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1-Page Summary of The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Overall Summary
The author, Michael Pollan, is concerned about the state of American health. He believes that Americans are confused about what to eat because they’re constantly bombarded with conflicting information from different diets and trends in food. Americans also have a lot of choices when it comes to food since we live in a country with an abundant supply of processed foods. Therefore, he sets out on a journey to trace three major sources of food (corn, beef and tomatoes) and discovers how those foods affect our bodies as well as the environment around us.
Michael Pollan focuses on four different meals that represent the industrial, organic and hunter-gatherer food systems. The first meal he discusses is fast food, which comes from the industrial system. Corn dominates American agriculture because it’s so productive in terms of calories per acre, and most corn goes to feed livestock or make processed foods. Most people eat a lot of corn without knowing it—it’s sweetener for soda or chips, starch in breads and cereals, colorants for ice cream or candy bars, flavorings for soup mixes or salad dressings.
The author visits two farmers in Iowa who grow corn, using industrial techniques to maximize their output. They can’t trace the corn back to its final use because all of it is processed together. Three-fifths of that corn ends up feeding cattle at factory farms.
Although it is also hard to track a single cow, the author buys and visits one called 534. 534 is born on a ranch in South Dakota and sent to Kansas at age six months where he’s fed corn-based diet. This makes cows sick because their stomach systems are specifically evolved for grass eating, which requires medical care and antibiotics.
Corn is used as feed for cattle. The rest of the corn is sent to refineries, where it’s processed into various food items and materials. Scientists are always developing new uses for corn because companies want to make money from their products. They’re not concerned with how that affects humans or the environment; they just care about making a profit. This has caused problems in our society, like over-consumption of calories and environmental damage through fertilizer use on cornfields.
Michael Pollan eats a meal from McDonald’s with his wife and son in the car. He describes how he traced the origin of each ingredient, which is not natural or organic. The food tastes good but it’s not what it says it is because everything has been processed to make it taste better. It also takes a lot of resources to make this food for people who are consuming them at an alarming rate, so much so that there isn’t enough land left over to grow actual fruits and vegetables for those same consumers.
Michael Pollan’s second and third meals are categorized as “pastoral”, or farm-based. He uses these meals to examine the differences between food chains that produce food with labels such as “natural” and “organic”. First, he looks at large-scale farming, which is used in supermarkets like Whole Foods. His farm guru is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia. Salatin scoffs at Big Organic because it’s just as bad as industrial farming. Pollan sets out to discover whether this is true by examining Polyface Farm more closely.
The organic movement began as an alternative, countercultural protest against industrial food in the late-60s. It was characterized by localized, off-the-grid, back-to-the-land hippie ideas. As it became increasingly popular and mainstream, it morphed into a booming industry that forced organic farms to scale up and make compromises. Pollan visits places like Cascadian Farms which started as a cooperative community but was later acquired by General Mills; he also goes behind the scenes at a poultry farm that purports to be free range but is actually only offering its chickens a tiny bare unused plot of land with no difference from an industrial chicken farm except for pesticide free feed.
