It is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Anyone heard of it?

I’m only about half way through, but I thought it might be fun to recount some of Pollan’s argument here. The book is really about America’s overindulgence . . . in corn. Pollan claims that we eat far more corn than we probably realize, and probably more than is good for us in the long run. The list of corn-derived substances is pretty impressive. We feed corn to cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, and salmon. We use corn starch and/or high-fructose corn syrup in our soft drinks, sauces, dressings, etc. We fry in corn oil. If it is true that "you are what you eat," then we are corn.

Pollan asks a scientist to use a mass spectrometer on a McDonald’s meal, as a ubiquitous example of the fare America eats. The question was, "how much of what we’re eating is actually corn." I’ll let him tell it:

"I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald’s meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it originally came from a corn plant. It is hard to believe that the identity of the atoms in a cheeseburger or a Coke is preserved from farm field to fast-food counter, but the atomic signature of those carbon isotopes is indestructible, and still legible to the mass spectrometer. Dawson and his colleague Stefania Mambelli prepared an analysis showing roughly how much of the carbon in the various McDonald’s menu items came from corn, and plotted them on a graph. The sodas came out at the top, not surprising since they consist of little else than corn sweetener, but virtually everything else we ate revealed a high proportion of corn, too. In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and french fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be a meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala."

Naturally I thought of Kathryn with that last reference, and since she was kind enough to describe her farm operation down under, I was led to wonder about sustainable farming that does not participate so heavily in the monoculture/agribusiness model. Pollan devotes a great deal of space to discussing farming practices that, while labor intensive, could nurse the land back to health over the years instead of leaching the soil of what’s good in it. I’m no expert, but it seems like a reasonable case to make.

From memory–there is a bit about keeping rabbits and chickens in a space with wood chips on the dirt floor, putting corn down among the wood chips and letting it begin to ferment, and letting pigs in now and again, who will root hard for the fermenting corn, thus cutting up the dirt floor and making it possible for the highly acidic rabbit piss to be neutralized.

There is a bit about moving the chickens onto land that four days ago was occupied by cows. The cows crop the grass down to where the chickens can hunt for grubs, and the four-day spacing allows juicy grubs to grow inside the cow dung, which the chickens eat like crazy, helping to keep the cows healthy when it comes their turn on that patch of land again.

Pollan describes the process we have to go through in order to get cows to eat corn–which they are ill-suited to digest naturally. It’s not pretty, at least the way he tells it. He puts a whole new spin on the adjective "corn-fed." And of course, feeding corn to the cows is not about the health of the cows or of the people who eat them–it’s about the US having so damn much corn that it is coming out of our ears. We have to keep finding ways to use it, so we hide it in everything . . .

So far, the book has been a real eye-opener. I haven’t gotten to the part where he discusses gene splicing and corn, though I am betting that someone somewhere is trying to splice the DNA of corn with that from a lion.

Why?

Because lions are really good at stalking.

I’ll be off now.

Herring405