Dec. 16, 2007
BOOK REVIEW: Michael Pollan's 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' Traces Four Meals Back to Their Beginnings; Obese Americans Are Truly 'Children of the Corn'
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
If Jessica Mitford (1917-1996) had written Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (Penguin Books quality paperback edition, 464 pages, $16) she might have called it "The American Way of Eating."
One of the famous Mitford sisters -- look for my review in a week or so of a book of letters between the six sisters -- "Decca" Mitford is perhaps most famous for her dissection of the American funeral industry in the 1963 book (issued in a revised edition, "The American Way of Death Revisited" after her death) "The American Way of Death." Mitford's mother would have found much to appreciate in Pollan's book; Lady Redesdale hated refined flour and white bread and insisted on natural grains for bread and naturally raised chickens. The English aristocrat was a chicken farmer at heart, a trait she passed down to her daughter Deborah Mitford Cavendish (1920--), the dowager Duchess of Devonshire.
Pollan ("'A Place of My Own," "The Botany of Desire") tells us where he's going in the book with his subtitle: "A Natural History of Four Meals."
He presents in considerable detail three journeys -- to Iowa corn fields; to a natural farm, Polyface Farm, in Virginia that is truly organic; and a hunting trip not far from his home in Northern California -- to produce the four meals. In the order presented, the meals represent the industrial model characterized by corn-based fast foods at a Bay Area McDonald's, two organic meals, one from "big organic" ingredients at Whole Foods, the other from those at Polyface Farm, and the piece de resistance, a "perfect meal" based on the ancient hunter-gathering, including a wild pig killed by Pollan, in his first effort as a hunter.
'The Omnivore's Dilemma' is a detail packed book that creeps up on the reader; facts upon facts are given to the degree that they would seem to overwhelm the reader. This didn't happen to me, as I reflected on how much farming has changed since I spent my first 10 1/2 years (1938-1949) on a subsistence/market farm in Van Buren County, Michigan. We didn't feed our milk cows corn: They ate hay grown on the farm, as nature intended. Our milk and butter was organic before it had a name. Corn went to the chickens whose eggs we sold, and to the hogs, who ended up as bacon and ham to go with the eggs.
Pollan visits a gigantic feed lot, where cows are fed corn laced with antibiotics -- an industrial practice that is not natural: "We've come to think of 'corn-fed' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you're referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous."
A diet that is almost entirely corn produces the marbled beef so prized by consumers and so deleterious to our health. I've recently tried bison meat, at a restaurant in New York City and at my local Kroger's (from a farm in Madison, VA) and find it delicious. It's much leaner than hamburger -- I use a George Foreman grill and can tell from the lack of grease -- yet is still very tasty. Drive up Interstate 81 in Virginia and you'll see bison (the common but incorrect name is buffalo) out in the pastures, eating grass and making meat that is far healthier than that from industrial feed lots. Like cows on corn, we're hooked on this industrial process and -- unless we get off -- we're taking this train to the end of the line.
Pointing out that grass-eating cows in Argentina produce excellent steaks in a country where meat eating is enshrined, Pollan writes: "In the same way ruminants [cows] are ill adapted to eating corn, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn."
Who's to blame: The federal government, of course, which rewards the overproduction of corn on America's farms by calling the 'marbled' beef produced the highest grade awarded. Hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild animals don't have the heart problems that we do, Pollan notes.
Another factor why we're so prone to food fads like the Atkins Diet and others is, Pollan notes: "America has never had a stable national cuisine; each immigrant population has brought us its own foodways to the American table, but none has ever been powerful enough to hold the national diet very steady." He hints that we would be better off with a Mediterranean diet that uses natural foods rather than the industrial products like high fructose corn syrup that seems to be in everything we buy.
My own -- probably annoying -- efforts to educate people on the virtues of whole grain real bread -- as opposed to the mass-produced soft stuff that's called bread -- almost invariably falls on deaf ears, but at least I know from my own health that I'm on the right track.
Pollan's very informative and entertaining -- trust me on this -- book was a bestseller in hardcover last year, winning the James Beard Award, and this paperback edition should be read by anyone who still wonders why we're a nation of wide-bodies.
Publisher's web site: www.penguin.com
Author's web site: www.michaelpollan.com
BOOK REVIEW: Michael Pollan's 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' Traces Four Meals Back to Their Beginnings; Obese Americans Are Truly 'Children of the Corn'
By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
If Jessica Mitford (1917-1996) had written Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (Penguin Books quality paperback edition, 464 pages, $16) she might have called it "The American Way of Eating."
One of the famous Mitford sisters -- look for my review in a week or so of a book of letters between the six sisters -- "Decca" Mitford is perhaps most famous for her dissection of the American funeral industry in the 1963 book (issued in a revised edition, "The American Way of Death Revisited" after her death) "The American Way of Death." Mitford's mother would have found much to appreciate in Pollan's book; Lady Redesdale hated refined flour and white bread and insisted on natural grains for bread and naturally raised chickens. The English aristocrat was a chicken farmer at heart, a trait she passed down to her daughter Deborah Mitford Cavendish (1920--), the dowager Duchess of Devonshire.
Pollan ("'A Place of My Own," "The Botany of Desire") tells us where he's going in the book with his subtitle: "A Natural History of Four Meals."
He presents in considerable detail three journeys -- to Iowa corn fields; to a natural farm, Polyface Farm, in Virginia that is truly organic; and a hunting trip not far from his home in Northern California -- to produce the four meals. In the order presented, the meals represent the industrial model characterized by corn-based fast foods at a Bay Area McDonald's, two organic meals, one from "big organic" ingredients at Whole Foods, the other from those at Polyface Farm, and the piece de resistance, a "perfect meal" based on the ancient hunter-gathering, including a wild pig killed by Pollan, in his first effort as a hunter.
'The Omnivore's Dilemma' is a detail packed book that creeps up on the reader; facts upon facts are given to the degree that they would seem to overwhelm the reader. This didn't happen to me, as I reflected on how much farming has changed since I spent my first 10 1/2 years (1938-1949) on a subsistence/market farm in Van Buren County, Michigan. We didn't feed our milk cows corn: They ate hay grown on the farm, as nature intended. Our milk and butter was organic before it had a name. Corn went to the chickens whose eggs we sold, and to the hogs, who ended up as bacon and ham to go with the eggs.
Pollan visits a gigantic feed lot, where cows are fed corn laced with antibiotics -- an industrial practice that is not natural: "We've come to think of 'corn-fed' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you're referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous."
A diet that is almost entirely corn produces the marbled beef so prized by consumers and so deleterious to our health. I've recently tried bison meat, at a restaurant in New York City and at my local Kroger's (from a farm in Madison, VA) and find it delicious. It's much leaner than hamburger -- I use a George Foreman grill and can tell from the lack of grease -- yet is still very tasty. Drive up Interstate 81 in Virginia and you'll see bison (the common but incorrect name is buffalo) out in the pastures, eating grass and making meat that is far healthier than that from industrial feed lots. Like cows on corn, we're hooked on this industrial process and -- unless we get off -- we're taking this train to the end of the line.
Pointing out that grass-eating cows in Argentina produce excellent steaks in a country where meat eating is enshrined, Pollan writes: "In the same way ruminants [cows] are ill adapted to eating corn, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn."
Who's to blame: The federal government, of course, which rewards the overproduction of corn on America's farms by calling the 'marbled' beef produced the highest grade awarded. Hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild animals don't have the heart problems that we do, Pollan notes.
Another factor why we're so prone to food fads like the Atkins Diet and others is, Pollan notes: "America has never had a stable national cuisine; each immigrant population has brought us its own foodways to the American table, but none has ever been powerful enough to hold the national diet very steady." He hints that we would be better off with a Mediterranean diet that uses natural foods rather than the industrial products like high fructose corn syrup that seems to be in everything we buy.
My own -- probably annoying -- efforts to educate people on the virtues of whole grain real bread -- as opposed to the mass-produced soft stuff that's called bread -- almost invariably falls on deaf ears, but at least I know from my own health that I'm on the right track.
Pollan's very informative and entertaining -- trust me on this -- book was a bestseller in hardcover last year, winning the James Beard Award, and this paperback edition should be read by anyone who still wonders why we're a nation of wide-bodies.
Publisher's web site: www.penguin.com
Author's web site: www.michaelpollan.com
