We saw Ratouille the other day. It was great, and in its honor, here is a blog post about rats and food:
During my first few days of my new commute, I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan. It took me a few reading sessions to figure out what was bothering me about this book. At first, it seemed only that it annoyed me that Pollan didn’t take full advantage of a topic that is ripe for puns. It turns out, however, that it simply wasn’t meeting my expectations for the genre. In a book that purports to illuminate a controversial or political topic like the food industry and vegetarianism, one expects such a title to be a half-hearted attempt to demonstrate that the author sincerely understands the problem before launching into a solution that has seemed completely obvious to him all along. Often, such titles are laced with irony (A Modest Proposal) or are simply stating the problem that the writer hopes the reader will agree is neatly solved by the end of the book (The Problem of Pain, Globalization and its Discontents). Insecurity is the last thing I expected when I cracked the cover, but it is the dominant characteristic of the book and its author. Rather than seeking to rationally solve the dilemma, the book is a narrative of it.
That is not to say that Pollan does not have an agenda. He is clearly in favor of some sort of food cultivation that treats animals humanely, uses as few chemicals as possible, is transparent to the consumer (what journalist wouldn’t be?) and, if possible, mimics nature. One has only to read the last few sentences of the book to figure that out:
“But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”
Unfortunately for anyone hoping to make an argument like Pollan’s, there is surprisingly little scientific or sociological research out there that either confirms or denies the value of organic (or, what Pollan advocates, “super organic”) food for our health or our culture. Or that is Pollan’s excuse, at least, when he does not cite many sources of that sort.
Although the book contains copious kernels of information, especially concerning the cultivation of corn (I finally know where the name “corned beef” comes from), almost none of it actually directly supports his argument. What’s a foody to do? When reason is unavailable as a tool for argument, a man unsure of his own mind is apt to turn toward the most powerful personality. Fittingly, the book is less a testament to Pollan’s persusive powers than to the sense of absolute certainty with which two of his central characters embrace their own food philosophies. (I suppose I could call them “interviewees” instead of “characters”, but this is, after all, practically a food novel.) Certainty is like a magnet to Pollan. He spills quite a bit of ink extolling the virtues of Polyface Farm, a nearly self-sustaining farm in Virginia that only sells its products locally. The farm is owned and run by Joel Salatin, who is as certain that his is the right way to farm as he is that it’s okay to kill animals because they do not have souls. Then there’s the rest of the book, where a cornucopia of description about a particular person is once again available. This time it’s a semi-professional hunter-gatherer whom Pollan describes as his Virgil in the world of the shortened food chain. In both cases, the charisma of the characters must do tremendous work toward persuading their acquaintances to follow their lifestyles (or at least buy their food).
When the lives and personalities of Pollan’s characters may fail to persuade, Pollan puts his own narrative power to work. Early in the book, Pollan identifies what actually differentiates most organic foods from their industrial counterparts and makes them so appealing to many people—pastoral narrative describing how the food was raised. He labels it a deception fabricated by a very industrial organic food industry, and then proceeds to robe his own food agenda in layers of the purplest pastoral. He even admits that is what he is doing at one point, after he has waxed overly poetic about his hunting trip: “Wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. I’m actually writing about a hunter’s ‘instinct,’ suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial union between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much.” He seems to be shocked at himself, but he is unapologetic: “Irony—the outside perspective—easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I would have.” Where there is no scientific or even simply reasonable argument to be made, Pollan appeals to the sensibilities and instincts of his readers through compelling stories. One starts to wonder whether he is good buddies with (freaky documentarist dude)
For all of his shock over his use of the word “instinct” in his hunting passage, he is certainly unashamed to employ it liberally in the rest of the book. Words like “primitive” and “instinct” pepper the passages in which there is the least amount of rational argument or supporting evidence. Pollan relies heavily on a common idea of what seems natural and on common conceits of what pre-civilized man was like, without any evidence to support these conceits. There’s nothing to support the idea that chickens are better off free to roam, but doesn’t it just seem like it ought to be the case? We should avoid the pathetic fallacy when it comes to figuring out how cows feel about death, but common sense should just tell you that, while cows don’t feel much pain or contemplate the questions of existence and death, there is just something wrong about the way animals are treated in feed lots.
Of course, these techniques of persuasion are actually entirely in keeping with the actual dilemma of the omnivore, at least as Pollan sees it. The dilemma, of course, is the tyranny of choice. Given the ability to eat almost anything, what should an omnivore choose? Pollan gives the example of another omnivore, the rat, who learns through trial and error as well as an instinctual (there it is again) sense of what may make him sick. Human beings have similar tools at our disposal, as well as the guidance of other omnivores: “In deciding whether or not to ingest a new food, the omnivore will happily follow the lead of a fellow omnivore who has eaten the same food and lived to talk about it. This is one advantage we have over the rat, which has no way of sharing with other rats the results of his digestive experiments with novel foodstuffs. For the individual human, his community and culture successfully mediate the omnivore’s dilemma, telling him what other people have safely eaten in the past as well as how they ate it. Just imagine if we had to decide every such edibility question on our ownL only the bravest or most foolish if us would ever eat a mushroom.” (372)
And so we are left to feel persuaded, or not, by the experience of selected others and a supposedly common sense of what is or ought to be instinctual. Even in the presence of some scientific evidence, Pollan argues, we should trust tradition and instinct to guide us where food is concerned. Science has failed us in the past, but culture and instinct cannot. After all, we have thousands of years of food cultivation experience and millions of years of biological evolution to thank for the solutions these two things pose to the omnivore’s dilemma. Although I remain unconvinced that those two things are sufficient to change my eating habits, I actually appreciate being made to think a little harder about what I put into my mouth and where it came from. Of course, immediately after reading it, I grilled myself some frozen chicken breasts from Costco and sauced them with a mélange of the most processed of foods (Diet Coke, ketchup, industrially dehydrated garlic and onion, steak sauce, and some sort of mysterious hot sauce with a rooster on the bottle), so his powers of persuasion can’t be all that formidable. I am not sure that his is a bad approach—I’m certainly not immune to the powers of Tradition. But even this powerful tool is a weak weapon in Pollan's hands; for all of his digging into the rich earth of information about agriculture, he has very little to support his appeals to a common sense of food tradition. I am about as persuaded of the virtues of free-range food by his foody novella as I am convinced of the myth of the Noble Savage after reading Rousseau’s Emile.