The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 4

The final meal prepared by author Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma is hunted and gathered. Upon moving to Northern California, he connects with some folks who still understand the woods and the wild. So Pollan embarks on a pig hunt, becoming the predator in a food chain that starts with oak trees that take energy from the sun to produce acorns which the wild pigs feast upon. He also hunts for mushrooms, adding fungi into the mix.

Pollan gathered cherries in Berkeley and some wild greens from the surrounding hills. He made sourdough bread using yeast from the air itself, which I'd never heard of doing -- simply exposing the dough mixture to air through an open window. The yeast spores are everpresent, apparently.

It was fascinating to contemplate the evolution of the original hunter/gatherer humans, their diets changing as they moved from treetops to savanah and then on to fertile deltas where crops could be grown, and then animals domesticated for consumption. The rise of seed corn as a commodity in the 20th century saw huge increases in the planet's population. By the end of the 20th century, cheap processed food fed the poorest of the poor, while the wealthy began looking for "organics" and "alternative food sources." Pollan hints that of the two species -- corn and homo sapiens, the former may be the real driving force of nature.

One thing is for sure -- there are many more dilemmas involved in eating than one suspects. Most of us engage in rather mindless eating without doing much thinking about the where and the how of the food that is before us. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a must read!

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Part 3 (the meme)

I've been tagged by Pho, tagged as in "for a meme" a term I had to look up and found that it is something like a chain letter only not linked to any threats of dire fortune if one doesn't keep it going. It's more of a controlled random way of forging blog links, so I don't mind participating one bit -- especially since it turns out to be total serendipity here at the Village Green.

The meme's instructions are:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
   
2. Open to page 123, go down to the 4th sentence.
   
3. Post the text of the following 3 sentences on your blog.
   
4. Name of the book and the author.
   
5. Tag three people of your own.

I'm glad to do this because the book right in front of me is -- as you might expect -- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It is at hand because I'm about to post my third comment in a row, takin g a look at the Pastoral Grass food chain. Page 123 turns out to be the first page of that section in a chapter called All Flesh is Grass. Here are the three sentences:

"I was tired. I'd spent the afternoon making hay, really just lending a hand to a farmer making hay, and after a few hours in the midday sun hoisting and throwing fifty-pound bales onto a hay wagon, I hurt. We think of grass as soft and hospitable stuff, but once it's been dried in the sun and shredded by machines--once it's become hay--grass is sharp enough to draw blood and dusty enough to thicken lungs." (Omnivore's Dilemma, p 123)

This was my favorite section of the book -- the chapter on Polyface Farm in Virginia. The farm raises chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, rabbits, and pigs, as well as tomatoes, sweet corn, and berries in a unique configuration of animal and crop rotations. This all happens on one hundred acres of pasture plus 450 acres of forest. The guy who runs it calls himself a "grass farmer" and his name is Joe Salatin. A fascinating fellow! But even more so is his way of farming which he deiscribes as a place where animals do most of the work.

Grass farming recognizes that energy comes from the sun and is stored in plant leaves, such as grass, which is consumed by animals who are then consumed by humans. Salatin has observed nature and his farming techniques are like an "intensive rotational dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer and the grasses are his verdurous stage."

Basically, he grazes his cows on pasture land then moves them before the cows over graze the grass. Grass will recover its vitality after one clip of cow teeth, but not as well after two or more bites down to the ground. So the cows are constantly moved with portable fencing. After the cows leave one section, a mobile chicken coop is brought in, affectionately known as the "Eggmobile!" Chickens in pens go straight to the cow pies (!) and peck out the grubs and other nasties growing in them. The chicken coops stay for one day and are moved the length of the coop to new ground so that the entire pasture benefits from the chicken manure which supplies the grasses with copious amounts of nitrogen.

The beauty and intricacy of this operation is that it is highly productive without the added costs from antibiotics, wormers, paraciticides, and fertilizers. There is a lot more to it than my brief summation above -- Pollan delves into the nature of grass plants and soil, doing a magnificent job of taking us on a grand tour of the the chain of food and life itself. Pollan spent a week working on the farm, and even participates in the weekly slaughter of chickens for sale. I admire him for his willingness to experience and record things that I could probably never bring myself to do. I know I couldn't kill an animal to eat it, but after reading this chapter -- I began to understand my heritage as a human onmnivore. If I were to become a meat eater once more, I would want link to the chain that had animals who lived their lives on a farm like Polyface.

Oh and tagging this meme far out of the park and on to: Microdot, Nerve Doc, and Kevin.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Part 2

Continuing on with Michael Pollan's provocative book about the food chains available to the human species, let's look at what he calls "Big Organic." This food chain markets the word "organic" to consumers with a conscience -- but it is still Agri-biz and monoculture-focused.

An example would be Rose the organic chicken, advertised as free of antibiotics and artificial hormones who are raised with "access to the outdoors," one of federal organic rules. The chickens are raised in long low sheds that have open doors that lead to a grassy yard. The only thing is, the chickens never venture outside even though the doors are open. For their first five weeks, they are kept inside, so they only know being fed and watered indoors. By the time they are five weeks old, their habits are formed and they would be terrified to go out into some strange outdoor environment. And by the way, after 7 weeks -- the chickens are slaughtered. So much for the happy free-range lifestyle for chickens.

Pollan gives us the scoop on the giant organic farm businesses in California, including Earthbound, a brand I used to purchase at the Mustard Seed. I've been very leary though, since the E.coli contaminated spinach was identified as coming from Earthbound. Wild pigs were reported as the E.coli carriers along with

"Samples taken from a wild pig, as well as from stream water and cattle on the ranch, have tested positive for the same strain of E. coli implicated in the outbreak, said Dr. Kevin Reilly of the California Department of Health Services."

It doesn't matter how organic and holistic one's farming practices are -- if the neighboring acreage is supporting unsanitary practices with its animals, the ground water is easily contaminated and wild animals help spread disease as well.

So now I am leary of vegetables grown on monoculture fields whether organic or not! I found an indoor lettuce grower online, but wow -- it is pricey. I'd like to figure out a way to make something out of recycled materials. Anybody have any ideas?

At least I have the egg problem solved. My mom sends along a picture of an actual free roaming and apparently happy chicken from someone who is raising chickens to sell their eggs. I won't be fooled by the organic advertising any more!

The Omnivore's Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals

If we are what we eat, most of us would be comprised of corn with a large side of petroleum. Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, follows the human food chains back to their origins by tracing the paths of all the items in four meals: a fast food meal from McDonald's representing processed food; an Agribiz produced "organic" food meal; a pastoral meal produced on an amazing farm in Virginia where nothing goes to waste and animals lead happy lives and are slaughtered as humanely as possible; and finally, a meal totally gathered and hunted in the woods and wilds of northern California.

Pollan wants us to become mindful of what we are eating and consider the effects of how it is produced upon the planet and upon our own bodies. It puts the human animal in a place she'd rather not be -- face to face with the reality of what it means to live on this planet and recognize that after all, we are but another thing that dies to feed other things.

Those who eat animals and/or their products, would really rather not know about the conditions those animals live in, but Pollan buys a steer calf and follows it through its short miserable life. He goes into great detail explaining how the stomach's of cows are evolved to digest grasses. That is what cows should eat, but now they are penned in CAFOs (Contained Animal Feeding Operations), and fed a corn-based mash. Cows do not digest corn naturally. So that upsets the balance:

"Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs, since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen. But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own, and in this new, man made environment new acid resistant strains of E.coli, of which 0157:H7, is one, have evolved--yet another creature recruited by nature to absorb the excess biomass coming off the Farm Belt. The problem with these bugs is that they can shake off the acid bath in our stomachs--and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the rumen with corn we've broken down one of our food chain's most important barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.." (Omnivore p 82).

Big Agribiz with its monoculture of corn fields and silos that produce and store the kernals that feed the cows on CAFOs burns up enormous amounts of petroleum products to produce its crop of field corn #2, including petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the fuel used to run the massive machines that work over the massive amounts of acres which are "farmed" these days. According to Pollan, one fifth of petroleum consumed in America goes to the production and transportation of food.

Those corn kernals go into just about every processed food humans consume, in the form of HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) and other fattening engineered food products. We fatten the cows on corn, then proceed to fatten ourselves on HFCS and other corn derivatives.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Pollan's book are the chapters describing the meal at the end of each food chain. In the case of the processed corn chain, it is a chicken McNugget, made from 38 ingredients including TBHQ, or tertiary butylhydroquinone, sprayed on to help preserve the freshness. It is actually a form of butane and extremely toxic if you swallow a gram of it. McDonalds isn't going to put a gram of it on your nuggets, but someone who eats those things a lot might be accumulating that stuff somewhere in their bodies, don't you think?

Yes, this book provokes an awful amount of thinking and I wish everybody I knew would read it ASAP. I will be writing about it all week as there is much to ponder and reflect upon -- especially concerning what I learned about my vegetarian life-style (30+ years now!) and whether after reading the Omniovore's Dilemma I could ever bring myself to eat flesh.

To be continued.....