Richard PollanNew York: Penguin Press, 2006.
$26.95/Hardcover, $16.00/Trade Paper
I originally intended to write a nuanced and balanced review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I was recently persuaded otherwise. Discussing the history of scientific ideas, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr has said, “my tactic is to make sweeping categorical statements” because they “lead more quickly to the ultimate solution of scientific problems than cautious sitting on the fence.” Thus, if the tone of this review seems polemical, it is partially in response to what I perceive to be an uncritical acceptance of Pollan’s major premises and conclusions by fellow environmentalists and progressives. The growing community of pseudo-intellectuals that have arisen around the local food movement fail to realize that, were Pollan’s arguments taken seriously, what an unmitigated disaster it would be for the natural world, not to mention an anti-humanist retrogression to pre-industrial pastoralism. I hope this review may, more than revealing Pollan’s journalistic ineptitude, arouse skepticism about the hype of so-called ethical dining.
Artist Chuck Close, famous for his massive, hyperrealistic portraits, has also produced a series composed of small blocks of color, in which the face only emerges from a distance. The portrait of contemporary agriculture looms likewise large, probably beyond the scope of any single person or discipline, and more than the sum of it parts. Just as trying to discern the face of Close’s portraits from scrutinizing a few whirls of paint would be misleading, Pollan’s method in Omnivore takes him and the credulous reader to equally erroneous conclusions. As the subtitle suggests, Pollan wants to tell the natural history of four “meals”: industrial, organic, local, and personal . His research involves following a single meal from farm to table, generally interviewing one practitioner of each of agricultural practice. Other reviewers have commended him for his empiricism but fail to recognize how narrow and skewed his ‘data’ are.
Traveling to visit my grandparents in Indiana, I was always baffled by the endless acres of corn. “Who is eating all of this?” I wondered. In one of the few fascinating passages of Omnivore, Pollan reveals that contemporary Americans are “processed corn, walking.” More often than on a cob, corn is consumed in everything from soda to Cheez Whiz and constitutes the primary feed for most livestock. How did this come to be? For the answer, Pollan goes to Iowan corn farmer George Naylor. Portrayed as an ordinary, if eccentric, farmer trying to carve out a living for his family, Naylor shares his seemingly innocent opinion about how corporations and the USDA are rigging the system against regular folk like himself. This is disingenuous. Naylor, as the “Sources” section reveals, is president of National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), a group whose views on GMO, irradiation, and free trade are out of step with the evidence.
Since I do not have space to adequately treat all the factual distortions, I will focus on the “Naylor Curve”:
A farm family needs a certain amount of cash flow every year to support itself, and if the price of corn falls, the only way to stay even is to sell more corn. Naylor says that farmers desperate to boost yield end up degrading their land, plowing and planting marginal land, applying more nitrogen – anything to squeeze a few more bushels from the soil. Yet the more bushels each farmer produces, the lower prices go, giving another turn to the perverse spiral of overproduction. Even so, corn farmers persist in measuring success in bushels per acre, a measurement that improves even as they go broke.
Pollan describes this cycle as making a “mockery” of supply and demand, and concluding with Naylor that the free market simply does not work with agriculture. In reality, conventional theory on supply and demand describes perfectly the above phenomenon. Current US agricultural policy guarantees an artificially high price per bushel of corn. Economic theory predicts that farmers will produce corn until the marginal gain from the next bushel is equal to the price. Thus subsidies induce farmers to plant corn on marginal land and with greater inputs than would be profitable in a free market. Farmers keep planting even as the price drops because the contributions of an individual farm are too small to affect the price. Corn farmers like Naylor are poorly compensated because they do not posses a scarce resource or skill. In contrast to specialty farms, there are few barriers to entering and exiting industrial corn farming. Rather than see the plight of corn farmers as a textbook demonstration of Econ 101, Pollan and Naylor blame big agribusiness for rigging the system against them. While I have no doubt that agribusiness gains from the current subsidy scheme, that is not the reason for its existence. Given the acknowledged goal of favoring domestic over international food production, which Naylor and Pollan champion, direct producer subsidies are more economically efficient than straightforward protectionism because they keep price low for consumers. The favored policies of Naylor and the NFFC are not based on any sound economic principle, but are plain old special interest.
Pollan, ever intent to blame his nebulous notion of capitalism, is equally misguided in his treatment of industrial organic agriculture. As with industrial agriculture, he does not consult a requisitely diverse array of opinions to understand the net impact of large-scale organic agriculture. Rather, he supplements scant research with personal trips to Whole Foods and an interview with idealistic hippy-turned-organic entrepreneur Gene Kahn. Furthermore, most of his critique draws from fringe beyond-organic farmers like Joel Salatin (see below). Omnivore’s targets of analysis are largely trivial nodes in a vast food chain that make for curious but uninformative reading. For example, Pollan follows the life of baby salad greens from field to table to find, unsurprisingly, that such a culinary luxury is energy intensive on a per calorie basis. He manages to find a silver lining on the cloud of the industrial organic, but only through egregious mis-accounting, tallying the benefits and ignoring obvious drawbacks to the point of intellectual dishonesty. He commends Gene Kahn for saving millions of acres from fertilizer and pesticide, thereby reducing pollution and protecting wildlife. The argument is specious, as it ignores the alterative of farming fewer acres more intensively, thereby preserving wilderness and biodiversity. Citing a study by David Pimentel, Pollan also incorrectly asserts that “growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally.” However, the study in question examined only corn and soybeans on a single experimental farm, and actually found no reduction for organic soy. One must conclude that, though he often adduces ecology to show which form of agriculture is most consistent with nature, Pollan is blissfully unaware of much current ecological research. Ultimately, Omnivore finds, predictably enough, that organic fails because it pursued an industrial mode of production incommensurable with nature. The erroneous conclusion misses two fundamental points: 1) pleasant agricultural landscapes are not natural nor the only or best means of conserving biodiversity; and 2) so long as fossil fuel is cheap, it will be used abundantly to meet consumer wants – organic and local agriculture (see below) are not exempt from the market.
After the disappointing find that “[his] industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart,” Pollan investigates the nascent beyond-organic, local farming as practiced by Joel Salatin and his family on Polyface Farms in Swope, Virginia. Through highly innovative, Ludditish technology, Polyface produces high quality food in a self-sustained manner, drawing only on the natural ability of wild grass to convert the sun’s energy to chemical nutrition. While it seems reasonable to conclude that production at Polyface leaves a small carbon footprint, further scrutiny suggests that the total fossil fuel consumption of local food is not substantially different from its industrial counterparts. The explanation is simple and can actually be deduced directly from Omnivore: local suppliers substitute inefficient transportation (cars and pickups) for highly efficient bulk transport (ships, trains, trucks, and [less so] planes) used by industrial suppliers. To wit, one of the “non-barcode people” who buys regularly from Polyface admits to driving “150 miles one way in order to get clean meat.” Assuming, generously, that her car gets 30 mpg, she would have to buy 31,000 to 44,700 calories (15.5 to 22 days worth) of food in order to break even with the 7 to 10 calories of fossil fuel used to produce one calorie conventionally. Of course, many people probably drive less, but the point demonstrates that further investigation inevitably turns up complexities which suggest there is no guarantee that local agriculture is substantially better for the environment. Consequently, the subtitle is deeply misleading. Natural history is not “story telling” or anecdoting, as Pollan seems to think, but a process of putting order to nature by investigating its every facet.
The case against industrial and for local agriculture in Omnivore is bothersomely overdetermined. Assuming for the moment that my contentions in this review stand up to reason and evidence, for those converted to Pollan’s perspective, it may seem as though I have only chipped away at the edifice of his arguments. Pollan’s barrage of ‘evidence’, an un-careful concatenation of poor philosophy and lazy journalism, is often perceived as strength. This is akin to describing a man aiming a shotgun at the broad side of a barn a better marksman than William Tell simply because the former hits his target more often. The more carefully considered policies consist of mostly well-worn, yet unpopular, ideas like taxing greenhouse gases to reduce emissions and ending perverse agricultural subsidies that are both inefficient and encourage farms to overuse their land. New ideas are also on the horizon, such as versions of annual crops (e.g. corn) genetically modified to become perennials, which generally require less fertilizer and prevent soil erosion. Of course, Pollan, Salatin, and their ilk find such academic and technological solutions unsavory because it conflicts with their cherished (mis)conception of man’s place in the natural world. Their way disturbs me both as an environmentalist and a humanist. They deny the intrinsic value of nature free from human manipulation and simultaneously understate the great achievements of civilization – man’s great leap out of the slavery to his next meal. Salatin, in his typically Socratic way, retorts to Pollan’s question about how local agriculture will feed large urban areas like New York City, “why do we need a New York City?” We need New York City and other urban centers because they are testaments to the human project and storehouses of our collective accomplishments that only shortsighted ideologues could dismiss. For the future of the environment and humanity, sound agricultural policies are needed, but pursuing the agrarian ideal of The Omnivore’s Dilemma would do farm more harm than good.
