BOOK: The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

In keeping with this month of food blogging, I thought it only fair to share my thoughts about this book, which apparently I was the last to actually read.

Before I do that, however, it is best to explain my strange relationship with food. At around twelve years of age I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons. Not long afterwards, I decided that to do my conscience justice, I would need to also become a vegan. And so, for nearly seven miserable years I abstained from animal products (though with a strongly Buddhist bent to my philosophy, I would eat whatever food would otherwise be wasted, though such animal consumption was still fairly infrequent). When I was 20, and living in Eugene (where it would have probably been easier than any other place on earth to maintain veganism, certainly the opposite of my experience of living in Missoula), I started to consume animals that I believed to be predators. Pollan himself actually revisits the anecdote that convinced me, one of Ben Franklin watching some anglers catch fish. He thought to himself that if these animals eat each other, he could think of no reason why they themselves should not also be eaten. Though as Pollan points out, this was only after the fish had hit the frying pan and begun to smell "admirably well." This list of creatures I could now eat, though arbitrarily excluding any kind of mammal, included most flightless birds, all lizards, and many types of fish (who I once heard called "swimming vegetables" by a friend).

All of which led me to the dietary choice I have had made for several years now, up until this week: I would eat non-mammalian predator animals, and do my best to procure dairy from those animals such as enjoyed good lives.

It is fair to say that I have been more concerned about eating chicken twice a day than I have been with reflecting on what the implications of this choice actually are. Despite what I have been eating so far this month, and though the recent posts in this blog would seem to call me a liar, I swear I usually eat fairly wholesome food. I singlehandedly brought my weight down 100 lbs solely by dieting. I try to avoid overly processed things. Though I don't eat much in the way of vegetables, I was not consuming really terrible fried meats either. But if it was the ethical quandary that brought me to this point, I wasn't doing a very good job of showing it.

About vegetarianism/veganism Pollan makes several points (which I will sum up in my own words):

-One cannot impose human values on animals.
Put simply, the life of a domesticated animal lacks a freedom that makes many humans feel it is degraded, or we imagine that they pine for their freedom when really they may prefer "not getting [their] head bitten off by a weasel within a couple of weeks."

-In many areas that humans choose to live, lack of human canivory leads to a non-sustainable chain of agriculture.
Indeed this is true in most places. It is well and good to eat greens instead of flesh, but when those greens are flown in from Argentina, sprayed with pesticides, and harvested by machines, etc etc, any moral high ground is lost utterly by the new externalities it creates. Further, a closed energy loop of sun-plant-human is neither desirable or sustainable from an ecological perspective. Without animals, we lose the ability to naturally sustain the soil the plants are grown in. While it is true that we may not have to eat these animals, they do need to die to complete the circuit. Return to the above point about the weasel, and then look south to the next.

-Nature rarely provides a good death.
Pollan writes "in the wild [animals] don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones." For example, he gives a grisly account of how bears will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. To be fair, this is a worst case scenario, but the best they could probably hope for is to be chewing some grass one day and be taken unawares by a mountain cat who, we can hope, does a quick job of it. Indeed, there are worse deaths. Languishing in a factory farm would be worse. But what about living their life on a farm in which they can still act free, but are eventually slaughtered as painlessly as possible?

I do hope the gentle reader will take it as given that, at least from an ecologically ethical standpoint, this view is correct. This is certainly the strongest part of Pollan's argument. But it was not out of environmental principles that I began this journey into specialized eating. On the contrary, I eschewed meat out of concern for the animal involved.

Why, then, the sea change? I am convinced that the natural order of things exists for a good reason. The earth ought to know what it is doing, and our every attempt to undermine this expertise has resulted in disaster. Whether by an agriculture based so largely on corn that putting America under a mass spectrometer we would see nothing but kernels (so much so that now we want to turn vast amounts of corn into gas to power the trucks to take more corn to the animals that are being engineered to eat it, which we will burn more corn gas to go and get and consume with a carbonated beverage made largely of corn after which we will eat a dessert made largely of corn corn corn corn corn corn), or by a system of meat-manufacture that puts an innumerable amount of animals in the basest possible conditions of abject misery and endangers the health not only of the eater, but of any human susceptible to the drug-resistant microbes that such factory conditions and the overuse of antibiotics has, does, and will continue to create.

Yet I still digress back to the ecological concerns! Let me try again.

I am convinced that this natural order exists for a good reason, and that straying from it results in disaster. Thus, animals are a necessary part of our food chain. I am also convinced that an animal can enjoy a good life, free of misery and fear, at the hands of humans. In fact, I believe this is almost certainly the only way 99.9% of animals will ever experience such a life. Our pets already do.

So if we are forced to do things nature's way, and animals are obliged to take part, and these animals must die (as we all will!) to complete this loop, and we want these animals to have a good death, and their meat is nutritious to us, what is left?

We must be the stewards not only of the land, but of the animals. Where human cultivation exists, and domesticated animals take part in it, we must insist that it models nature as closely as possible. We must practice polycultural farming, we must feed the land at least as much as it feeds us, and we must insist that those sentient components of the chain are allowed a dignified life, and death, that allows them to express what Pollan calls their "creaturely character."

There are farmers who farm sustainably. There are farmers who farm ethically. There are farmers who farm locally. Until we begin to vote with our feet and with our dollar, industrial produce and meat will continue to deaden our world.

Examining the many stages of growth my diet has undertaken, I view it with a linearity not just of time, but of logic. Each step was taken with the knowledge of what came before it and with an attempt to improve it. If, as I now intend, I begin to eat ethically appropriate meat, I will be doing a lot more for the cause of the steer than I ever did as a vegan and eating nothing but industrial grain.

I am an omnivore anew.