I have been watching Michael Pollan for a while and have ordered his book. A review to follow, in the meant time…
Sunday, April 30, 2006
JOHN FOYSTON
The Oregonian
We sing of amber waves of grain, but Michael Pollan makes a strong case
that American agriculture is a yellow flood of corn floating on dwindling
lakes of oil.
“When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain . . . I expected
that my investigation would lead me to a wide variety of places,” Pollan
writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals “(But) at the very end of these food chains, I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. The great
edifice of variety and choice that is the American supermarket turns out to
rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation . . . dominated by a
single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as
corn.”
You’ll never again look at corn the same way after reading Pollan’s book,
just as you’ll gain a healthy respect for the powers of intellect that
omnivory developed in our distant ancestors. Being able to eat almost
anything requires memory, the ability to learn and civilization in the form
of tradition and taboo: “You can’t eat those mushrooms” or “Bugs are
disgusting.”
That’s the omnivore’s dilemma, and it’s become thornier of late. Pollan says
his book is a 464-page answer to the once-simple question of what shall we
eat. Using the recent low-carb craze that banned bread, pasta and rice –
considered by societies throughout history as staple foods — he asks why
that question has become so complicated.
We’re lucky to have a writer and thinker of Pollan’s clarity and imagination
on the case. Instead of citing statistic and study, Pollan traces four food
chains — industrial, industrial organic, sustainably farmed and
hunted/gathered — from source to table.
For the meal whose ingredients were as local as possible, Pollan gathered
mushrooms and salad greens and baked bread fermented by airborne yeast. He
learned to shoot, pondered the ethics of hunting and carnivory, then hunted
and killed a wild pig. He doesn’t claim that hunting/gathering is a viable
option, but is it much less so than an industrial food juggernaut that burns
10 calories of oil for every calorie of food energy created?
The costs of a food chain founded upon cheap energy, chemicals and an
oversupply of cheap corn go beyond the oil consumed. Our corn monoculture is
a disaster for almost everyone. American farmers are going broke, our soil,
water and health are being degraded, cattle live in vast compounds eating
food they were never evolved to digest, and our citizenry grows ever fatter
as we eat our way through the corn glut.
(Little is eaten as yellow kernels. Instead, we eat it as ingredients and
sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup: each of us swills 66 pounds of
HFCS a year.)
The glut is a boon for corporations such as Cargill and Archer Daniels
Midland, which sell the chemicals, feed and seed, who buy and process the
corn, slaughter the livestock and transport food. And it’s a boon for the
corn itself, Pollan says.
“Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated
by Homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly — has
colonized more acres and bodies — than Zea mays, the grass that
domesticated its domesticator.”
Pollan speaks at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, May 11, at the Jean Vollum Natural
Capital Center, 721 N.W. Ninth Ave. Tickets are $35. To register, go to
www.ecotrust.com.
John Foyston: 503-221-8368; johnfoyston@news.oregonian.com
About the Author...
Joanne Hay, Editor of Nourished Magazine, Chief Nourisher and Mother of three is very grateful to live in Byron Bay and be able to share all she has learned about Nourishment. She has trained as an Acupuncturist (unfinished), Kinesiologist (finished) and parent (never finished). She serves the Weston A Price Foundation as a chapter leader. She loves sauerkraut, kangaroo tail stew, home made ice cream, her husband Wes and her kids Isaiah, Brynn and Ronin (in no particular order…well maybe ice cream first).
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