain their energy by one of two means:

    • Saprophytically: Decomposition of dead vegetable matter (logs, manure, grain)- common white mushrooms, Shitakes, cremini, portobello’s, and oyster mushrooms.

    • Mycorrhizal: Association of Fungi with the roots of living plants.

  • Mushroom spores trickle out of openings on the underside of the cap, where they are sheltered from the rain so that they don’t get wet and clump together. The cap itself transpires water vapor, cooling the air around the mushroom just a little bit. The cooled air around the edge of the cap sinks slightly, taking the spores with it, and then warms up again in the surrounding air. Both the warmed air and the spores now waft out and up about 4 inches above the cap. All it takes is a tiny breeze to carry the tiny passengers away.

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Food Processing

  • One problem with selling whole foods is that it will always be hard to distinguish one company’s corn or chicken or apples from any other companies. It makes much more sense to turn the corn into a brand-name cereal, the chicken into a TV dinner, and the apples into a component in a nutraceutical food system.

  • Chicken Nuggets: A mix of…

    • Chicken Meat

    • Mono-, Tri-, and Diglycerides & Lecithin: Emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating

    • Dextrose: Added sugar, for taste.

    • Chicken Broth: To restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out.

    • Yellow corn flour and modified cornstarch: For the batter, the filler, and to bind pulverized chicken meat.

    • Leavening Agents- Na-Al-PO3, Mono-Ca-PO3, Na-acid-pyro-PO3, Ca-lactate: Antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid.

    • Dimethylpolysiloxane: Anti-foaming agents added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry.

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High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

  • Yet since the human desire for sweeteners surpasses even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into 33lbs of HFCS. That at least is what we’re doing with about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest- turning it into 17.5 billion lbs of HFCS.

  • Since 1985, an American’s annual consumption of HFCS has gone from 45lbs to 66lbs.

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Organic & Sustainable Foods

  • Davis researchers found that organic and otherwise sustainably grown fruits and vegetables contained significantly higher levels of both ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and a wide range of polyphenols.

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Misc Quotes

  • Until his death in 1993, Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald's, but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn -- the high-markup items that theaters depend on for their profitability. As the story is told in John Love's official history of McDonald's, Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales -- two-for-one deals, matinee specials -- but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish. Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the 64 oz Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the Jumbo fries.

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Chronology

  • 1926: General Mills is founded as a mill selling whole wheat flour- ground wheat. When that product became a cheap commodity, the company kept ahead of its competition by processing the grain a bit more, creating bleached and then “enriched” flour.-Omnivores Dilemma by Pollan.

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