The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 10 of 10: In Closing
December 2, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
Pollan’s third and final part of the book explores the elaborate and intricate methods by which he procured his self-fabricated repast consisting of a pig he hunted, mushrooms he collected, vegetables he grew, and abalone he plucked from the freezing brine of the Pacific coast. He also engages in an intriguing discussion on the ethics of eating animals, which to keep the political argument of this blog relatively clean, I will not endeavor to elaborate. Suffice it to say that I still enjoy my steak rare after reading (and deeply pondering) the arguments but support my brethren who maintain a strictly vegetarian philosophy and lifestyle.
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.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 9 of 10: Is Organic Better?
December 1, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
This is a tough question. Tastier? Healthier? Safer? Well, let’s contemplate all of this and see what we come up with.
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 Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 8 of 10: USDA and Organic Rules
November 27, 2009 by dr. lam · 17 Comments
Since 1990, the definition of organic has been manhandled by the USDA, more specifically by the many lobbyists. In 1997 the USDA released a watered down set of standards that defined organic food that allowed genetically modified crops, irradiation, and sewage sludge with the idea that the government wanted to impose a lighter regulation on the industry. However, the “organic movement”, or little organic, pitted against the “organic empire”, or big organic, still wanted to exemplify better values than these loose regulations called for. However, little organic is well, little. The question in 1997 was would a factory farm be considered organic? How about grazing on pasture? How about food additives and synthetic chemicals? Guess what, big organic won on all 3 counts. This was a reversal of the stricter 1990 guidelines and a victory that paved the way for things like Cascadian Farms’ “organic tv dinner”. What an oxymoron!
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.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 7 of 10: Industrial Organic
November 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
Rather appropriate that we are talking about food on Thanksgiving Day: Hope I don’t ruin any meals!
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!!!
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 6 of 10: Joel Salatin & Polyface Farms
November 25, 2009 by dr. lam · 8 Comments
We now leave the world of industrial foods to go organic. But are we? Well, that is more complicated than one or two sentences can convey. So let’s take a look at famed Virginia farmer Joel Salatin and his Polyface farms. If you ask Salatin who raises chicken, pigs, cattle and varied vegetables and crops what kind of farmer he is, he will say that he is a “grass farmer”. In essence, he is paying homage to the power that grass has on the entire structure of his farmed ecosystem. It serves as the nourishment for his livestock who run also free over the pastured lands and also upon which the crops grow in abundance. By rotating crops, he can create a sustainable farm that does not suffer the consequences of a monoculture like either the CAFOs or the corn farms. What George Naylor is to industrial, Salatin is to pastoral. Pastoral or organic? What?
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.