FOOD ON THE FOOD

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chapter 7

It's been a while, so let's recap.  So far, Michael Pollan has advocated unlimited unprotected sex, bombing the shit out of as many countries as possible, bringing back the pre-Prohibition days of public drunkenness, and reinstituting enforced busing into our white, white, cowless suburbs.  Now I can understand why he’s earned his reputation as a radical. 

After all this, and on our seventh date, the last place I expected him to take me was McDonald's.  But okay, Michael Pollan, if you're buying.  A large fries, please.  Oh, and a strawberry shake.

In the last chapter of the corn section, Pollan drives home the point that corn is in everything we eat (remember the two-bit ho?).  From the meat that has been fattened on corn, to the corn syrup used as a sweetener, to the cornstarch and corn flour used to bind and bulk, to the fat used to fry.  Whether you're buying a prepackaged meal at the grocery store or grabbing a quick bite at a fast food joint, you can count on about 60% of the calories, on average, to come from corn.

Still, even Michael Pollan admits he isn't immune to corn's cunning charms:

"I ate a lot of McDonald's as a kid....  I loved everything about fast food: the individual portions all wrapped up like presents...; the familiar meaty perfume of the French fries filling the car; and the pleasingly sequenced bite into a burger—the soft, sweet roll, the crunchy pickle, the savory moistness of the meat."

You're really speaking my language, Michael Pollan.  Keep it coming.

"Well-designed fast food has a fragrance and flavor all its own...this generic fast-food flavor is one of the unerasable smells and tastes of childhood—which makes it a kind of comfort food.  Like other comfort foods, it supplies (besides nostalgia) a jolt of carbohydrates and fat, which, some scientists now believe, relieve stress and bath the brain in chemicals that make it feel good."

Uh-huh, tell me more.

"...but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that—something more like a signifier of comfort food.  So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon.  And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full."

Well, that was downer.  Note to Michael Pollan: if you're trying to sex me up, use more descriptors like "meaty perfume" and "savory moistness."  Still, I know what he means.  It’s like eating cheap chocolate.  I can eat 25 Hershey bars and still hanker for more, but give me a single, well-made truffle and I'm good.  (Congratulations, Hershey.  I guess you win.)

Anyway, this concludes the Corn section, thank god.  It’s only been six months.  Now we can move on to the section we've all been waiting for: Grass.  (Pass the French fries.)

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chapter 6

It feels odd and somewhat wrong to be talking about surplus corn when half the state of Iowa was recently underwater.  But the fact is that the whole first section of this book was rooted in surplus corn, and so I’m afraid I’m constrained by the facts that were on the ground when the book was written.  Luckily, though, Michael Pollan is forward-thinking, and the message in this particular chapter applies whether it’s a bumper year for corn or not. 

I’m talking about hooch.

You see, recent events notwithstanding, it turns out that we Americans have seen excess corn before in our short but illustrious history.  In the early 1800s, we had a shitload of corn, too, and we had a very ingenious way of dealing with the situation.  We turned it into whiskey.  Pollan writes:

“As the historian W.J. Rorabaugh tells the story in The Alcoholic Republic, we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, before work and after and very often during.  Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called “the elevenses.”  (Just to pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.)  Except for a brief respite Sunday morning in church, Americans simply did not gather—whether for a barn raising or quilting bee, corn husking or political rally—without passing the whiskey jug."

That sounds freaking fantastic. So, let me get this straight.  We’ve wasted precious decades putting our surplus corn into soda when we could have been putting it into whiskey?  Why?  WHY WHY WHY?  I’m afraid the great taste of “lymon” will never hold a candle to bourbon straight up.  Who even cares about Pepsi versus Coke unless they’re mixed with the good stuff?  All I’m saying is if you have to choose a public health epidemic, obesity versus alcoholism, then I think the winner is clear.  (Though, I think we might be able to make room for both if we really apply ourselves.)

But those poor Midwestern farmers.  Too much corn, and you’re screwed.  Not enough corn, and you’re screwed.  It seems to me that Michael Pollan’s message to Iowa farmers is this.  Start drinking.  Whether its purpose is to level a towering mountain of corn, or to erase the image of a giant lake where your land should be, drink up.  You’re going to need it.

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chapter 5

Forgive me for getting even further behind on the book club that was my idea in the first place.  It’s just that I had a dream that Michael Pollan e-mailed me about these posts, and it really freaked me out.  The Internet has not proven itself skilled at keeping secrets thus far.  But, I mean, please.  Like Michael Pollan doesn’t have anything better to do than read food blogs?  Here I go confusing fantasy with reality again.  My mistake.  So, let’s get back down to business.

In Chapter 5, Pollan surprised me by debunking the notion that all processed foods are bad:

“The dream of liberating food from nature is as old as eating.  People began processing food to keep nature from taking it back: What is spoilage, after all, if not nature, operating through her proxy microorganisms, repossessing our hard-won lunch?  So we learned to salt and dry and cure and pickle in the first age of food processing, and to can, freeze, and vacuum-pack in the second.  These technologies were blessings, freeing people from nature’s cycles of abundance and scarcity, as well as the tyranny of the calendar or locale. …As Massimo Montanari, an Italian food historian, points out, the fresh, local, and seasonal food we prize today was for most of human history “a form of slavery,” since it left us utterly at the mercy of the local vicissitudes of nature.”

I don’t know if you know this or not, but the Italians have a penchant for melodrama.  Fresh, local food is slavery?  Really?  Well, tie me up. 

Okay, fine.  Maybe there is a tiny grain of truth to it.  If you’re restricted to a purely local diet and things don’t go your way, nature-wise, you could starve.  And, yeah, my relatives did flee their tiny farming village in Italy for a better life in the Land of Plenty, where plenty is defined as lots and lots of stuff you don’t need, and not nearly enough of what you do.  I’ve heard farming isn’t the sinecure we all dream of.  And maybe it’s not a bad idea to have some reliable backup sources of sustenance and food pathways that make sense.

But still.  To be constrained by the limits of the natural world is slavery?  I never thought about it that way.  But now that you mention it, I really hate gravity.  Why, imagine how much better life would be if we weren’t tethered to the earth by invisible bungee cords.  And now that I really, really think about it, nature screwed me over big time when it saddled me with the female reproductive system.  After all, if nature had its way, I would have been knocked up 11 times to my 2 by now, and then where would I be?  Someplace not unlike my idea of hell, that’s where.  (Shut up, ovaries, you’re not getting your way on this one.)

I’m not really sure what my point is here, but Michael Pollan is coming through loud and clear.  Since we’ve been slaves to nature since the beginning of human history, it’s time we got nature back.  Reparations, baby!  He’s just given us a free pass to stick it to nature any way we can, on behalf of our ancestors, on behalf of ourselves.  Pollution.  Deforestation.  You name it.  Nature isn’t going to ruin itself, people.  So, get going.

Wow.  Um.  That was fast.

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chapter 4

We’re finally to a topic near and dear to my heart.  Meat.  Unfortunately, Michael Pollan didn’t have anything good to say about it.  At least not in this chapter.  In fact, he basically did the equivalent of taking a perfectly good rib eye steak, stomping on it, dragging it through the mud/feces, then really grinding it in there with the sole of his shoe.  I don’t mean to shoot the messenger, but thanks a lot, Michael Pollan.

I guess it’s not really new news that cows in industrial feedlots don’t have good lives.  Though they spend their early months out in the country, they’re then brought to special fattening factories designed to bring you meat as cheaply as possible, by whatever means possible.  Pollan writes:

“America’s food animals have undergone a revolution in lifestyle in the years since World War II.  At the same time as much of America’s human population found itself leaving the city for the suburbs, our food animals found themselves traveling in the opposite direction, leaving widely dispersed farms in places like Iowa to live in densely populated new animal cities.  These places are so different from farms and ranches that a new term was needed to denote them: CAFO—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.”

In other words, ghetto.  Pollan goes on to describe the living conditions of these animals, which include, but are not limited to, filth, squalor, a highly caloric yet malnourishing diet, and drugs.  Sounds vaguely familiar.  Force-feeding the cows corn, which their bodies are not designed to eat, means they are riddled with health problems.  Compound that with crappy medical insurance, low test scores, and high unemployment, and you're not looking at an optimistic group.  And although the teen pregnancy situation seems to be under control, you can pretty much count on all the young, bright ones being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We haven’t done a great job dealing with this plight for human populations, so I doubt the cows stand much of a chance.  However, since I know that I personally have contributed to this situation by eating large quantities of disgusting-yet- somehow-still-delicious CAFO beef, I’d like to be a part of the solution.  Growing up in suburban Boston as I did, my suggestion is this. 

Busing.

If cheap corn is the problem, and I think Pollan is saying that it is—that we can’t afford NOT to feed every living creature government-subsidized corn—we need to find not just a source of cheap grass to compete, but free grass.  And I know just the place.  The suburbs. 

We’ll just bus the cows from their midwestern slums right into the posh coastal suburbs.  We can use the old Boston school buses with the tinted windows you still see every once in a while so the Kow Klux Klan doesn’t hurl corn cobs at them as they drive by.  Then we’ll set the cows loose on all those juicy green lawns.  Maybe not so much where I live, but over there on the right side of the tracks.  They’ll munch away, then move on to the other side of the fence where the grass really is greener. 

You homeowners with the good school systems might object at first, but think of all the money you’ll save on landscaping fees.  Plus, the system is self-fertilizing, and with the absence of lawnmowers, the only thing to offend your ears will be the occasional bout of cow flatulence.  A small price to pay for a better world, I think.

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chapter 3

You’ve already finished this whole book, haven’t you?  (sigh)  That’s okay.  This is why no one ever invites me to any book clubs.   Well, one reason anyway.

In the blissfully short Chapter 3 (four pages), Pollan explains how corn’s identity moved from corn-as-food to corn-as-commodity, like oil or anything else that’s bought and sold in bulk.  It becomes less about individual quality and more about quantity and consistency and efficiently moving it from place to place:

“With the coming of the railroads and the invention of the grain elevator (essentially a great vertical warehouse filled by conveyor belt and emptied by spigot)…it made sense to… treat corn less as a certain number of discrete packages someone had to haul and more like an unbounded liquid that could be pumped, in effect, by machine.  Mix it all together in a great golden river.  The river of corn would flow from the farms to the Chicago market and then out from there to buyers anywhere in the world.”

I’ll admit, the capitalist in me (yes, she’s in there somewhere) thought this sounded pretty cool.  The model of ingenuity and efficiency that we Americans are known for.  After all, this isn’t sweet corn we’re talking about, which you can eat raw right off the cob if you feel like it, but the starchy grain that forms the basis of nearly all packaged food nowadays.  Maybe it doesn’t matter who the individual farmer was or what was unique about his crop.  Every box of Corn Chex just needs to taste the same.

But Pollan makes a convincing point.  Small organic farmers could really learn a thing or two from those in commodity corn.  After all, the Midwest isn’t the only place with elevators.  We have plenty of elevators right here in Boston, and we’re not afraid to use them.  In fact, I’m sure the folks in the Financial District wouldn’t mind bumping elbows with commodity organic produce.  We’ll just ship the crates in on the T and cram them into the elevators real tight.  No, forget the crates.  Big piles.  Sure, the fruits and vegetables might get bruised and start to weep a little after a while, but that’s the beauty of an unbounded liquid.  It’ll drip right into your coffee cup on the way to your 10:00 meeting.  Mmmmm.

I can’t wait to tell my farmer about this!

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Chapter 2

Chapter 2 was rough.  Nothing makes my eyes glass over quite like economics and/or U.S. farm policy.  I’d rather be up to my eyeballs in science, and this is coming from someone who, during my undergraduate years (my only years, by the way), made several tenured biology professors reconsider their positions after hearing my amazing scientific theories.

That said, I appreciated the refresher course on nitrogen-fixing.  I totally forgot that nitrogen was important for life.  I thought it was all about the carbon.  You, too?  Let’s review.

All that nitrogen you hear about in the atmosphere?  Completely useless.  That is, unless you can manage to split all those paired nitrogen atoms, stuck together with the equivalent of Super Glue, and bond them to hydrogen.  If you can, this combination magically jump-starts plant growth, which, in turn, modulates how much additional animal life can be supported. 

Until fairly recently, the only way nitrogen-fixing happened was by the good graces of soil bacteria on the roots of certain plants.  Oh, and lightening, which is strong enough to break those bonds outright.  So, the world’s population was limited by how much nitrogen was available to feed it. 

But then, German scientist Fritz Haber came up with a way to do it yourself, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1920.  Synthetic fertilizer was born, thereby enabling the human population to more than double in a century (high-five, Haber!), despite the fact that his process was also used to create bomb after bomb after bomb (low-five, Haber!).

After World War II, we had all these leftover explosives containing ammonium nitrate.  Wait a minute, that’s free nitrogen!  Naturally, we turned that shit into fertilizer (the poison gases morphed into pesticides).  Yummy!

Anyway, the rest of the chapter had to do with how American farmers with their fertilizer ended up growing so much corn that we ended up with a surplus, driving prices down, which then trapped them in an ongoing vicious cycle of debt and despair.  The last paragraph pretty much summed up the whole chapter:

“In nature, the population of a species explodes until it exhausts its supply of food; then it crashes.  In the market, an oversupply of a commodity depresses prices until either the surplus is consumed or it no longer makes sense to produce any more of it.  In corn’s case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can.”

There’s no way we Americans are going to stop eating corn.  It’s in everything, and it’s so goddamned delicious.  Therefore, there’s no way you’ll be able to convince corn farmers that they should stop growing it.  So, I think Pollan is implying that there’s really only one thing left to do.  Starve corn.  And how do you do that?  By taking all that nitrogen fertilizer and putting it back into the bombs it came from. 

Then, we’ll just start checking countries off our list.  We have a long list, you know.  Afghanistan and Iraq would obviously be the first to go.  Then, Iran and North Korea.  France, just for the hell of it.  We’ll keep China around for a little while so we don’t seem like the worst human rights violators of all time.  But, not for long.  Don’t get smug, Canada, you’re coming up on the next page (unless I get those creme eggs).  Italy, even your precious Tuscany can’t save you now.  Who am I forgetting?

Wow, did you have any idea that Michael Pollan was such a badass?

When My Dad Comes to Call

Oh, the complaining.  Every week I ask myself if it’s worth the free babysitting.

Him: Why can’t you just make real food when I come over?

Me: This is real food.

Him: No, REAL FOOD.  Like hamburgers and French fries.

Me: You can get that anywhere.  Plus, don’t you get sick of eating the same stuff all the time?

Him: No.  At least I know I like it.

Me: You’ll like this.

(Which, for the record, was a somewhat manly version of bruschetta: crusty, garlicky bread with ricotta, chorizo, pickled onions, and frisée.  But it was really light on the frisée, I swear.)

Him: I can’t even pronounce what you make half the time.

Me: You don’t have to pronounce it. 

Him: Plus, it’s taking too long.

Me: It’s only been, like, ten minutes.

Him: Yeah, but it should only take 10 seconds from the time I walk into the kitchen until the time it hits my mouth.  No longer than it takes to open a can.

Me: Wow, Dad.  Them’s some high standards!

There it is, Michael Pollan.  The “omnivore’s dilemma” in a nutshell.

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan (Still on Chapter 1)

Judging by the comments from our first book club meeting, it seems that a lot of people are having trouble getting through The Omnivore’s Dilemma because we’ve already been spoon-fed the basic premise, perhaps to an annoying degree.  But that’s not Michael Pollan’s fault.  It’s our damned liberal media. 

So, why don’t we do this?  Let’s just zoom right in on the sexy parts, much like a frustrated adolescent might flip through her grandmother’s trashy novels until a word like “manhood” catches her eye.  Luckily, one of the sections in the first chapter is entitled Corn Sex, so I didn’t have to look far.  Here’s an excerpt:

“The tassel at the top of the plant houses the male organs….  A meter or so below await the female organs, hundreds of minuscule flowers arranged in tidy rows along a tiny, sheathed cob that juts upward from the stalk at the crotch of a leaf midway between tassel and earth.”

That was pretty hot.  Though maybe not quite as hot as the turkey sex scenes in Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

“Inch by inch he walked up onto her back.  Then he turned around in circles several times, s-l-o-w-l-y, like the minute hand of a clock, before appearing to decide on the correct orientation....  Paradise arrives when a fellow has kneaded his lady’s erogenous wing zones for a long, long time with his feet….” 

Not that hot.  But still, somewhat hot for vegetables.

Not to spoil the exciting climax, but I learned two important things from this subchapter on corn copulation.  One, that those silky threads that poke out of the top of a cornhusk are there to catch pollen blown by the wind, which then tunnels down through the middle of one of those threads to a hidden, cloistered flower within the husk to form a single kernel of corn.  I didn’t know that.  I thought those silks were there to hide fat, juicy corn worms waiting to drop onto my bare feet as I shuck, causing me to shriek like a girl every time.

The other crucial bit of information is how easily man can insert himself into corn’s sex life, because even Internet porn gets boring after a while.  The ease with which breeders can select for traits that would enable hybrid varieties to withstand, even flourish under, mechanization and other modern farming techniques have made corn an industrial food system’s darling.  More than a darling, actually.  Reading between the lines, I think Pollan is calling corn a two-bit ho, ready to gratify man’s every wanton desire on a moment’s notice.

Ah, but self-respect is a small price to pay for world domination, is it not?  I know this particular ho will be anxiously awaiting the answer in the next chapter, Michael Pollan.

Misunderstanding Michael Pollan, Part One

I just cracked open The Omnivore’s Dilemma after letting it decoratively grace my nightstand for about a year.  I thought I’d be content just to coast along on the condensed version in the Times (which was still kinda long, truth be told), but now everyone’s reading the even-longer version.  Quoting it.  Documenting weddings and births inside the cover as if it were the family Bible.  Even people who don’t much care about food or even eat food.  It just makes me look like a giant slacker.

Anyway, I know a couple of you just started it, too, so maybe we can have a little Internet book club.  This would be my first book club experience so I hope it goes well.  For those of you who finished it a long time ago and are on to the next one, please don’t spoil the ending. 

I’m on page 23 at the moment (we won’t go into how long it took me to get there).  So far, Pollan has a very interesting take on the evolutionary biology of plants and animals on the farm.  He suggests that it was not we who domesticated these species, but rather they who domesticated us.  Let’s read together:

“By evolving certain traits we happen to regard as desirable, these species got themselves noticed by the one mammal in a position not only to spread their genes around the world, but to remake vast swaths of that world in the image of the plants’ preferred habitat.”

We’ve been conned!  Plants and animals have tricked us into furthering their own genetic codes.  Tricked us with deliciousness.  They even got us to foot the bill for a decorator.  All this time, I was under the impression that this was purely one-sided exploitation.  Now that I realize there’s something in it for both of us, things aren’t sitting quite so well.

Sometimes when I look at sheep, I think to myself that maybe they’re not the smartest creatures alive.  Smarter than cows, definitely, but not as smart as pigs.  Now I know.  They’re just biding their time, chewing their cud like a clique of gum-smacking tweens waiting for their eighteenth birthdays so they can finally tell their parents what they really think of them without getting sent to juvie.  What other hidden, sinister agendas they might have is anyone’s guess. 

Anyway, I think that we might be the Big Mammal on Campus that Pollan is talking about.  So, his point must be this.  If we humans want to win, we need to start noticing the hell out of each other right away so we can spray-paint our genes all over every square-inch of this planet before it’s too late.  Not to mention replacing all of these useless trees with our preferred habitat: prefab.  Bottom line: Have lots of sex RIGHT NOW (preferably with a contractor) and, for god’s sakes, don’t use a condom. 

Is that right, Michael Pollan?  Did I get the basic gist?