Food, food everywhere, nor any a bite worth eating
Americans have obsessed about diet for decades, but we've only recently been shown the full story of why our food is so bad for us and how damaging industrial agriculture is for our environment.
Michael Pollan's THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA and Barbara Kingsolver's ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE show where our food comes from, the true costs of growing and manufacturing it, what eating it does to us, and some of the ways we can improve both our personal health and the health of the planet. In different ways they demonstrate how our diet is oil-based: oil for fertilizer and pesticides, for tractors and harvesters, for trucks and airplanes to ship it to us, for plastics to wrap it in.
But there are alternatives, and both books discuss them. We can always vote with our wallets, despite the power of giant agriculture and food companies. They've made it difficult to buy good food, but so far they haven't made it impossible. It just takes some thought and effort to give up our dependence on the uberprocessed, chemical-laden boxes and bags that line the store shelves.
Pollan gives a comprehensive view of the food industry, having traveled over a good part of the country to do his reporting. Kingsolver's book (which was co-written with her husband and daughter) also reports and comments on the larger issues, but it is much more of a practical guide to making the old ways of slow, local, fresh food work today.
THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Pollan tells the stories of four meals, starting with fast food eaten while driving and ending with a hunter-gatherer meal, including a wild pig he shot himself. Pig hunting might put some people off, but it would be a mistake to ignore the book. Pollan's reporting on where the Standard American Diet (SAD) comes from is timely and important. He visits the factory farms of the Midwest corn monoculture and the vast feedlots (more accurately, oceans of manure) that most beef comes from. He reports with some authority because he bought a calf from a rancher and followed it from ranch to feedlot to slaughterhouse. He also visits the huge industrial-organic farms of California, the source of all those bags of greens in your local produce section. Later he spends a week in Virgina living and working on Polyface Farm, a model of sustainable agriculture, where we see the advantages of switching from a corn-based to a grass-based food chain. Finally Pollan goes home to northern California to hunt pigs and mushrooms. He even attempts to gather salt from the shore (the result was a greasy chemical-tasting scum that made him gag). Along the way Pollan dissects the web of laws and policies that support industrial agriculture and their origins in the immense political influence of Big Agri. It's always Pollan's personal journey, though, the story of his encounters with the people who make our food, the story of his four meals, which are also our meals.
Amazon Price: $17.79 (as of 10/11/2008)
ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
When novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family moved from Tuscon to their farm in Virginia, they resolved to eat only locally grown food for a year, with a few exceptions, like coffee. They also decided to write about their experiment. Kingsolver's family includes her husband, Steven L. Hopp, a biology professor, and two daughters, Camille and Lily. Only Lily doesn't contribute directly to the text, but she was a big contributor to her family's story and to the household economy, running the egg operation pretty much on her own, despite being in elementary school. (She got an excused absence for "agriculture" the day she went to the post office to pick up the chicks that started her flock.) Steven Hopp writes sections on technical and legal issues, like how much oil is consumed by the agriculture industry (400 gallons per capita per year) and how federal policies squeeze out small farmers. Camille writes glowing appreciations of her favorite foods--how to grow and prepare them and include them in meals. But the main narrative is Kingsolver's, and she is vivid, precise, and insightful. Kingsolver takes on a daunting range of topics--nutrition, American foodways, the politics and economics of agriculture, as well as growing (and buying from other local growers), preparing, and preserving fresh food. Kingsolver is clear about the book's focus, and that's what holds it all together: "It's hard to reduce our modern complex of food choices to unifying principles," she writes, "but this is one that generally works: eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body."
The audio book is read by Kingsolver and her family and available through Amazon.
Amazon Price: $17.79 (as of 10/11/2008)
What Pollan and Kingsolver are up to now
- Michael Pollan's web site
- More information on Pollan, his other books and articles for the New York Times Magazine, and speaking engagements.
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle web site
- A site that continues Kingsolver's family's adventures in growing, cooking, and eating. With pictures, recipes, and links to organizations that promote local-market agriculture.
- The Ethics of Eating
- An interview with Barbara Kingsolver on Krista Tippett's public radio program SPEAKING OF FAITH.
Polyface Farm
While writing OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, Michael Pollan spent a week on Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a sustainable, grass-based farm run by Joel Salatin and his family. Polyface produces some tomatoes, corn, and berries, but the center of Salatin's system is a hundred acres of pasture that anchor the production of 40 thousand pounds of beef, 30 thousand pounds of pork, 10 thousand chickens, and 35 thousand dozen eggs. I say that the pasture anchors the production because it isn't as simple as growing alfalfa and then taking it to cows in pens. In most cases, the animals go to the pasture. The cows rotate through sections of pasture to avoid overgrazing, and the chickens go to pasture in a movable cage that allows them to eat bugs and deposit manure, which improves the health of both the chickens and the pasture.Salatin's system is a marvel of invention, and he's a tireless educator about it. He's written several books about various aspects of Polyface for general readers as well as those interested in starting a similar operation.
Joel Salatin's Books on Sustainable Farming
Holy Cows And Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide To Farm Friendly Food
From Amazon: HOLY COWS AND HOG HEAVEN is written by an honest-to-goodness-dirt-under-the-fingernails, optimistic clean good farmer. His goal is to:
# Empower food buyers to pursue positive alternatives to the industrialized food system.
# Bring clean food farmers and their patrons into a teamwork relationship.
# Marry the best of western technology with the soul of eastern ethics.
# Educate food buyers about productions.
# Create a food system that enhances nature's ecology for future generations.
Called "the high priest of the pasture" by the New York Times, Joel Salatin likes to refer to himself as a "Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer." He lives with his family on Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Salatin has developed a system of pasture rotation that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximizes the composting of animal waste. Each species on the farm is dependent on another. The cows, for example, eat the nutrient rich grass in Pasture A and then are moved to Pasture B. The chickens then move to Pasture A where they pick through the cow pies eating bugs and grinding the waste into the ground where it revitalizes the grass for the cows.
Amazon Price: $12.21 (as of 10/11/2008)
Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament
From Amazon: Saving the landscape, rebuilding entrepreneurial rural families, and protecting nutritious food are the themes of this timeless treatise--hence the word "testament." Delving into the soul of the Salatin family's nationally acclaimed Polyface Farm, Salatin offers Family Friendly Farming as the key to dealing with resource issues, food policy, and social fabric.
With humor and personal stories, he opens his family and farm convictions for all to see, share, and enjoy. The heart of this book is aimed toward parents tired of their Dilbert cubicle at the end of the expressway who want to reconnect with their children through a pastoral lifestyle. It's written for anyone who yearns to grow old working with and being adored by value-sharing grandchildren and honored by passionate, productive adult children.
Family Friendly Farming can make any family business more viable and any family more functional.
Amazon Price: $23.10 (as of 10/11/2008)
You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise
From Amazon: In YOU CAN FARM, Joel Salatin describes just how he runs his farm and why. By sticking to the example of his own experience and his own farm, he paints a vivid, detailed, and obviously accurate picture of how he makes his living from farming, and how you can, too.
Most of the farm activities he recommends require little up-front investment or experience. One can start small and expand as one learns the ropes.
We've used many of Salatin's ideas on our farm in Oregon, and they've worked very well for us, and we know a lot of other people who've put them to work as well.
Other writers focus too much on the romance and political correctness of ecologically responsible farming. But romance and political correctness don't pay the bills. "Sustainable agriculture" has to sustain the farmer as well as the land, or it's nothing but a snare and a delusion. Salatin shows a proven path to success and profitability. --Robert Plamondon, Blodgett, OR
Amazon Price: $23.10 (as of 10/11/2008)
Polyface Farm & a Farm Using the Polyface Method
- Polyface, Inc.
- Polyface, Inc. is a family owned, multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm and informational outreach in Virginia's Shenandoah ...
- One farm's experience with the Salatin model
- Perhaps more than any other single individual, Joel Salatin, owner/operator of Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, has popularized the concept of using ...
Supersized Fast Food
The Pollan and Kingsolver books are full of revelations about the state of our food today, but many of the problems aren't new. Upton Sinclair's novel THE JUNGLE, an expose of the meat-packing industry, was published in 1906 and prompted the establishment of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.More recently, Eric Schlosser's book FAST FOOD NATION showed that while some things have improved since Sinclair's day, we still have a long way to go to provide safe, clean meat produced in ways that are humane both for the animals and the workers. The movie of the same name is a dramatization of the issues Schlosser raises and well worth a look.
Morgan Spurlock's film SUPER SIZE ME follows his thirty days on a McDonald's-only diet. His weight and cholesterol level both shot up, and at one point his doctor didn't think he would survive. The film of his experiment in supersizing has helped to change the menus of several fast food chains.
The Jungle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
From Amazon: Upton Sinclair's muckraking masterpiece THE JUNGLE centers on Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant working in Chicago's infamous Packingtown. Instead of finding the American Dream, Rudkus and his family inhabit a brutal, soul-crushing urban jungle dominated by greedy bosses, pitiless con-men, and corrupt politicians.
While Sinclair's main target was the industry's appalling labor conditions, the reading public was most outraged by the disgusting filth and contamination in American food that his novel exposed. As a result, President Theodore Roosevelt demanded an official investigation, which quickly led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws. For a work of fiction to have such an impact outside its literary context is extremely rare. (At the time of THE JUNGLE's publication in 1906, the only novel to have led to social change on a similar scale in America was Uncle Tom's Cabin.)
Today, THE JUNGLE remains a relevant portrait of capitalism at its worst and an impassioned account of the human spirit facing nearly insurmountable challenges.
Amazon Price: $11.20 (as of 10/11/2008)
Fast Food Nation
From Amazon: On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways.
Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.
One of Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 10/11/2008)
Fast Food Nation
From Amazon: If you're still eating that fast-food burger after watching Super Size Me, you might not feel too hungry after watching FAST FOOD NATION, a fictionalized feature based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling nonfiction expose. Director Richard Linklater, who cowrote the screenplay with Schlosser, guides a topnotch ensemble cast through a peek behind the veil of how that Big Mac is born. Much of the film focuses on the illegal immigrants who work in the loosely regulated meat-packing industry, and actors including the luminous Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace), who plays a desperate but outraged laborer. Greg Kinnear also delivers a spot-on performance as a fast-food chain marketing manager, trying frantically to discover the source of stomach-turning contamination in the company's meat. Stories are woven in unexpected ways, and cameos by the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, and especially Bruce Willis keep the narrative fresh. The film has a point of view, but thanks to Linklater's deft touch, is never didactic. As Willis's character slyly says, "Most people don't like to be told what's best for them." Agreed, yet FAST FOOD NATION likely will help the viewer be more conscious of what's on the end of that fork. --A.T. Hurley
Amazon Price: $11.99 (as of 10/11/2008)
Super Size Me
From Amazon: Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, rejected five times by the USC film school, won the best director award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival for this alarmingly personal investigation into the health hazards wreaked by our fast food nation. Under extensive medical supervision, Spurlock subjects himself to a steady diet of McDonald's cuisine for 30 days just to see what happens. In less than a week, his ordinarily fit body and equilibrium undergo dark and ugly changes: Spurlock grows fat, his cholesterol rockets north, his organs take a beating, and he becomes subject to headaches, mood swings, symptoms of addiction, and lessened sexual energy. Spurlock spends most of the film probing insidious ways that fast food companies worm their way into school lunchrooms and the hearts of young children who spend hours in McDonald's playrooms. French fries never looked more nauseating. --Tom Keogh
Amazon Price: $5.99 (as of 10/11/2008)
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