Conscious Choice Seattle: The Trouble with Corn

April 2006 | Conscious Culture

The Trouble with Corn

Michael Pollan, a superb writer and even better food detective, explains how our food chain is fattening America

By Ellie Winninghoff

As a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan has taught us a lot about our food. He uncovered that the Environmental Protection Agency classifies certain genetically modified potatoes as pesticides, traced the shocking changes during the last three generations in how American beef has been raised (thus popularizing grass-fed meat) and described the New Organic Industrial Complex (not exactly what you think it is). Pollan, author of the acclaimed “Botany of Desire,” has invented a whole new field of inquiry: food detective.

Now, his newest book continues the lessons. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (Penguin Press, $26.95) traces four different food chains—industrial, industrial organic, grass-fed (also called “beyond organic”) and hunter-gatherer—from their points of origin to your dinner table. Part food critic (and a funny one), Pollan mixes history, science, ecology, economics, adventure, feisty characters and common sense. The result is nothing less than the “Silent Spring” of its genre—a sort of “Fast Food Nation” 2.0.

This time though, the story is not beef—it’s corn. In fact, beef is corn. Corn feeds the steer that becomes beef. It feeds the cow that produces milk, which is turned into cheese and yogurt.

Corn feeds chickens. It feeds the hens that lay eggs. It feeds pigs, turkeys, lamb, tilapia, catfish and increasingly—gasp!—salmon. (Farmed salmon, no doubt, not wild.) These animals, which until recently mostly ate grass and other greens and thereby converted the sun’s solar energy into something digestible for human consumption, must now take supplements and drugs in order to digest the stuff.

The production of corn and corn-fed meat now contributes to carbon emissions and global warming. In fact, Pollan writes, the production and transport of our food now accounts for 20 percent of our fossil fuel consumption. And in its entirety, food production accounts for 1/3 of manmade carbon emissions.

Looking at the McNumbers

But that’s just the beginning. Take a chicken McNugget at McDonald’s, which has 38 ingredients. Thirteen are corn-derived. In deadpan prose, Pollan lists them all—if you can understand it. But that’s the idea, isn’t it?

He even has his family’s car lunch from McDonald’s—one of the four featured meals in the book—tested in a lab to determine with precision the amount of corn it contains. Turns out, that the widely touted Paul Newman’s salad dressing is made with the same sort of cheap corn-derived ingredients (high fructose corn syrup (HCFS), corn syrup, cornstarch and more). Also of note: In the l980s, Coke and Pepsi quietly switched from sugar to the cheaper HCFS—about the same time portion sizes inflated and America’s obesity rate sky rocketed with them. Today, more than 25 percent of the 45,000 items in the supermarket contain corn in one form or another.

Pollan has researched and compared four meals: the McDonald’s lunch, a dinner made from ingredients bought at a Whole Foods Market, another dinner put together with items from a sustainable farm in Virginia and a feast of foods that Pollan himself foraged or hunted (including wild boar).

One of his major revelations comes from simply quantifying how many of the ingredients in the industrial food supply are nothing more than subsidized corn (“welfare queen,” some Iowa farmers derisively call the crop). The federal government may warn on the one hand about America’s obesity and health problems but it quickly turns around and finances it—to the tune of some $20 billion per year.

That’s just the direct cost, of course—paying off industrial farmers. It doesn’t count the cost of pollution (which Pollan describes to some extent but does not price). Nor does it include the extra health care costs we all bear for the Republic of Fat or the cost of going to Iraq in order to sustain our food supply.

Organic questions

Another big issue is just how “organic” the organic industrial food complex really is. Pollan raises doubts. Rosie’s Organic Chicken, for example, operates from a place called Petaluma Farm. But the digs more resemble a military barracks—an animal city otherwise known as a Confined Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. But CAFOs, Pollan reports, are dangerous places for animals that don’t imbibe antibiotics. The irony is that the safety of organic food (generally safer than industrial food for a variety of reasons) is more precarious in an industrial system.

Then there’s Earthbound Farms (annual sales, $350 million), which Pollan considers to be industrial organic at its ‘best.’ The company’s founders helped dethrone iceberg lettuce when they invented mixed salad greens in a bag. Pollan just can’t help mentioning that the company washes these “organic” greens in “lightly chlorinated” water.

But what really throws him for a loop is the stupendous amount of energy required to run the high-tech machines that pick the crops, chill the greens in a building and transport these salads in refrigerated trucks.

How much energy are we talking about? He quotes Cornell ecologist David Pimental, who claims it takes 57 calories of fossil fuels to transport 1 calorie of simple greens.

“The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance,” Pollan reports.

But is an organic dinner better than its conventional counterpart? It depends. It’s true, for example, that organic tomatoes generally register higher Brix scores, meaning they contain less water and more sugar and thus flavor. But Pollan, the food critic, believes freshly picked conventional produce will taste better than organic that has been “riding the interstate for three days.”

Then there are the health consequences. Beyond the issue of pesticides (obviously it’s better to avoid these poisons), he says there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that “organic” is better. That may be because most of the organic produce you buy at an organic retail chain has, in effect, been grown in an industrial fashion (as a part of a “monocrop”) rather than in a truly organic way.

Nonetheless, there is hope. In the book, farmer Michael Ableman (featured in the November 2005 of Evergreen Monthly) advocates the “beyond organic” movement.

“What I’m doing is not substituting inputs,” says Ableman.

Pollan brings us along on a visit to Virginia-based Polyface Farms, which he calls a post-industrial enterprise. While not technically “organic,” he finds it far more “sustainable” than most organic farms. Owner Joel Salatin calls himself a “grass farmer.” But what he does is orchestrate a dance where he says the animals do all the work. The annual production is amazing. On 100 acres (plus 450 acres of woodland), Polyface produces 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broilers, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits and 35,000 eggs.

As far as Pollan can ascertain, the animals here live happy lives as they roam outside and feed on grass. It’s enough to make him re-consider the ethics of eating meat. More good news: the meat Polyface produces is healthier to eat. It is, in fact, an entirely different product than industrial meat (either convention or “organic”). But that’s not all, the pasture they’ve left behind has been improved ecologically rather than destroyed. And the grasses contribute positively to global warming.

The industrial, industrial organic and grass-fed sections of this book are chock full of investigative surprises, a must-read for anybody who cares about food, sustainability and health. That includes any readers who simply want to be better informed and more conscious eaters. This much I can say with utter enthusiasm: Michael Pollan always has something to teach us. Always. Always. Always. He is pure delight.

As for the hunter-gatherer section, it is so decidedly different in tone that it is almost a separate book. Essentially, it boils down to a highly personal adventure, albeit an amusing one. I found myself a bit bored winding my way through philosophy and the ethics of eating meat. The section on foraging mushrooms is useful and informative (and funny). But I also wondered why Pollan ignored fish.

Ellie Winninghoff is a former director of Slow Food Seattle.

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