Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

http://www.buzzflash.com/store/reviews/283
Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan

  We'll let a Washington Post review of this book by Bunny Crumpacker
introduce you to "The Omnivore's Dilemma":

  Most of us are at a great distance from our food. I don't mean that we
live "twelve miles from a lemon," as English wit Sydney Smith said
about a home in Yorkshire. I mean that our food bears little
resemblance to its natural substance. Hamburger never mooed; spaghetti
grows on the pasta tree; baby carrots come from a pink and blue
nursery. Still, we worry about our meals -- from calories to carbs,
from heart-healthy to brain food. And we prefer our food to be
"natural," as long as natural doesn't involve real.
  In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes about how our food is
grown -- what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really
three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the
second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small
farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for
oneself. And each section culminates in a meal -- a cheeseburger and
fries from McDonald's; roast chicken, vegetables and a salad from Whole
Foods; and grilled chicken, corn and a chocolate soufflé (made with
fresh eggs) from a sustainable farm; and, finally, mushrooms and pork,
foraged from the wild.

  The first section is a wake-up call for anyone who has ever been
hungry. In the United States, Pollan makes clear, we're mostly fed by
two things: corn and oil. We may not sit down to bowls of yummy
petroleum, but almost everything we eat has used enormous amounts of
fossil fuels to get to our tables. Oil products are part of the
fertilizers that feed plants, the pesticides that keep insects away
from them, the fuels used by the trains and trucks that transport them
across the country, and the packaging in which they're wrapped. We're
addicted to oil, and we really like to eat.

  Oil underlines Pollan's story about agribusiness, but corn is its
focus. American cattle fatten on corn. Corn also feeds poultry, pigs
and sheep, even farmed fish. But that's just the beginning. In addition
to dairy products from corn-fed cows and eggs from corn-fed chickens,
corn starch, corn oil and corn syrup make up key ingredients in
prepared foods. High-fructose corn syrup sweetens everything from juice
to toothpaste. Even the alcohol in beer is corn-based. Corn is in
everything from frozen yogurt to ketchup, from mayonnaise and mustard
to hot dogs and bologna, from salad dressings to vitamin pills. "Tell
me what you eat," said the French gastronomist Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you what you are." We're corn.

  Each bushel of industrial corn grown, Pollan notes, uses the
equivalent of up to a third of a gallon of oil. Some of the oil
products evaporate and acidify rain; some seep into the water table;
some wash into rivers, affecting drinking water and poisoning marine
ecosystems. The industrial logic also means vast farms that grow only
corn. When the price of corn drops, the solution, the farmer hopes, is
to plant more corn for next year. The paradoxical result? While farmers
earn less, there's an over-supply of cheap corn, and that means finding
ever more ways to use it up.

  Is eating all this corn good for us? Who knows? We think we've tamed
nature, but we're just beginning to learn about all that we don't yet
know. Ships were once provided with plenty of food, but sailors got
scurvy because they needed vitamin C. We're sailing on the same sea,
thinking we're eating well but still discovering nutrients in our food
that we hadn't known were there -- that we don't yet know we need.

  We've lost touch with the natural loops of farming, in which livestock
and crops are connected in mutually beneficial circles. Pollan
discusses the alternatives to industrial farming, but these two long
(and occasionally self-indulgent) sections lack the focus and intensity
-- the anger beneath the surface -- of the first. He spends a week at
Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a farm that
works with nature, rather than despite it. Salatin calls himself a
grass farmer, though his farm produces cows, chickens, eggs and corn.
But everything begins with the grass: The cows nibble at it at the
precise moment when it's at its sweetest and are moved from pasture to
pasture to keep the grass at its best height. Their droppings fertilize
the grass, and the cycle is under way. There's a kind of lyrical
symmetry to everything that happens on this farm. Even the final
slaughtering of chickens is done quickly and humanely, in the open air.
It isn't pleasant, but compared to the way cattle are fattened and
slaughtered in meat industry feedlots and slaughterhouses, it is
remarkably reasonable.

  We needn't learn how to shoot our own pigs, as Pollan does; there's
hope in other ways -- farmers' markets, the Slow Food movement,
restaurants supplied by local farms. To Pollan, the omnivore's dilemma
is twofold: what we choose to eat ("What should we have for dinner?" he
asks in the opening sentence of his book) and how we let that food be
produced. His book is an eater's manifesto, and he touches on a vast
array of subjects, from food fads and taboos to our avoidance of not
only our food's animality, but also our own. Along the way, he is alert
to his own emotions and thoughts, to see how they affect what he does
and what he eats, to learn more and to explain what he knows. His
approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just,
his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling.

  [End of Review]

  This is NOT a vegetarian or vegan book (although you may become one
after reading it). It is as the title indicates a personal reflection
and study of the the relationship between the human species and food.
In that context, omnivore is defined as "an animal that will feed on
any kind of food, including both plants and animals."

  It has received wide acclaim for its exploration of the lost
relationship between humans as consumers of food and humans as food
gatherers and producers. Michael Pollan teaches us much as he traverses
this gap.

  The book has been a surprise strong seller nationally despite the fact
that it's NOT about sex. But we can live without sex if we had to; we
can't live without food.