INTRODUCTION

OUR NATIONAL EATING

DISORDER

What should we have for dinner?

This book is a long and fairly involved answer to this seemingly

simple question. Along the way, it also tries to figure out how such a

simple question could ever have gotten so complicated. As a culture we

seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may

once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and

anxiety. Somehow this most elemental of activities—figuring out what

to eat—has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How

did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell

us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner

menu?

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall

of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human

life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I’m talking of

course about bread.Virtually overnight,Americans changed the way the

way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia

seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia

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dating to the Carter administration. The latter was when, in 1977, a

Senate committee had issued a set of “dietary goals” warning beefloving

Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had, until

now.

What set off the sea change? It appears to have been a perfect media

storm of diet books, scientific studies, and one timely magazine article.

The new diet books, many of them inspired by the formerly discredited

Dr. Robert C. Atkins, brought Americans the welcome news that they

could eat more meat and lose weight just so long as they laid off the

bread and pasta.These high-protein, low-carb diets found support in a

handful of new epidemiological studies suggesting that the nutritional

orthodoxy that had held sway in America since the 1970s might be

wrong. It was not, as official opinion claimed, fat that made us fat, but

the carbohydrates we’d been eating precisely in order to stay slim. So

conditions were ripe for a swing of the dietary pendulum when, in the

summer of 2002, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on

the new research entitled “What if Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat?”Within

months, supermarket shelves were restocked and menus rewritten to

reflect the new nutritional wisdom.The blamelessness of steak restored,

two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial foods known to

man—bread and pasta—acquired a moral stain that promptly bankrupted

dozens of bakeries and noodle firms and ruined an untold number

of perfectly good meals.

So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of

a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a

culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and

eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august

legislative body to ever deliberate the nation’s “dietary goals”—or,

for that matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise

design of an official government graphic called the “food pyramid.” A

country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for

the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It

would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or

fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutri-ent and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse

protein bars or food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with

medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed

fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely

would not be nearly so fat.

Nor would such a culture be shocked to discover that there are

other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions

on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure

and tradition, eat all manner of “unhealthy” foods, and, lo and behold,

wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are.We

show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French

paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic

substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and

healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to

speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy

people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

TO ONE DEGREE or another, the question of what to have for dinner assails

every omnivore, and always has.When you can eat just about anything

nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir

anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable

to sicken or kill you.This is the omnivore’s dilemma, noted long ago by

writers like Rousseau and Brillat-Savarin and first given that name thirty

years ago by a University of Pennsylvania research psychologist named

Paul Rozin. I’ve borrowed his phrase for the title of this book because

the omnivore’s dilemma turns out to be a particularly sharp tool for

understanding our present predicaments surrounding food.

In a 1976 paper called “The Selection of Foods by Rats, Humans,

and Other Animals” Rozin contrasted the omnivore’s existential situation

with that of the specialized eater, for whom the dinner question

could not be simpler. The koala bear doesn’t worry about what’s for

dinner: If it looks and smells and tastes like a eucalyptus leaf, it must be

dinner. The koala’s culinary preferences are hardwired in its genes. But for omnivores like us (and the rat) a vast amount of brain space and

time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential

dishes nature lays on are safe to eat.We rely on our prodigious powers

of recognition and memory to guide us away from poisons (Isn’t that the

mushroom that made me sick last week?) and toward nutritious plants (The red

berries are the juicier, sweeter ones). Our taste buds help too, predisposing us

toward sweetness, which signals carbohydrate energy in nature, and

away from bitterness, which is how many of the toxic alkaloids produced

by plants taste. Our inborn sense of disgust keeps us from ingesting

things that might infect us, such as rotten meat. Many anthropologists

believe that the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was

precisely to help us deal with the omnivore’s dilemma.

Being a generalist is of course a great boon as well as a challenge; it

is what allows humans to successfully inhabit virtually every terrestrial

environment on the planet. Omnivory offers the pleasures of variety,

too. But the surfeit of choice brings a lot of stress with it and has leds

to a kind of Manichaean view of food, a division of nature into The

Good Things to Eat, and The Bad.

The rat must make this all-important distinction more or less on its

own, each individual figuring out for himself—and then remembering—

which things will nourish and which will poison. The human omnivore

has, in addition to his senses and memory, the incalculable

advantage of a culture, which stores the experience and accumulated

wisdom of countless human tasters before us. I don’t need to experiment

with the mushroom now called, rather helpfully, the “death cap,”

and it is common knowledge that that first intrepid lobster eater was on

to something very good. Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in

an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary

traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma

at every meal.

One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return,

with an almost atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma.The

cornucopia of the American supermarket has thrown us back on a bewildering

food landscape where we once again have to worry that some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a

poisonous mushroom, but just as surely.) Certainly the extraordinary

abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice.

At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed

the omnivore’s dilemma have lost their sharpness here—or simply

failed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant

populations, each with its own culture of food,Americans have never had

a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us.

The lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable

to the blandishments of the food scientist and the marketer, for

whom the omnivore’s dilemma is not so much a dilemma as an opportunity.

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate

our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with

new products. Our bewilderment in the supermarket is no accident; the

return of the omnivore’s dilemma has deep roots in the imperatives of

modern food industry, roots that, I found, reach all the way back to

fields of corn growing in places like Iowa.

And so we find ourselves where we do, confronting in the supermarket

or at the dinner table the dilemmas of omnivorousness, some of

them ancient and others never before imagined.The organic apple or the

conventional? And if the organic, the local one or the imported? The wild

fish or the farmed? The transfats or the butter or the “not butter”? Shall I

be a carnivore or a vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegetarian or a

vegan? Like the hunter-gatherer picking a novel mushroom off the forest

floor and consulting his sense memory to determine its edibility,we

pick up the package in the supermarket and, no longer so confident of

our senses, scrutinize the label, scratching our heads over the meaning

of phrases like “heart healthy,”“no transfats,”“cage-free,” or “range-fed.”

What is “natural grill flavor” or TBHQ or xanthan gum? What is all this

stuff, anyway, and where in the world did it come from?

MY WAGER in writing The Omnivore’s Dilemma was that the best way to answer the questions we face about what to eat was to go back to the very beginning, to follow the food chains that sustain us, all the way from

the earth (or,more accurately, the sun) to the plate—to a small number

of actual meals. I wanted to look at the getting and eating of food at its

most fundamental, which is to say, as a transaction between species in nature,

eaters and eaten. (“The whole of nature,” wrote the English author

William Ralph Inge, “is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and

passive.”) What I try to do in this book is approach the dinner question

as a naturalist might, using the long lenses of ecology and anthropology,

as well as the shorter, more intimate lens of personal experience.

My premise is that like every other creature on earth, humans take

part in a food chain, and our place in that food chain, or web, determines

to a considerable extent what kind of creature we are.The fact of

our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body (we

possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws of the omnivore, equally well

suited to tearing meat and grinding seeds) and mind. Our prodigious

powers of observation and memory, as well as our curious and experimental

stance toward the natural world, owe much to the biological

fact of omnivorousness. So do the various adaptations we’ve evolved to

defeat the defenses of other creatures so that we might eat them, including

our skills at hunting and cooking with fire. Some philosophers

have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible

for both our savagery and civility, since a creature that could conceive

of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in

particular need of ethical rules, manners, and ritual.We are not only

what we eat, but how we eat, too.

Yet we are also different from most of nature’s other eaters—

markedly so. For one thing, we’ve acquired the ability to substantially

modify the food chains we depend on, by means of such revolutionary

technologies as cooking with fire, hunting with tools, farming, and

food preservation. Cooking opened up whole new vistas of edibility by

rendering various plants and animals more digestible, and overcoming

many of the chemical defenses other species deploy against being

eaten.Agriculture allowed us to vastly multiply the populations of a few

favored food species, and therefore in turn our own.And, most recently, industry has allowed us to reinvent the human food chain, from the

synthetic fertility of the soil to the microwaveable can of soup designed

to fit into the car’s cup holder. The implications of this last revolution,

for our health and the health of the natural world, we are still struggling

to grasp.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the three principal food chains that

sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer.

Different as they are, all three food chains are systems for doing more

or less the same thing: linking us, through what we eat, to the fertility

of the earth and the energy of the sun. It might be hard to see how, but

even a Twinkie does this—constitutes an engagement with the natural

world. As ecology teaches, and this book tries to show, it’s all connected,

even the Twinkie.

Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition

among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and

stored in the form of complex carbon molecules.A food chain is a system

for passing those calories on to species that lack the plant’s unique

ability to synthesize them from sunlight. One of the themes of this

book is that the industrial revolution of the food chain, dating to the

close of World War II, has actually changed the fundamental rules of

this game. Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on

the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food

chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead. (Of

course, even that energy originally came from the sun, but unlike sunlight

is finite and irreplaceable.) The result of this innovation has been

a vast increase in the amount of food energy available to our species;

this has been a boon to humanity (allowing us to multiply our numbers),

but not an unalloyed one.We’ve discovered that an abundance of

food does not render the omnivore’s dilemma obsolete.To the contrary,

abundance seems only to deepen it, giving us all sorts of new problems

and things to worry about.

Each of this book’s three parts follows one of the principal human

food chains from beginning to end: from a plant, or group of plants,

photosynthesizing calories in the sun, all the way to a meal at the dinner end of that food chain. Reversing the chronological order, I start

with the industrial food chain, since that is the one that today involves

and concerns us the most. It is also by far the biggest and longest. Since

monoculture is the hallmark of the industrial food chain, this section

focuses on a single plant: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass we call corn,

which has become the keystone species of the industrial food chain,

and so in turn of the modern diet.This section follows a bushel of commodity

corn from the field in Iowa where it grew on its long, strange

journey to its ultimate destination in a fast-food meal, eaten in a moving

car on a highway in Marin County, California.

The book’s second part follows what I call—to distinguish it from

the industrial—the pastoral food chain. This section explores some of

the alternatives to industrial food and farming that have sprung up in

recent years (variously called “organic,” “local,” “biological,” and “beyond

organic”), food chains that might appear to be preindustrial but

in surprising ways turn out in fact to be postindustrial. I set out thinking

I could follow one such food chain, from a radically innovative

farm in Virginia that I worked on one recent summer to an extremely

local meal prepared from animals raised on its pastures. But I promptly

discovered that no single farm or meal could do justice to the complex,

branching story of alternative agriculture right now, and that I needed

also to reckon with the food chain I call, oxymoronically, the “industrial

organic.” So the book’s pastoral section serves up the natural history

of two very different organic meals: one whose ingredients came

from my local Whole Foods supermarket (gathered there from as far

away as Argentina), and the other tracing its origins to a single polyculture

of grasses growing at Polyface Farm in Swope,Virginia.

The last section, titled Personal, follows a kind of neo-Paleolithic

food chain from the forests of Northern California to a meal I prepared

(almost) exclusively from ingredients I hunted, gathered, and grew

myself. Though we twenty-first-century eaters still eat a handful of

hunted and gathered food (notably fish and wild mushrooms), my interest

in this food chain was less practical than philosophical: I hoped

to shed fresh light on the way we eat now by immersing myself in the way we ate then. In order to make this meal I had to learn how to do

some unfamiliar things, including hunting game and foraging for wild

mushrooms and urban tree fruit. In doing so I was forced to confront

some of the most elemental questions—and dilemmas—faced by the

human omnivore: What are the moral and psychological implications

of killing, preparing, and eating a wild animal? How does one distinguish

between the delicious and the deadly when foraging in the

woods? How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs

of nature into some of the greatest delights of human culture?

The end result of this adventure was what I came to think of as the

Perfect Meal, not because it turned out so well (though in my humble

opinion it did), but because this labor- and thought-intensive dinner,

enjoyed in the company of fellow foragers, gave me the opportunity, so

rare in modern life, to eat in full consciousness of everything involved

in feeding myself: For once, I was able to pay the full karmic price of

a meal.

Yet as different as these three journeys (and four meals) turned out

to be, a few themes kept cropping up. One is that there exists a fundamental

tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry,

at least as it is now organized. Our ingenuity in feeding

ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come

into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to

maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures.

This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons

practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and

environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts

to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and

the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you

find a biological system—a patch of soil, a human body—and the

health of one is connected—literally—to the health of the other. Many

of the problems of health and nutrition we face today trace back to

things that happen on the farm, and behind those things stand specific

government policies few of us know anything about.

I don’t meant to suggest that human food chains have only recently come into conflict with the logic of biology; early agriculture and, long

before that, human hunting proved enormously destructive. Indeed,

we might never have needed agriculture had earlier generations of

hunters not eliminated the species they depended upon. Folly in the

getting of our food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating

in our industrial food chain today—by replacing solar energy

with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement,

by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by

feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize—we are

today taking unprecedented risks with our health and the health of the

natural world.

Another theme, or premise really, is that the way we eat represents

our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating

turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into

our bodies and minds. Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural

world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the

composition of its flora and fauna. Our eating also constitutes a relationship

with dozens of other species—plants, animals, and fungi—

with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply

entwined. Many of these species have evolved expressly to gratify our

desires, in the intricate dance of domestication that has allowed us

and them to prosper together as we could never have prospered apart.

But our relationships with the wild species we eat—from the mushrooms

we pick in the forest to the yeasts that leaven our bread—are no

less compelling, and far more mysterious. Eating puts us in touch with

all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It de-

fines us.

What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is

how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections.To

go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave

this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly,

not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting,

or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food

chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial

agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is

also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been

done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a

great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of

it.To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound

like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is

to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly

content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a

thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are

things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book

about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened

by knowing. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Recommended to book clubs by 3 of 3 members.