Top Quotes: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — Michael Pollan
Background: I’ve heard about this book for years and have been wanting to better understand things like what makes food organic or why small farms of the past have been replaced by industrial farms. Pollan traces four meals from their very beginnings in crop form to their presentation on a dinner plate and contrasts how different the process of making a fully organic meal is vs. putting together a McDonalds hamburger. Everyone who eats ;) should read this as it really clearly explains how food in America is made and is very thought-provoking.
Corn
“Corn feeds animals that become meat. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt come from animals that eat 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’ll find. More than 1/4 of items in the average American supermarket (including non-edible items) are made with corn.”
“The food industry has done a good job of convincing us that the 45,000 different items in the supermarket — 17,000 new ones every year — represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”
“Corn is able to recruit more atoms of carbon between each instance of photosynthesis than other plants, allowing it to store more calories.”
“It makes just as much sense to regard agriculture as a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on the part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests. By evolving certain traits we happen to regard as desirable, these species got themselves noticed by one mammal in a position not only to spread their genes around the world, but to remark large swathes of that world in the image of the plant’s preferred habitat. No species has reaped more from agriculture than corn.”
“Colonists saw that no other plant could produce food quite as fast as Indian corn. Its prodigious genetic variability allows it to adapt rapidly to new environments too.”
“Corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsided during their passage to America.”
“One small corn farmer is effectively feeding some 129 Americans.”
“Soybeans are fed to livestock and find their way into two-thirds of all processed foods.”
“Despite being a rural state, a mere 2% of Iowa’s land remains what it used to be (tall grass prairie) — every square foot of the rest having been completely remade by men.”
“In 1920s Iowa, farmers grew a diversity of crops and could feed themselves and withstand a collapse in the market for any particular crop. Everyone had livestock outside, so large parts of farms would be green year-round. Now, from the October harvest to the emergence of the corn in mid-May, much of Iowa is black — vast plowed fields. As corn yields began to soar in the ’50s, the temptation was to give the miracle crop more and more land. Almost every farmer in America thought the same thing so the price declined. The cheap corn made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass and to raise chickens in giant factories rather than farmyards. Wherever the price of corn slipped, farmers planted a little more of it to lower expenses and stay even. By the ’80s, the diversified family farm was history in Iowa.”
“It doesn’t take long to raise modern corn so farms got bigger and the people went elsewhere.”
“Synthetic fertilizer is possible because of fixing nitrogen — splitting its atoms and bonding it to hydrogen. 2 out of every 5 humans alive today would not be alive without this invention because it has allowed us to feed billions of people. This ability also shifted the basis of soil fertility from a total reliance on solar energy to a new reliance on fossil fuels. Every bushel of individual corn requires the equivalent of between 1/4 and 1/3 of a gallon of oil to grow it.”
“New Deal farm programs gave farmers loans in exchange for them waiting to sell their corn until there was enough demand. Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture in the ’70s began a new program of paying farmers directly for shortfalls in prices of corn — which now makes up more than 1/2 of net farm income and actually subsidizes the buyers of all the cheap corn, like Coca-Cola.”
“3 out of every 5 kernels grown in the U.S. ends up on a factory farm of food animals.”
“The urbanization of America’s animal population (moving them from widely dispersed farms to densely populated animal cities) would never have taken place if not for the advent of cheap federally subsidized corn.”
“Cattle are exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass but now must be adapted on factory farms — at considerable cost to their health, to the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters — to live on corn because it offers the cheapest calories around and because the great pile [of produced corn] must be consumed.”
“Four giant meatpacking companies now slaughter 4 out of every 5 beef cattle born in this country.”
“Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet. In the early 1900s, cows were slaughtered at age 4–5, now it’s at age 1.”
“Corn-fed meat contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass — many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-feed beef.”
“Most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed, a practice that is leading directly to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.”
“You would be hard-pressed to find a processed food that isn’t made from corn or soybeans. The longer the ingredient label on a food, the higher fraction of corn and soybeans you’ll find in it.”
“Of a dollar spent on a whole food like eggs, 40 cents finds its way back to the farmer vs. 4 cents for processed food. When Tyson food scientists devised the chicken nugget in 1983, most of the money Americans spend on chicken moved from the farmer’s pocket to the processor’s.”
“‘Natural raspberry flavor’ doesn’t mean the flavor came from a raspberry; it may well have been derived from corn, just not something synthetic.”
“After corn whiskey suddenly became overabundant and cheap in the early 1800s, Americans began drinking more than they had ever before or since — 5 gallons of spirits per person per year. The figure today is <1 gallon.”
“Why? Farmers were producing too much corn so they turned it into whiskey which was cheap because it was available in excess. We’re eating today much the way we drank then, for some of the same reasons.”
“The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes had to be renamed type 2 diabetes because it now occurs so frequently in children.”
“In 2000, the number of people suffering from overnutrition surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition in the world.”
“When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it.”
“By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup because it was cheaper and consumers didn’t seem to notice. We began swilling a lot more soda because it was cheaper per ounce as supersize sodas were marketed.”
“We subsidize high-fructose corn syrup and not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the President is signing farm bills guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.”
“1 in 3 Americans eat fast food every day.”
“Even though ethanol diminishes air quality, new federal mandates pushed by the corn processors require refineries in California to help eat the corn surplus by diluting their gas with 10% ethanol.”
“At McDonalds, a soda is 100% made of corn, a milkshake is 70% made of corn, chicken nuggets are 56% made of corn, a cheeseburger is 52% made of corn, and fries are 23% made of corn.”
Grass
“Our species’ coevolutionary alliance with the grasses has deep roots and has probably done more to ensure our success as a species than any other alliance.”
“Hunter-gatherers deliberately promoted the welfare of grasses to attract and fatten the animals they depended upon.”
“If the 16 million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the U.S. became well-managed grass pasture, that would remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as taking 4 million cars off the road.”
“Animals raised outdoors on grass have a diet much like that of the wild animals humans have been eating at least since the Paleolithic era. So it makes evolutionary sense that grass-fed meat is healthier for us. It’s higher in omega-3s, lower in saturated fat, and grass-feed beef may be less harmful to us than farm-fed salmon. Some hunter-gatherer populations today eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.”
The Forest
“Typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than 17 hours per week and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturalists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.”
“Zoologists theorize that the koala once ate a more varied and mentally taxing diet than the eucalyptus leaves it eats now and as it evolved toward the present, its underemployed brain shrank to its current tiny size.”
“The cow depends on the ingenious adaptation of the rumen in its guts to turn an exclusive diet of grasses into a balanced meal; we depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to identify inedible or poisonous foods or identify an edible mushroom and share that information with others.”
“Benjamin Franklin said, ‘The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you do.’”
“Human hunting literally helped form the American Plains bison which did not live in herds and had much larger outstretched horns (not suitable for close proximity with other bison) before the arrival of the Indians.”
“We don’t know the most basic things about mushrooms because you can’t dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelia are too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintegrating.”
“Fungi decompose and recycle organic matter. Without fungi to break things down, the earth would have long ago suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter created by plants and living things would run out of things to eat.”
