50 pages • 1 hour read
Michael PollanThe Omnivore's Dilemma
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part I, Introduction-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Pollan opens with a simple question: “What should we have for dinner?” (1). Although this question appears straightforward, its answer presents a plethora of problems. Pollan argues that modern eaters have abandoned an indigenous knowledge and a harmonious cultural relationship with food, leading to a disordered and rollercoaster approach of fad diets and pseudoscientific trends. Pollan suggests that part of this trouble stems from the fact that humans can eat anything. Having a wide variety of foods available that the body can digest leads to a challenging predicament: making a decision.
To narrow this overwhelming choice, humans naturally begin to categorize foods as either good or bad. The supermarket has become a battleground of confusing labels, all meant to entice buyers who have become increasingly disconnected from their cultural connections to food. Pollan attempts to reestablish this connection by tracing the origins of food and its relationship with eaters. He focuses his attention on three food chains which influence human consumption. First, Pollan explores how the Industrial Revolution changed the way people eat, emphasizing abundance and convenience. Second, Pollan’s examination of the pastoral food chain details organic food and its many nuances. Third, Pollan looks at his own experience as a hunter-gatherer and attempts to reframe how humans think about eating.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Plant: Corn’s Conquest”
Pollan opens with a thought experiment. He asks the reader to consider the modern supermarket through the lens of a naturalist. The produce and meat section of the store most closely represent their original forms. These sections harken to the original vegetable or animal from which their supermarket version originated. A wide range of foods is available, and the middle sections of the grocery store boast an even more complex list of ingredients. This complication of food led Pollan to consider his own role as a journalist and how the average eater would not have the time or ability to make sense of the lengthy and, often, unpronounceable ingredients appearing in supermarket wares. Pollan’s attempt to trace the origin of his food led him directly to a cornfield.
Much of the food found in the supermarket, including eggs, meat, and dairy, finds its origins in corn. High-fructose syrup, lactic acid, xanthan gum, and numerous other ingredients are derivations of corn. An examination of carbon in human tissue reveals that North Americans, despite identifying as “wheat people,” are intrinsically linked to corn, even more so than their Latin American counterparts (22). Corn’s success as an American crop is owed to its cultivation by Indigenous peoples, as well as its many biological advantages. Corn grows quickly and is adaptable. It is also versatile, historically serving to provide food, animal feed, fuel, and liquor. The grass plant self-fertilizes, and new species are easily cultivated with a simple pollination technique. This makes the plant easily adaptable to different environments and needs.
Corn also benefits from this focused attention. Its husk design makes it difficult for the plant to propagate on its own: it needs humans to collect the cobs, separate the kernels, and distribute the kernels in soil. Hybrid strains allowed growers to mechanize and industrialize corn production, and corporations became increasingly important as new seeds were planted each year.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Farm”
Chapter 2 opens with Pollan driving a tractor on a family farm in Iowa. He describes the rich soil left behind in the formerly all-prairie state by a glacier thousands of years ago; now only 2% of the state remains as prairie land. Pollan highlights the trajectory and experiences of the American farmer: what was once a self-sustaining operation providing food for an entire family into a highly productive single crop enterprise—alternatively corn or soybeans—feeding over 100. Yet, this same farmer struggles to make ends meet in a system that glorifies corporations and separates and isolates consumers and farmers from one another.
Pollan’s time on the tractor is monotonous. The seed he is planting is a hybrid corn species but not a GMO like those planted on so many other farms. Although this hybrid does not boast some of the high-yield properties of its GMO cousins, one field of this variety will produce 1.8 million pounds of commodity.
Iowa’s landscape has been entirely altered by the domination of corn production. The population in the state has decreased significantly as more land is devoted to corn and soybeans. Farms that were once diverse and boasting several species of plants and livestock have submitted to the crop. This exclusive focus on corn comes at a cost. Lack of biodiversity means that disease and insects thrive; more pesticides are needed to keep the threats at bay.
Pollan identifies a turning point for the corn industry when ammonium nitrate, a chemical used in making explosives, was discovered to be extremely useful as fertilizer. The U.S. Department of Agriculture determined that ammonium nitrate should be applied as chemical fertilizer for American crops, propelling corn to its prominent status. Synthetic fertilizers enabled farmers to grow corn repeatedly; there was no longer a need to alternate crops to reintroduce nitrogen to the soil. The Haber-Bosch Process became instrumental in producing high-yield fertilizers, but it also had many global ramifications, including the introduction of bombs made from synthetic nitrates by Germany during World War I and an increase in carbon emissions.
Despite corn’s prominence in the global food market, farmers’ profits from corn are on a steady decline. Their devotion to the crop is wrapped in a complicated history of psychological warfare: Farmers are told to produce more corn if they want to increase their profits.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Elevator”
When Pollan visits a corn elevator in Iowa, he is shocked to see corn littering the ground and roadways. He compares the experience to a cultural reverence for the crop in Mexico, where kernels of corn are considered precious. The difference in attitudes toward the crop lies in what corn has come to symbolize: for Iowa farmers, corn is a commodity, not a food. It represents a raw material used in fuel production, many types of sugar, and many other commodities. In fact, the corn produced in Iowa is not immediately edible, nor does it taste good. This type of corn is an abstract concept, entirely detached from the psychological relationship between humans and the food on their tables.
Rather than going directly from farm to family, corn production involves numerous intermediaries. Corn is now funneled via conveyor belt onto railroad cars and distinguished by a grading system rather than by the farms where it was produced. Once farmers deliver their product to be graded, they release responsibility, and the consumer is disconnected from the history and terroir of the product. Farmers receive payment for the corn they deliver, as well as government subsidies for a product that has low profit but is highly relied upon. Pollan suggests that $19 billion of taxpayer money is spent annually on farming subsidies. The subsidy system keeps prices of food low and the low profits of farmers only encourages them to increase production.
Pollan then examines this agricultural boom through the lens of the naturalist. Industrial agriculture has created an excess which produces new food chains. Corn production has numerous ramifications, including the health of the economy, the planet, and its human inhabitants.
Introduction-Chapter 3 Analysis
Pollan’s examination of the production and processing of corn identifies the heart of the modern industrial food methodology. He exposes how a system which rewards overproduction of a single crop leads to the complex refining found in modern food production. Corn presents a compelling paradox. Since European colonists relied upon Indigenous agricultural knowledge to survive in North America, corn was one piece of Indigenous life that ensured European survival, yet corn guaranteeing the endurance of the settlers later became a contributing factor in ethical and physical decline for all humans on the planet. High fructose corn syrup and a diet high in fat and sugars have led to a rise in diabetes and other health-related concerns. The energy needed to produce mass amounts of corn directly contributes to climate change. Pollan also explains how industrialized corn production hurts farmers. Overproduction lowers the cost of the product, and farmers struggle to make ends meet while being pressured to continue to increase yields and buy newer, more expensive equipment.
The paradox of corn lends itself to the theme “The Cost of Convenience.” By imposing efficiency and streamlined practices onto industrialized agriculture, humans can overproduce and flood the market with products filled with corn byproducts. Something must be done with all that leftover corn, so scientists find new ways to break it down into its most basic parts, re-introducing it to human diets in myriad ways. Pollan criticizes the high cost of this efficient food system. The one person that consumers might think would benefit most from this system is victimized by it: the farmer. The pressure to increase production of a crop that is already overproduced drives practices further downward. Farmers struggle to financially survive while succumbing to pressure to buy more expensive equipment and increase yields. Another assumption would be that this surplus of food would mean fewer hungry humans, but the opposite is true. The system is designed to reward the wealthiest areas of the world and penalize the poorest. Furthermore, foods that contain more corn byproducts are more processed and less healthful. Since these foods are also the cheapest, their detrimental health outcomes disproportionately affect low-income households.
Pollan sees this as a failure of humans to see “Food as Connection to the Natural World.” Industrialized farming separates the food on the plate from the biological reality of its ingredients. Pollan remarks on how the industrialized farm he visits in Iowa is diverging from the American ideal of the pastoral farm. In fact, only two percent of Iowa’s landscape is devoted to prairie; the rest is developed land marked by either soybeans or corn. The Iowan farm that Pollan describes in these first three chapters is as removed from the natural world as it can be. Biodiversity is seen as a threat to the necessary high-yields farmers need to keep up with their low-profit enterprise. The most processed foods in the grocery store—sugary soft drinks, cereal, and microwavable dinners—are filled with strange ingredients with unpronounceable names. Pollan’s pursuit of the question “What should we eat?” is not fully answered in this first section, but he does know that it is not this.
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