America has an eating disorder. That's not to say that we are all excessively underweight or suffering from body dysmorphia; nor is it to imply that each of us is one donut away from reality show stardom as our body mass spirals out of control. The author believes that nobody knows what to eat anymore, because the messages we receive about food are so confusing. Is this good for us? Is this fattening? If a food is considered trendy, is it still good for you when it goes out of vogue? This is purely a human problem, because humans, traditionally and biologically omnivores, have too many food choices and too much information which in turn makes it almost impossible to make a sensible decision about what to have for dinner. The problem is at its worst in countries where food choices are abundant. Pollan decides to the problem by focusing on four meals that represent three food chains - industrial, hunter-gatherer and organic.
Meal one is fast food based. It is a food that is mass produced by the industrial food system and its base ingredient is corn. Most corn is grown in vast quantities to feed industrially-raised cattle and the rest is refined to make some of the additives used in our food that provide it with texture, flavor and color. Pollan visits two Iowa farmers who grow corn and learns that by utilizing every imaginable pesticide they can grow as much corn as is physically possible on the amount of land that they own.
Pollan then purhases a steer named 534.534 and visits it on the ranch where it was born. From the ranch in South Dakota the steer is sent to Kansas at the age of six months and force fed a corn-fased diet, which is cheaper than raising him on a grazing field. It also fattens them up faster and they produce a marble-looking meat that is very popular with consumers. However, cow stomachs are the result of generations of evolution, specifically designed to enable them to digest and process grass. Their corn diet makes them sick, which in turn means that they are given antibiotics. These antibiotics turn up in meat, and are consumed by Americans in food without ever being "declared" by the vendor.
The corn that is not used as cattle feed is sent to a refinery where it is processed to turn it into many other materials, some which we eat, some which we do not. The most common product produced in a refinery is high-fructose corn syrup, a complicated and controversial sweetener with multiple downsides and no nutritional benefits whatsoever. All of which drives home to Pollan that the food industry does not care very much about making food healthy for the consumer, for the animals or for the planet; it's all about the bottom line. The corn industry relies on fossil fuels that hurt the environment. Unnatural reliance on just one crop harms the planet because all other species other than corn are eliminated using chemicals. Corn harms consumers because it provides an awful lot of calories for very little money. Pollan eats his McDonald's Happy Meal in the car with his wife and son. The meal does not remind him in any way of what he has seen in the making of it. Fast food enables each family member to make an individual choice about what they want to eat but what each has in common is a defining and evocative smell and taste that is almost addictive and that the consumer comes to crave. The food items also suggest a sense of a food without actually being that food; a chicken nugget evokes the idea of chicken but is really a synthetic food with chicken flavoring and associated aroma. The majority of the ingredients in the meal are made from corn.
Meals two and three are both deemed to be "farm based". He uses these meals to investigate just what is meant by "farm fresh", "farm to table" and "organic". He looks at large-scale farming which creates the products that end up in supermarkets such as Whole Foods. Joel Salatin is an independent small farmer and acts as his spirit guide in this exploration. He sneers at what he considers to be Big Business Organic, which he says is just as bad as the industrial synthetic food system. Is he right? Pollan decides to find out.
Believe it or not, the organic movement began as a counter-culture answer to industrial food producers and it was seen as something that Birkenstock-wearing conspiracy theorists subscribed to. It was the way that hippies ate, but over the last few decades it has become a mainstream and booming industry. The demand for organic products meant that smaller providers had to increase productivity and with this productivity came compromises that were not a match for the eco-friendly ethos of the organic consumer. Pollan visits Cascadian Farms, which began as a small, granola-producing cooperative but was later purchased by cereal giant General Mills. He also visits a poultry farm that states itself to be "free range" but in actuality offers chickens a tiny patch of bare land to scratch around on. The only difference between this farm and a large-scale industrial one is in the quality of the food the chickens are given - it is grown without pesticides.
Much of the food on the organic food chain is more recognizable as food and bears far more relation to what the consumers believe they are eating; however, the production of organic food is still harmful to the environment, which goes against the ehos of most people purchasing organic in the first place. Big organic producers need even more fossil fuels than their industrial counterparts so that they can combat the inefficiency of producing huge quantities of food wthout using chemical fertilizers or pesticides. As he eats a meal made from scratch using ingredients purchased at Whole Foods, Pollan weighs up the benefits to the earth of eating food that is more nutritious and far more flavorful than fast food against the cost of flying in organic asparagus from Argentina in January to San Francisco. Industrial organic betrays the original intentions of the organic movement because it is unsustainable and very expensive - but for the consumer, it fulfills its promise because it tastes much better, and it is also far more healthful.
Pollan revisits his "beyond organic" farm and meets up again with Salatin. The farm, Polyface, do not just adhere to the letter of the law, which is issued in vague dictates and goals from the government, but they are committed to organic in the true sense of the word. They are almost self-sufficient. They rely on the natural ecosystem of each crop or organism. Salatin is a grass farmer, which means that instead of depleting the land he is constantly revitalizing it (imagine if a paper manufacturer also planted trees to replace the ones that they had used). Cows are moved from pasture to pasture, followed by the chickens, eating grubs from the cow manure. Each system depends upon the one before and fertilizes the next, which results in happy, healthy animals producing delicious, nutrient-dense foods with almost no waste at all. The system compares favorably to the previous two, but the only problem is one of scale; how can a farm like this be scaled up in size to meet the needs of a hungry population?
For his last experimental meal, Pollan goes Paleo and attempts to hunt and forage every ingredient for himself. He wants to keep his food chain local, and this throws up other ethical dilemmas about killing animals and the way in which humans decide which animals are food and which are not. There is also a question of deciding which wild grown foods can be eaten and which can't - mushrooms are a prime example of this. His meal is delicious, healthy and creates the minimum harm to the planet, but it is produced in a way that is completely unsustainable. It is just as impossible to sustain the nation on a meal like this as it is to sustain a healthy population on a lifetime of meals purchased from fast food restaurants. Pollan realizes that food is a person's most direct and hands on interaction with the natural world, and that choices about what to eat have consequences that are far more far reaching than whether we can fit into our pants or keep a healthy heart.
