By Michael Pollan
Tracing food from soil to plate
Subject
Themes
Three food chains sustain modern eaters, and each is traced from soil and sunlight to a finished meal. The first, the industrial chain, begins in the cornfields of Iowa, where George Naylor farms 470 acres for less than it costs to produce, kept afloat by government subsidies that have swollen the annual corn harvest from four billion to ten billion bushels. This surplus flows through a vanishingly small number of corporate hands (Cargill and ADM control roughly a third) into feedlots, wet mills, and processing plants. Steer number 534, purchased for $598 from a South Dakota ranch, spends his final months at Poky Feeders in Kansas, consuming thirty-two pounds of corn-based feed daily while antibiotics mask the diseases his unnatural diet causes. At the wet mill, corn is broken into hundreds of fractions: high-fructose corn syrup, ethanol, modified starches, emulsifiers. At General Mills, four pence of commodity corn becomes four pounds of branded cereal. The industrial chain ends at McDonald's, where a family's 4,510-calorie lunch is, under the mass spectrometer, almost entirely corn. The industrial eater has become "corn's koala."
Three food chains sustain modern eaters, and each is traced from soil and sunlight to a finished meal. The first, the industrial chain, begins in the cornfields of Iowa, where George Naylor farms 470 acres for less than it costs to produce, kept afloat by government subsidies that have swollen the…
Published in 2006, this work arrived at a pivotal moment in American food culture. The organic food movement was experiencing explosive growth, with sales increasing by 20 percent annually throughout the early 2000s. Whole Foods Market had recently become a Fortune 500 company, and the USDA's…
Zea mays has colonised eighty million acres of the American continent and, through its countless processed derivatives, more human bodies than any other domesticated species. A quarter of the forty-five thousand items in an average supermarket contain corn in some form. Mass spectrometry proves the…
Polyface Farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley operates as a living demonstration that biological complexity can outperform industrial simplification. Joel Salatin's hundred acres of pasture, integrated with 450 acres of woodland, produce an astonishing volume of food each season: 25,000 pounds of…
A ninety-nine-cent fast-food hamburger is one of the most deceptive prices in the American economy. It appears to be a bargain, but it fails to account for the true costs of its production: the farm subsidies paid by taxpayers, the environmental damage from nitrogen runoff and pesticide…
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, read over a rib-eye steak at the Palm restaurant on the eve of steer 534's slaughter, poses the ethical challenge at the heart of omnivorous eating. Singer's utilitarian framework is straightforward: if an animal can suffer, its suffering counts morally. The…
The journey from an Iowa cornfield to a McDonald's drive-through, from Polyface Farm's open-air abattoir to a Charlottesville dinner table, and from a Sonoma oak forest to a Berkeley kitchen culminates in a single proposition: the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural…
The American supermarket appears to teem with biodiversity, its aisles stacked with hundreds of species from every corner of the globe. Regarded through the lens of a naturalist, however, this dazzling variety rests on an astonishingly narrow biological foundation. More than a quarter of the…
At the grain elevator in Farnhamville, Iowa, a bright yellow pyramid of corn sits out in the rain, left over from a bumper crop. Agronomist Ricardo Salvador, raised in Mexico, recoils at kernels scattered in the mud. The Aztecs once gathered every dropped grain, believing that maize would accuse its…
About a fifth of America's corn crop flows into wet mills, where kernels are broken into their botanical and chemical components. At Iowa State's Center for Crops Utilization Research, director Larry Johnson demonstrates the industrial digestion: kernels steep for thirty-six hours in sulphur…
The industrial food chain ends at a McDonald's drive-through, where a family of three eats lunch in a moving convertible. Isaac orders Chicken McNuggets and a double-thick vanilla shake. Judith gets the Cobb salad with Paul Newman dressing. The narrator has a classic cheeseburger, large fries, and a…
Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary experience. Every product tells a story: range-fed cattle roaming mountain meadows, cage-free hens, wild salmon caught by Native Americans. But tracing these pastoral narratives to their sources reveals that "industrial organic" has become an oxymoron made real.…
Polyface Farm's interlocking enterprises, which Joel Salatin calls "holons" (borrowing Arthur Koestler's term for entities that are simultaneously wholes and parts), reveal a biological efficiency that industrial farming cannot match. Fifty portable broiler pens march across the hillside, each…
Polyface Farm sells exclusively through local channels: on-farm sales, metropolitan buying clubs, farmers' markets, and direct delivery to a handful of local restaurants and retailers. Joel Salatin refuses to ship long distance, sell to supermarkets, or wholesale his food. The three hundred chickens…
One final meal remains: a dinner made entirely from hunted, gathered, and home-grown ingredients, representing all three edible kingdoms plus a mineral. The narrator has never fired a gun, fears fungi, and has just moved to Northern California. His father, "one of the great indoorsmen," considered…
Over a rib-eye steak at the Palm restaurant, on the eve of steer 534's slaughter, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation is opened for the first time. Singer's utilitarian argument is straightforward: if an animal can suffer, its suffering counts morally, and the pleasure humans gain from eating meat…
Mushrooms occupy a kingdom of their own, neither plant nor animal, and they resist human understanding more stubbornly than almost any other food. Lacking chlorophyll, fungi feed on the dead or form symbiotic relationships with the roots of living trees, exchanging minerals for sugars through…
By Michael Pollan
Subject
Themes
Three food chains sustain modern eaters, and each is traced from soil and sunlight to a finished meal. The first, the industrial chain, begins in the cornfields of Iowa, where George Naylor farms 470 acres for less than it costs to produce, kept afloat by government subsidies that have swollen the annual corn harvest from four billion to ten billion bushels. This surplus flows through a vanishingly small number of corporate hands (Cargill and ADM control roughly a third) into feedlots, wet mills, and processing plants. Steer number 534, purchased for $598 from a South Dakota ranch, spends his final months at Poky Feeders in Kansas, consuming thirty-two pounds of corn-based feed daily while antibiotics mask the diseases his unnatural diet causes. At the wet mill, corn is broken into hundreds of fractions: high-fructose corn syrup, ethanol, modified starches, emulsifiers. At General Mills, four pence of commodity corn becomes four pounds of branded cereal. The industrial chain ends at McDonald's, where a family's 4,510-calorie lunch is, under the mass spectrometer, almost entirely corn. The industrial eater has become "corn's koala."