When you walk into the modern grocery store, you are given the opportunity to purchase items from around the world. The produce section is void of seasonality or locality. Mangoes in January. Asparagus in December. Globalization and the industrialization of agriculture has made this possible. Standing in front of over 40,000 products makes the question of what to have for dinner more than a just a simple choice. It is sheer anxiety of too many choices.
Michael Pollan tackles these daily decisions that we make in a land where industrial agriculture produces 500 additional calories per U.S. eater every day. Food producers talk in terms of the "fixed stomach". In order to make more money, you either have to get people to pay more for the same food by arranging it in fashionable, new, delicious ways or get people to eat more of it. Fast food companies are great at tackling both of these challenges. Super Size me.
Corn is king. 10 billion bushels of corn is harvested every year. Corn has a long history dating back to the Mayans referring to themselves as "corn people". Americans are now "corn people", but more accurately "petroleum people". As long as fossil fuels are relatively cheap, it makes sense to grow corn and lots of it. It takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food. Every step in the "industrial digestion" wet milling process of refining corn and rearranging it in different creative ways, about 10 calories are burned for every calorie produced. All calories are the same when you get right down to it, and corn is the cheapest. We eat only a fraction of corn directly as corn. The rest is used to cleverly rearrange the molecules into additives like xanthan gum, high fructose corn syrup, thanol, MSG, sorbitol, maltodextrin, starches, and lactic acid.
It used to be that farms were fully sustainable. Legumes replenishing nitrogen back into the soil feeding corn. Livestock grazing on grass and manure fertilizing the grass. We have gone from capturing sun energy and turning it into food to converting fossil fuels into food. This process is economically cheap, but ecologically expensive. War time converting to peace time created excess fertilizers (amonium nitrate). The Department of Agriculture's idea in 1947 was to spread this excess of America's fields with the goal of increasing the amount of food an acre of land could support. They succeeded beyond their expectations. However, the unintended consequences of fertilizer runoff being high levels of algae growth in waterways contributing to oxygen depletion and dying fish.
Three of every 5 Americans are obese. We fatten our cows faster (12-14 months compared to 4-5 years at the beginning of the 20th century). We engineer chickens to have larger breasts, so much so that they have a difficult time standing. Our society has evolved from a meal-in-a-pill futuristic dream to a pill-in-a-meal reality. A human being simply cannot consume more calories than they burn without gaining weight. Or can they? Food scientists are tackling the problem of food that cannot be absorbed and stored as fat. Olestra. Splenda. We can eat what we want, have access to seasonal food any time of year, 24/7, in our cars, without consequence. But what are the consequences?
So what is the perfect meal? As Michael Pollan contemplates "Perhaps the perfect meal is one that's been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted." Having the "Omnivore's Thanksgiving" every day is not realistic or probable in the way our society functions today. But to eat obliviously without understanding what we are doing is also, in my opinion, unfortunate.
Michael Pollan's dilemma, laid out in 411 pages was to open people's eyes to what they are eating, where it is coming from, how it got to where it is, and what the total cost was. It encourages the audience geared mostly those who want to know about what they are putting in their bodies, onto the earth, and in the air to ask ourselves, if we are what we eat, then what exactly are we?
To be successful in the restaurant industry, one not only has to make good food, but also have a story. The better the story, the more people will connect to the food. Examples are "Iowa Pork Chops" or "Home made ketchup". This is not imperative, but will help you succeed. One must have a passion for cooking for others and no matter what you are cooking, feel good about serving it to people, however that feels to you. Lastly, one must be open to always learning. There will never be a day where you will know it all. Tomorrow is special because you can always do something better than you did today. And that is the fun part.
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