How the upper crust eats: food as a status symbol

Reason, Nov, 2006 by Katherine Mangu-Ward

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, New York: Penguin Press, 450 pages, $26.95

THEY SAY YOU'RE not supposed to talk about religion or politics at the dinner table, but these days just complimenting the cook might mean broaching both. The question of what to serve for dinner is increasingly fraught with moral considerations, and every aisle of the grocery store seems politically charged. Should the coffee be Fair Trade, or is generic organic adequate? Must I buy only locally grown apples, or can I add Chilean grapes to my fruit salad (especially now that Pinochet is dead) ? What the hell is "farm-raised salmon"? Low fat? Low sugar? Fake fat? Fake sugar? More Omega3s?

As any TV news junkie could tell you, American food is a world in disarray. We're fat, sick, and sick of being fat, thanks to partially hydrogenated soybean oil, hormone-laden beef, and pesticide-coated cauliflower. Every local news station runs a weekly horrifying food-related expose--some true, some false, all accompanied by B-roll of big bellies. And when our food isn't a threat to us, we're a threat to our food" Chickens and cows, we're told, are being mistreated nationwide. The proposed solutions run the gamut from big government to huge government--new labeling requirements, bans on trans fats and soda machines in schools, lawsuits against McDonald's.

In the midst of all the chaos sits Michael Pollan, calmly nibbling a piece of homemade boar prosciutto and ruminating, "Let them eat cake made with unbleached organic flour and fresh butter from the local creamery." Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, an irritatingly excellent book. The reporting is illuminating, the writing is clear and swift, and I'm furious at myself for not having thought of the concept first. In this "Natural History of Four Meals," Pollan traces the ingredients of four meals from field to table" an industrial fast food lunch at McDonald's, a "big organic" winter supper from Whole Foods, a "local" dinner from a small farm in Virginia, and a final meal that he hunts, gathers, and cooks himself.

In the raucous public debate over what we should eat, Pollan has a lot of clout. His articles appear on the cover of The New York Times Magazine with astonishing frequency; he blogs for the Times too, and his books sell like organic hotcakes. Among them: Second Nature, a gardening memoir, and The Botany of Desire, an account of plant domestication from the plants' perspective. (See "The Potato Whisperer," February 2002.)

In an effort to reconnect us with where our food comes from, Pollan pries into everything from corn subsidies to wild pig proliferation in California. He reveals the secret life of fungi (surprisingly fascinating) and describes the role of a "killing cone" in chicken slaughter (just as gross as it sounds). Pollan adeptly analyzes "our national eating disorder"--cyclical food faddism, overeating, and guilt--from political, agricultural, anthropological, and evolutionary psychological perspectives. Virtually every page contains an interesting factual tidbit or a clever turn of phrase about what we eat and why. Of his McDonald's meal, for example, Pollan writes: "If you include the corn in the gas tank (a whole bushel right there, to make two and a half gallons of ethanol), the amount of corn that went into producing our movable fast-food feast would easily have overflowed the car's trunk, spilling a trail of golden kernels on the blacktop behind us."

So what's the agenda lurking behind the author's engaging narration and commonsense tone? Doritos, he declares, are disgusting, and imported grapes from Chile are almost as bad. It's best to prefer food from farms less than 100 miles from your home. Pollan loves the local food movement's battle cry "Eat your view !" but acknowledges that view eating doesn't happen overnight. In fact, he writes, "a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer but a new kind of eater." Pollan's omnivorous New Man (homo culinarus) "won't find a tomato in December" and "will have to become reacquainted with his kitchen." His "sense of taste has ruined him for a Big Mac, and [his] sense of place has ruined him for shopping for groceries at WalMart."

This last example was turned on its head when, shortly after Pollan's book appeared, Wal-Mart announced plans to introduce more than 1,000 new organic products this year. Pollan, already disdainful of the industrial organic offerings from Whole Foods, was not impressed. Addressing this development on his blog, Pollan briefly nods to the fact that having more organic options for more people is probably a good thing. "Oh, wait," he writes, "I was talking about the good that will come of Wal-Mart's commitment to organic. Sorry about that." But then he returns his attention to his real passion: What will happen to local eaters like him? He frets that Wal-Mart's promise to cap the premium for organic foods at 10 percent above the price of conventional foods "virtually guarantees that Wal-Mart's version of cheap, industrialized organic food will not be sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word." Wal-Mart, he worries, will drive down prices and standards worldwide. "We don't think you should have to have a lot of money to feed your family organic foods," the company's CEO has said. To Pollan, that's a threat.