Covering the canvas from a highly refined fast food meal that could be consumed in a speedy motor vehicle in under ten minutes to a wildly laborious and near impossible journey to create every morsel of food on the dinner table himself, Pollan argues that a moderated diet may be the best option, or at least the most tenable position.  As all of you know, I maintain that moderation in almost all things in life is the key to happiness and pleasure.  Too much of anything can sour the palate, beyond even the vagaries of food.

Being sentient creatures, we all need to make rational choices in our life that are well educated, albeit openly biased based on our religious, political, cultural, and gender legacies.  However despite the limitations that we may have in our nature or our nature, I think these blogs strive to raze the dividing walls and aim toward a more universal perspective on life, and in this case food.

As mentioned in my previous blog series on Pollan’s most recent book, In Defense of Food, I had a radical epiphany in France while simultaneously reading Pollan’s work and realized that eating fresher foods, more plants, more slowly was the key to a healthy lifestyle.  However, being too strict with anything in life or feeling guilty about your choices will only encumber our ability to enjoy life and partake of its rich diversity.

Tastier?  Maybe maybe not.  What Pollan found was for example his conventionally raised chicken tasted better than his organic chicken only because it was an older chicken, which maintains more flavor.  However, clearly cheap feed and animal byproducts in the feed can create a bland and tasteless bird.  He argues that locally grown and picked conventional produce may taste better than some organically raised food that is shipped across the U.S. to your local grocery store.  Of course, the best combination is local, organic food, which is oftentimes a difficult item to procure.

Safer?  Using his mass spectrometer he found in conventional food lingering elements of pesticides and other residue that science has not definitively linked with cancer or other ill health issues.  However, they certainly can’t be good for you.  The absence of these fertilizers and pesticides in organically grown food may be of particular benefit to growing children who consume more and are growing.  However, do we know that for certain?  Not really.

Healthier?  Perhaps.  A study by the University of California-Davis in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry in 2003 found that identical varieties of corn, strawberries, and blackberries grown in neighboring plots using different methods (organic versus conventional) showed that organic methods produced significantly higher levels of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and a wide range of polyphenols.

Today, these secondary metabolites known as polyphenols in plants have been touted to play some role in preventing or fighting cancer, may exhibit antimicrobial properties, and may play an important role in human health and nutrition.  So, score a victory for the organic camp.

Why though would organic berries carry more polyphenols?  One theory contends that polyphenols are a plant’s natural defense system against predators.  These plant pesticides may not need to be as strong in chemically fertilized soil, as external pesticides serve as a man-made equivalent.  More convincingly, conventional soil that is chemically treated is simply not as biorich and may not provide the necessary nutrients for plants to synthesize the full range of complex polyphenols.  This lack of polyphenols not only may compromise their health benefits but also deprive the fruits and vegetables of their characteristic robust taste, that is also benefit of richly diverse and abundant polyphenol content.

Polyphenols may explain why highly refined food that contains rich vitamins simply don’t cut it.  You can’t stick vitamins into a Twinkie or into a bottle of Coke and expect a miracle.  You need solid fruits and vegetables in large part because of their polyphenols, and organic versions just might be better for us.

Is organic better for the environment?  Here Pollan extends an unqualified yes.  More specifically:  the absence of pesticides that may trickle through the farmworkers’ bloodstream, the nitrogen and growth hormone spilloff into the water supply, the poisoned soils, the dangerous pathogens arising from indiscriminate antibiotic treated animals, and the absence of subsidy checks to cover all of that. However, the one big thing that still limits an industrial organic meal is the insane amount of fossil fuel required to produce the meal, on order similar if not the same as a conventional industrial meal.  Unfortunately, going back to the pasture may not be feasible today, but we all can try.  I have a garden in the backyard, and whatever I eat from it I think of how glorious and unadulterated that food stream is from the soil to my mouth.

The USDA received a backlash about cows who do not roam on pasture so they mandated a very vague idea of “access to pasture”.  How often did this access have to occur?  Many of the critics have argued that “access to pasture” is so vague that it really is both meaningless and unenforceable.  The example of the chickens at Petaluma mentioned in yesterday’s blog is a great one to understand that this 2 week short hiatus to pasture is really never even used by the chickens so “free range” in that case is a real farce.

Pollan goes on to examine big organic and finds that many of the farming practices are decidedly better than pure industrial.  However, no large industrial organic can by its very nature produce the same high quality food as say Polyface farms of Joel Salatin that relies on polyculture, bioregionalism, and sustainability.  All of this is simply fascinating.  This exposé on organic and the organic industry is not meant to condemn organic food.  It just means as consumers we need to be a little bit more educated than subscribing blindly to romanticized notions of our food.  I encourage everyone to read Michael Pollan’s book because these short blogs simply cannot embrace the in-depth and comprehensive nature of his wonderful book.  It is simply an articulate, brilliant, and literate treatise.

When we walk the aisles of Whole Foods, a romantic notion swirls in our brain that the eggs spawned from “cage-free vegetarian hens” or the heirloom tomatoes from Capay Farm, “one of the early pioneers of the organic movement”, would give us a heady concoction of civility, health, and well, organic-ness to our lifestyle.  In short, that we were making the right choices for our diet and our children’s diet.  However, what Pollan begins to show is that despite Whole Foods and other big chain organics’ desires to remain true to organic qualities, they can’t.  Whole Foods can no longer buy from small farms but must buy from huge industrial organic farms like Earthbound Farm and Grimmway Farms, which together dominate the organic marketplace of America.

When Pollan investigated what he had in his shopping cart culled from the pristine aisles of his local Whole Foods, he found items that caused more distress in his heart than supposedly the “undistressed” cattle experienced who lived the purported organic life.  For example, his organic milk was ultrapasteurized, a process that can compromise nutritional value, because the milk had to travel extremely long distances.  In addition, the organic milk came from factory farms where thousands of Holsteins never encountered a blade of grass but did dine on certified organic grain (what?) tethered to milking machines three times a day.  He also found organic beef derived from cattle eating organic high-fructose corn syrup (oxymoron perhaps?).  Further, his entrée from Country Herb (from Cascadian Farms, now a subsidiary of General Mills), an organic tv dinner, contained a wide variety of unname-ables like guar, xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, etc.  These synthetic additives actually are permitted under federal organic rules.  What?  Finally, his chicken he procured, reportedly organic, came from Petaluma, where chickens are cramped in tight aisles and only have a “free range” access about 2 weeks before slaughter, when they are so used to staying indoors that the pasture outside only poses a threatening presence.  So is organic organic?  Hmmmmm.  Joel Salatin’s term for the $11 billion a year organic food market as “the organic empire” is certainly sounding a bit more true now.  HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!!

Salatin actually is not organic since that is a term that the Federal Government now owns and regulates.  He orders his chicken feed locally that has atrazine, a violation of federal rules for the claim on using the word “organic”.  However, Salatin argues: “If I said I was organic, people would fuss at me for getting feed corn from a neighbor who might be using atrazine.  Well, I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get ‘pure product’ that’s really coated in diesel fuel.  There are a whole lot more variables in making the right decision than does the chicken feed have chemicals or not.  Like what sort of habitat is going to allow that chicken to express its physiological distinctiveness?  A ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass every day?  Now which chicken shall we call ‘organic’?  I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government, because now they own the word.”

Salatin considers himself “beyond organic” since he believes the rules that the government has set forth for being organic are bunk.  As an example, he does not ship his product out of his local area because he simply believes that it is not “sustainable”, i.e., it destroys the integrity of the food item.  When Pollan asked him to ship his chicken to him via FedEx, he received a polite no with the above explanation.  Our labels for our food as this book outlines are a bit more contrived, vague, and elusive than we would otherwise want to believe.

The same problem has plagued the United States since the 1970s but of a different variety.  Now cheap, subsidized corn has led most U.S. residents not to out drink themselves (although some do that well) but to eat themselves into an early grave.  In fact, the thought today is that children born after the year 2000 may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, a landmark first in the history of mankind.

A lot of that corn we ingest comes in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS.  1980 was a watershed year.  That is the year that Coca-Cola switched from pure cane sugar to HFCS and Pepsi followed suit shortly thereafter.  No one complained or even noticed.  What is the big deal anyway?  Aren’t sugar and HFCS pretty much the same?  Actually, yes.  However, what happened was that tariffs that the corn lobby imposed on sugar made HFCS a few cents cheaper to make.  Realizing that most consumers would not buy another bottle of coke just because of this marginal cost savings, the soda manufacturers upsized all the drinks from, e.g., 8 oz. to 32 oz. servings and charged an incremental premium for this bonus surplus.  Most Americans favored the extra size and guzzled accordingly.  What is shocking is that even though our HFCS intake since 1985 went from 45 to 66 pounds per person per annum, that is not at the expense of other sweeteners.  In fact, we have enlarged our intake of all sweeteners (cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, maple syrup, etc.) from 128 to 158 pounds per year.  We are in short supersizing everything.

We owe a lot to David Wallerstein who invented supersizing at McDonald’s.  Ray Kroc simply did not believe that people would consume more if they were given larger portions.  It is now known that we can consume 30% more if we simply see more on our plate, almost as a biological response to scarcity.  Kroc changed his tune when Wallerstein reported people were scrounging around their tiny french fry bags because having 2 sodas or 2 bags of french fries was self-deemed gluttony.  Having a large bag of fries on the other hand was simply no big deal.  Wallerstein, until his passing in 1993, worked in a Texas movie chain before his stint at McD’s and helped people see that individuals would consume any size bag of anything so long as it was in a single container.  Once you ordered two small bags of popcorn, you would think yourself more of a gourmand than the abstemious Puritan that we desired to be.

In short, we are in our predicament because of the flood of cheap corn that is so readily available making us spend less on our food and desire to eat even more of it not out of necessity but because it is there.

In the old days, farmers would feed the cattle the waste grain and the cattle would fertilize the land with their waste, creating a closed ecologic loop.  Today, CAFOS herd the steer stacked almost on top of each other creating indescribable quantities of their own toxic waste that has no exit strategy.  The waste piles up, damaging the environment, the soil, the water supply, and the animals.  Simply put, the waste just keeps piling up and wreaking havoc everywhere.  Not to mention the terrible conditions that these animals are mired in during their lifetime.

These CAFOs and the cheap corn that has fed the CAFOs have permitted meat to be cheaper than ever.  What in the past was a rare delicacy can now be afforded by all and even eaten 3 times a day at a pittance.  Chickens still cost less than cattle because they require much less feed per pound of flesh.  The USDA rewards cattle for their marbling, a direct result of the ingested corn.  Of course, the saturated fat and the high omega 6 content in corn-fed beef may take the heavily marketed concept of “corn fed” as being a good thing to be revealed for its truly negative impact.  The hunter-gatherers that live today have very little heart disease despite subsisting on a high beef diet because their beef is almost all grass fed.  As you may know, all Argentinian cattle are raised on pure grass.  We just have too much cheap corn that we have to get rid of.  Might as well fatten the cows so that we can get even fatter.

Why have we not heard of Haber?  Most likely because Haber had a very ignominious life that is not particular cause for celebration.  Haber’s invention of bonding nitrogen to the soil was used during World War I on behalf of Germany’s war effort when nitrates used for explosives were both in short supply and cut off by the British.  Haber’s synthetic nitrates helped Germany prolong the war campaign, and Haber served relentlessly on behalf of his motherland, even creating the infamous Zyklon B gas that would later be used by Hitler in the concentration camps.  His wife, a fellow chemist, sickened by her husband’s promotion of the war effort, killed herself with her husband’s army pistol.  In the 1930s, Haber, a German Jew, who later converted to Christianity, was compelled to flee his native land with the rise of the Third Reich and died a broken man in an obscure Basel hotel in 1934.

Although Haber’s process defines the modern fertilization process that has literally supported our population boom, Pollan calls what we have gained from his knowledge a true “Faustian bargain.”  In order to get the nitrogen and hydrogen to meld with the soil, we need a ton of non-renewable fossil fuel to accomplish that end, as compared with the free energy of nitrogen that certain bacteria living at the base of legumes would otherwise create in small quantities.  In addition, fertilizers can obviously pose health risks and further pollute the land and the water supply when there is spillage and oversupply of it.  In short, fertilizers support our human growth and appeal to our big-scale industry of farming but has darker, untoward consequences of which we must also be cognizant.

Corn expressess a very strong DNA footprint of carbon 13 given its unique molecular structure that carries 4 carbon atoms compared with many legumes that only have 3 atoms.  We can actually scan a person’s hair and other body parts to see how much we are made of what.  Mexicans today who consume corn but not in the radically superabundant quantities that we do actually have much less carbon-13 corn in their systems than we do.  We are filled with corn.  High-fructose corn syrup colors our daily lives as opposed to the pure cane sugar that the Mexicans still heavily rely on.  Further, their meat still oftentimes graze on grass, whereas our cattle, chicken, lamb, and even fish eat corn.  So we are not only what we eat but we are what we eat eats and again that is corn.

The story starts in Iowa, the epicenter of corn manufacturing.  How did we get to where we are?  First, corn provides abundant calories owing to its unique possession of a carbon 4 (C4) structure, alluded to earlier.  Second, corn is mass produced in Iowa owing to what George Naylor, a corn farmer featured in the book, calls “the Naylor Curve”.  Farmers, believe it or not, actually lose money on every bushel of corn they make.  In order to actually feed their families when the price of corn drops, they have to squeeze out more corn in marginal land using more heavily fossil-fuel laden nitrogen fertilizer (we will discuss this tomorrow) to try to make ends meet.  Of course, this further drives corn prices lower, which compels farmers to make even more corn.  The $5 billion a year in corn subsidies that the Federal Government supplies further supports this non laissez-faire economy.

All this cheap corn continues to be more and more prevalent owing to this vicious cycle, burning up heavy fossil fuels (estimated at 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn and not even a 1:1 calorie substitute of fossil fuel for food), plaguing the water supply with contaminated nitrogen from over-fertilized, marginal lands, and burning up the quality of the land year after year.

Stephanie Smith

Today, a quarter of the foodstuffs in our flourescent-illuminated grocery aisles contain corn.  Is corn all that bad for you?  First, it is filled with omega 6s as compared with omega 3s that could otherwise enter our food by way of grass-fed animals. Not to mention that animals that graze on grass are not used to eating corn so that their digestive systems are in absolute turmoil, necessitating antibiotics and also escalating the risk of e.coli exposure.  It has been found that feeding cattle grass even for the last few days of their lives could reduce the risk of toxic e.coli that grows in the cows’ normally pH neutral stomachs (acidified by corn), by over 80%. However, we live in a world driven mainly by money not by thoughts of how food could actually benefit our environment and our bodies.

As an update to this blog post, here is an article about Stephanie Smith, a dance instructor, who is paralyzed for life at the tender age of 22 from eating contaminated e. coli meat, that I read from the New York Times on October 3, 2009.  Here is also a frightening video about how we get our meat that appeared in the New York Times that I also posted on my Twitter account on November 3, 2009.

The omivore’s dilemma as the eponymous title reflects concerns the age old question, “What shall we have for dinner?”  The term comes from University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin who coined the phrase and posed this existential question.  Unlike a koala bear who simply eats eucalyptus leaves, we have a diversity in our menu selection that is bewildering and potentially fraught with risk.  Pollan exposes the back end of what we are eating because what sits on our dinner table may be more than we bargained for.  We should know how did what we got get there and what can we do differently in our lives to be more educated consumers of foodstuff.  I think you will enjoy this intellectual and highly pragmatic journey into the world of food, yet again.  Bon Appetit!