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The not-quite-artisanal chicken

June 25, 2010 at 6:51 am · Filed under Facts, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , , ,

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan summarizes a column by Allan Nation in Stockman Grass Farmer on the subject of “artisanal economics” and discusses its relevance to Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm.  Pollan writes,

“The biggest problem with alternative agriculture today,” Nation writes, “is that it seeks to incorporate bits and pieces of the industrial model and bits and pieces of the artisanal model. This will not work….In the middle of the road, you get the worst of both worlds.”

Nation’s column had helped Joel understand why his broiler business was more profitable than his beef or pork business. Since he could process the chickens himself, the product was artisanal from start to finish; his beef and pork, on the other hand, had to pass through an industrial processing plant, adding to his costs and shrinking his margins. (250)

A reader might be inclined to contrast Salatin’s entirely artisanal product with the chicken that Pollan bought at Whole Foods Market. Not only was that bird industrially raised and slaughtered, but the bird was a product of industrial breeding:

Rosie the organic chicken’s life is little different from that of her kosher and Asian cousins, all of whom are conventional Cornish Cross broilers processed according to state-of-the-art industrial practice….The Cornish Cross represents the pinnacle of industrial chicken breeding. It is the most efficient converter of corn into breast meat ever designed, though this efficiency comes at a high physiological price: The birds grow so rapidly (reaching oven-roaster proportions in seven weeks) that their poor legs cannot keep pace, and frequently fail. (171)

There’s at least one thing wrong with drawing this contrast, though. As Salatin writes on page 34 of his book, Pastured Poultry Profit$, Polyface Farm’s broilers are the same Cornish Cross chickens which, in the context of Petaluma Poultry, were “the pinnacle of industrial chicken breeding.” Salatin may be correct that the processing regulations cut into his beef and pork profit margins, but the idea that Salatin’s chickens are a purely artisanal product is nontheless something of a fantasy.

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The good of New York City

June 24, 2010 at 2:15 pm · Filed under The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Michael Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma,

Originally I assumed Joel’s motive for keeping his food chain so short was strictly environmental — to save on the prodigious quantities of fossil fuel Americans burn moving their food around the country and increasingly today, the world. But it turns out Joel aims to save a whole lot more than energy. (240)

However, it isn’t clear from what follows that Salatin’s distribution system actually saves energy at all. Pollan proceeds to tell us that many customers drive “more than an hour over a daunting (though gorgeous) tangle of county roads” (241) to buy Salatin’s meat straight from the farm. One customer even tells Pollan, “I drive 150 miles one way in order to get clean meat for my family” (242).

To Pollan, the distances people are willing to drive for Polyface meat are evidence of just how good and clean Salatin’s product is, but they stand in striking contrast to earlier claims about the environmental benefits of the farm. Pollan has, for example, written, “Joel’s pastures will, like his woodlots, remove thousands of pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year” (197). Of course, Pollan makes no mention of the environmental impact of having customers drive so far to the farm. While the food might not travel as far as, say, the Mexican blackberries that Pollan enjoyed in his Whole Foods meal, there’s a certain efficiency to moving things in large quantities, even if it means moving them a little bit further.

To show that this can be significant, I’ll attempt a calculation. I’ll look not at the extreme case of the customer driving 150 miles each way, but at the more common example of the customers driving more than an hour to the farm. Assuming that a customer drives 45 miles each way in a car that gets 22.1 miles per gallon (corresponding to the EPA’s estimated average fuel ecomomy for passenger cars), each trip would require a little more than 4 gallons of gasoline. Based on the EPA’s estimate that burning a gallon of gasoline releases 19 pounds of carbon dioxide, this results in the emission of 76 pounds of carbon dioxide per trip. If such a customer were to visit Polyface just once a month, the fuel burned would release 0.41 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

To put that into perspective, a 2008 study estimated that delivering food consumed by a typical U.S. household in a year to the store is responsible for the release of 0.36 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. In other words, driving an hour each way to the farm once a month results in greater carbon emissions than can be attributed to the average American household’s food miles.

Of course, Salatin doesn’t cite environmental concerns as a reason to avoid selling to grocery stores. For him, it seems to be more about rejecting the “Western, reductionist, Wall Street sales scheme” (248). The above calculation seems to show, at least, that Salatin’s strongly anti-industrial views are sometimes in conflict with environmental values. This tension is perhaps best seen when Pollan asks Salatin about the broader applicability of his kind of farming:

When I asked how a place like New York City fit into his vision of a local food economy he startled me with his answer: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” (245)

Pollan doesn’t really answer Salatin’s question, instead pointing out that New York City would continue to be inhabitated by people who need to eat, but New York City does do some good.

To Salatin, a big city like New York is a symbol of the industrial world, but there are considerable environmental advantages to having things close together as they tend to be in large cities. A 2008 study by the Brookings Institution reported that America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas have lower per capita greenhouse gas emissions from residential and transportation sources. The study attributes this smaller “partial carbon footprint” to less car travel and residential electricity use. In 2005, the average New Yorkers had a partial carbon footprint, with 1.495 metric tons, less than 60 percent of the average American’s partial carbon footprint of 2.60 metric tons.

The Brookings study gives us reason to be cautious about considering food in isolation when it comes to environmental decision-making. While moving food long distances results in substantial greenhouse gas emissions, we tend to produce even more greenhouse gases by moving people around. It makes environmental sense to have cities, where a relatively small proportion of people can eat local food, if these cities reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from other sources.

This isn’t to say that Salatin’s vision of a world without New York City is necessarily less sustainable than the world we live in today. He may well prefer a world in which people didn’t travel by car at all, and in which he simply sold meat to neighbors who visited the farm on horse-drawn carriages. However, that is a world that most of Pollan’s readers (and probably many of Salatin’s customers) would find less appealing to live in than the more industrialized world that we have today.

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Another look at the nutrient cycle

June 21, 2010 at 9:55 am · Filed under Facts, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Last week, I wrote about this claim on Michael Pollan’s new website:

A truly sustainable agriculture will involve animals, in order to complete the nutrient cycle, and those animals are going to be killed and eaten.

I want to revisit this claim because it relates to something I’ve recently read in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

It seems to me that to say that farm animals “complete the nutrient cycle” is to miss a very important point. Every time we take food — whether it be from plant or animal source — from a farm, we’re taking nutrients away. Unlike wild animals, though, we don’t tend to return all of those nutrients when we’re done with them. Instead, we flush them down the toilet, sending them to septic tanks or sewage treatment plants. (Some nutrients eventually find their way back to the farm, but the process is far less direct than in nature.)

I want to focus on nitrogen in particular, since Pollan writes about it quite a bit. When we take food from a farm, we’re removing nitrogen from the system. In order to continue to produce food on that land, we need to somehow replenish that nitrogen. As it happens, nitrogen is plentiful in the atmosphere. However, atmospheric nitrogen isn’t usable to plants and animals. It needs to be converted to a biologically-available form, which — as Pollan writes on page 42 — is done naturally by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the roots of leguminous plants or synthetically by the Haber-Bosch process. There are a few other ways that nitrogen can be fixed naturally, such as by lightning or bacteria living symbiotically with termites, but the key fact is that farm animals don’t contribute to nitrogen fixation.

What this means is that when animal manure is used to fertilize plants, the nitrogen it provides was fixed either by the Haber-Bosch process or by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the roots of plants. Any nitrogen animals leave on the pasture was ingested in their food. This is a point that Pollan seems to miss when he writes,

The chief reason Polyface Farm is completely self-sufficient in nitrogen is that a chicken, defecating copiously, pays a visit to virtually every square foot of it at several points during the season. (210)

Polyface Farm isn’t completely self-sufficient in nitrogen, though. There’s plenty of nitrogen in the eighty percent of the chickens’ diet that Pollan has told us (just a few sentences earlier) comes from  corn and soy that Salatin buys. For the soil to maintain a stable nitrogen level from year to year, it’s necessary for the chicken feed together with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the roots of clover  and other legumes to provide enough nitrogen to replenish whatever is removed from the farm in food for humans. Passing through the chickens’ digestive systems doesn’t increase the amount of biologically-available nitrogen in the feed. (In his very next sentence, Pollan describes the chicken feed as Polyface’s “sole off-farm source of fertility,” apparently seeing no contradiction with the claim of self-sufficiency.)

What farm animals might be said to do with nutrients is to take them from grasses we can’t eat (though we can apparently eat clover like that on Salatin’s pasture) and convert them to a form that we can eat. Pollan does also describe at length how intensive grazing increases the productivity and diversity of the pasture. I can’t see how either of these roles would be said to be completing a nutrient cycle, though.

In the comments of my last post on the subject, Andy D and bill suggested using human manure, or humanure to fertilize crops. I don’t know enough about the public health implications, so I’m not going to endorse the idea. I will say, however, that using humanure would return the nutrients that have been removed from the farm. If Pollan wants to “complete the nutrient cycle” in any meaningful sense of the word “cycle,” it seems to me that humanure would do a lot more to this end than farm animals would.

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Minutiae, pages 159-207

June 20, 2010 at 7:25 am · Filed under Minutiae, The Omnivore's Dilemma

I spent more time writing and researching this week than I did reading, so I don’t have a whole lot to report here. Here’s this week’s collection of little things:

  • In my copy of the book, the surnames of David Pimentel (a leading expert on energy use in food production) and Frank Perdue (founder of the chicken company Perdue Farms) are repeatedly misspelled. These have been fixed in the version on Google Books.
  • Pollan writes, “According to Cornell ecologist David [Pimentel], growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food” (167). This bothers me for reasons similar to something I wrote about in last week’s minutiae post. I don’t think it makes sense to look at the number of calories of fossil fuel energy per calorie of food energy because people aren’t eating salad greens for the calories. It would make more sense to compare fossil fuel calories to something that better measured the salad’s perceived value to the consumer, perhaps a number of servings or the amount of some nutrient. (For all I know, salad greens may not fare much better, there.)
  • Pollan says of his meal from Whole Foods, “All but one of the vegetables I served that night bore the label of Cal-Organic Farms, which, along with Earthbound, dominates the organic produce section in the supermarket” (174). However, he later tells us that his salad greens were grown by Earthbound (183). This seems like a contradiction.

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Energy consumption and the industrial organic meal

June 18, 2010 at 5:36 pm · Filed under The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , , ,

As he concludes the story of his industrial organic meal from Whole Foods, Michael Pollan turns to the question of whether this meal is better for the environment than its conventional counterpart. While he believes that it is, the industrial meal  leaves much to be desired:

But perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked in Arizona (where Earthbound moves its entire operation every winter) to the moment I walk it out the doors of my Whole Foods. (183)

Notably absent is any reference to the energy that went into bringing his chicken or ice cream to market. Instead, Pollan gives us a comparison of organic and conventional foods, concluding “growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally…though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby” (183).

The focus on the transportation of the fruits and vegetables might lead a reader to believe that it is moving the food around that accounts for most of the fossil fuel consumption required to bring the meal to market. It’s an idea that is reinforced when Pollan explains, “growing the food is the least of it: only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around” (183).

Checking the source that Pollan cites (page 41), one finds that the situation is a bit more complicated. Pollan’s figure for the proportion of energy consumed agriculturally is about right, but it turns out the other eighty percent covers more than just “processing the food and moving it around.” In fact, the largest component is household preparation and storage, with a little more than thirty percent of energy used. Transportation accounts for only about fourteen percent and processing about seventeen percent.

I raise these points about the lack of mention of the chicken or ice cream and the emphasis on transportation because I think they serve to obscure the very substantial environmental consequences of raising food animals like the chicken and the cows for Pollan’s organic meal.

Particularly relevant here is a 2008 study from the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, which compared reductions in greenhouse gas emissions attained by reducing meat consumption with those attained by sourcing food locally. Greenhouse gas emissions certainly aren’t the same as energy consumption, but they’re something an environmentally-concerned reader probably cares about. The study found that forgoing meat and dairy one day a week would achieve a larger carbon footprint reduction than sourcing all of one’s food locally.

I’ve often heard vegetarians misuse this study in trying to discredit locavorism. The way this study calculated the reduction in emissions achieved by eating local food was by assuming that food traveled zero miles but not allowing for any difference in production energy. It makes a good case against buying meat from a local factory farm, but it isn’t necessarily applicable to the locally pastured animal products that locavores will tend to seek out.

However, Pollan has already told us that the cows that produced the milk for his ice cream were corn-fed, and told us that his hen came from a facility that was “more animal factory than farm” (140). Pollan’s chicken and ice cream are organic, but since he’s told us that organic need not be much better, this study should say something about a meal like Pollan’s.

Of course, Pollan can’t be faulted for not picking up this specific study, which was published after The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I chose that one because I think it best clarifies the analysis for a reader deciding what to eat today. However, there certainly were studies on the environmental impact of meat production when The Omnivore’s Dilemma went to press, including this one by David and Marcia Pimentel (whom Pollan cites numerous times).

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Cycling nutrients

June 15, 2010 at 7:36 pm · Filed under News, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , ,

Erik Marcus points out that Michael Pollan’s new website includes the following claim:

A truly sustainable agriculture will involve animals, in order to complete the nutrient cycle, and those animals are going to be killed and eaten.

I was planning on addressing this point after getting to the point where he makes it in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but this seems to be another good occasion for doing so.

I should begin by saying that I’m not an ecologist. I’m not going to claim to know definitively whether Pollan is right or wrong. However, he doesn’t provide evidence, so I’ll write a little bit about why I’m not convinced. If you know more than I do, I’d be interested to hear about it.

First of all, there are a number of successful examples of veganic (or vegan organic) farms, which keep no domesticated animals and use no animal inputs. Instead of animal manure, these farms use plant-based fertilizers, such as mulches and compost. The Veganic Agriculture Network claims that plant-based fertilizers are more efficient:

In fact, it would be more efficient to directly use the fodder to fertilize the soil than to feed the animals, collect the manure, compost it, transport it, and spread it on the soil.

They don’t provide any evidence for this claim, so it’s fair to treat it with some skepticism.

Now, most organic farms aren’t vegan organic, but there are some successful examples. Take, for instance, Honey Brook Organic Farm in New Jersey, which claims one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in the United States. It must be acknowledged that Honey Brook’s crops don’t include many protein-rich plants. However, the veganic Janlau Farm in Quebec grows soy, wheat, flax, and buckwheat.

I think that when Pollan talks about the need for animals to cycle nutrients, he’s drawing on his experience at Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, which provides what he says in The Omnivore’s Dilemma “looks an awful lot like the proverbially unattainable free lunch” (127). Indeed, it is the chickens that Pollan credits with applying nitrogen to the pasture.

These chickens aren’t simply living off the pasture, though. They also eat feed corn that Salatin buys from a neighbor who “might be using atrazine” (132). That is to say, it isn’t sustainable organic corn, but the bad stuff Pollan writes about in the first part of the book. It’s not at all clear to me that the fossil fuels used to grow that corn couldn’t more efficiently be used to grow plant-based foods.

As I wrote above, I’m interested to hear what you know. If anybody has heard Pollan further explain his claim about needing animals to cycle nutrients, I’d be interested to hear about that, too.

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Sir Albert Howard and the scientific method

June 15, 2010 at 12:18 pm · Filed under Misrepresentation of sources, Science, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , ,

In describing the origins of organic agriculture, Pollan leans heavily on Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament, which he calls “the movement’s bible” (145). Pollan explains that Howard’s work is the story of “a Fall” in which the “serpent” is Baron Justus von Liebig, who showed that plants need only nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium to grow.  Howard called this the “NPK mentality” after the chemical symbols for those three elements.

After explaining that humus-rich soil does much more for plants than provide those three nutrients, Pollan writes,

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. (147)

Though Pollan doesn’t say so directly, one might guess from reading his account that Howard’s work was some sort of anti-science treatise. The complete text of An Agricultural Testament is available online, and Howard does indeed devote a full chapter (Chapter 13) to criticizing agricultural science. This chapter criticizes many aspects of agricultural science as it was practiced in his day, such as the tendency to fit agricultural problems into existing branches of science, the insistence on quantitative results, the role of economics in research, and the failure of scientists to adequately communicate their results to farmers. Notably absent, however, is any criticism of the scientific method.

To clarify this distinction, I think it’s worth discussing what is meant by the scientific method. This refers to a very general method for gathering and organizing knowledge. Loosely speaking, it’s a sort of systematization of the trial-and-error process. It involves seeking the answer to a question by using observations to make a hypothesis, using the hypothesis to make a prediction, testing the hypothesis experimentally, and using the results to form a new hypothesis.

If the NPK mentality led agriculture astray, I would argue that it’s not because the scientific method is inherently reductionist but because science was applied badly. The NPK mentality confuses the question of what plants need, at minimum, to grow (answer: nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium) with the question of how we should grow crops. It’s absolutely a reductive mindset, but that’s the fault of the scientists, not the scientific method.

To see that better science is possible, one need look no further than Howard’s An Agricultural Testament. The twelfth chapter is titled “Soil Fertility and National Health” and sets out to address a general question: “How does the produce of an impoverished soil affect the men and women who have to consume it?” It’s a much broader question than the one that guides the NPK mentality.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the age of Howard’s work shows through in this chapter. After suggesting the idea of experimenting on subjects in concentration camps, convict prisons, and asylums, Howard simply writes, “Objections…would almost certainly be raised,” and he later tells us that the people of northern India include “some of the finest races of mankind.” Nonetheless, the chapter does present ideas about how the scientific method might be applied to agriculture to produce better results.

Although Howard does acknowledge the impracticality of experimenting on humans, he also relays some observations on relationships between various groups of people in India and the health of their soils. This isn’t a controlled experiment like the ones that Liebig and his followers used to justify the NPK mentality, but it is an example of what is called a “natural experiment,” an experiment in which the controls are assigned by nature (rather than by researchers). Howard also presents limited scientific evidence from studies in Britain and writes that more work is needed. Notable also is his proposal,

The agricultural colleges with their farms should devote some of their resources to feeding themselves, and so demonstrating what the products of well-farmed land can accomplish.

In doing so, he proposes to have the agricultural researchers address a question more useful than the one that led them to NPK. He proposes that they should address the question of which agricultural methods are best for human health and also that they should test their hypotheses on themselves.

Pollan’s retelling of Howard’s work seems to be guided by an overly simplistic notion of the nature of scientific inquiry. Reading Pollan’s work, one might think that science refers only to work done in laboratories. He writes,

Howard’s concept of organic agriculture is premodern, arguably even antiscientific: He’s telling us we don’t need to understand how humus works or what compost does in order to make good use of it.

But there’s nothing antiscientific about this idea. Indeed, Howard presents scientific evidence that humus does work, including the fact that it works in nature. To say that we shouldn’t try to find out why humus works would be antiscientific, but to say that we can reap its benefits without understanding how it works is not.

Contrast this with a claim that Howard makes in his eleventh chapter:

The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders, and so forth is unscientific and unsound as, even when successful, such procedure merely preserves the unfit and obscures the real problem — how to grow healthy crops.

To Howard, it is conventional — rather than organic — agriculture that is unscientific. To him, the problem with conventional agriculture isn’t that it’s scientific but that it isn’t. Whereas Pollan believes that conventional agriculture is driven by “the scientific method at its reductionist worst,” Howard considers reductionism to be unscientific, a consequence of researchers focusing on the wrong problem.

Howard reaffirms his belief in science in his concluding chapter, where he writes,

[T]he investigator of the future will only differ from the farmer in the possession of an extra implement — science — and in the wider experience which travel confers.The future standing of the research worker will depend on success: on ability to show how good farming can be made still better.

There should be no doubt that Sir Albert Howard believed the scientific method to be an important tool for agricultural research. Sadly, Pollan relays Howard’s work in a way that not only fails to make this clear but also promotes overly simplistic ideas about what science is.

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Minutiae, pages 85-158

June 12, 2010 at 11:11 pm · Filed under Minutiae, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged ,

Here’s another weekly list of things so minor that you probably don’t care about them unless you happen to be editing a new edition of The Omnivore’s Dilemma for Pollan’s publisher. I’ll have at least one more substantial post to write on these pages, too, but that’s going to take a bit more work.

  • Pollan writes, “Corn syrup (which is mostly glucose or dextrose—the terms are interchangeable) became the first cheap domestic substitute for cane sugar” (88). It’s not quite correct to say that the terms glucose and dextrose are interchangeable. Dextrose is the most common form of glucose.
  • Pollan explains the concept of natural flavorings: “‘Natural raspberry flavor’ doesn’t mean the flavor came from a raspberry; it may well have been derived from corn, just not from something synthetic” (98). I didn’t really like this because what does it mean to come from “something synthetic”? If you trace any ingredient far enough back, you’ll necessarily find materials that were found in nature (at least if you’re willing to consider oil natural in the sense that humans didn’t make it). So what exactly do to something before we have to consider it synthetic?  For purposes of food labels, here’s how the FDA defines a natural flavor :

    The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional.

    Rather than by defining natural as the absence of “synthetic” materials, the FDA defines it in terms of a few starting materials and processes that can be used.

  • I found the following seemingly innocent paragraph to be slightly irksome:

    Since 1985, an American’s annual consumption of HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] has gone from forty-five pounds to sixty-six pounds. You might think that this growth would have been offset by a decline in sugar consumption, since HFCS often replaces sugar, but that didn’t happen: During the same period our consumption of refined sugar actually went up by five pounds. What this means is that we’re eating and drinking all that high-fructose corn syrup on top of the sugars we were already consuming. In fact, since 1985 our consumption of all added sugars—cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever—has climbed from 128 pounds to 158 pounds per person. (104)

    My objection is a subtle point relating to the way the sweeteners are measured. Pollan tells us that our total consumption of added sugars has increased by 30 pounds. It’s not exactly clear what this means. Is Pollan talking about the weight of sugar in added sweeteners or the total weight of the sweeteners? The difference is particularly significant because we’re considering both solid and liquid sweeteners. For example, 128 pounds of cane sugar actually contains more sugar than 158 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup (which is twenty-four percent water by weight). The meaningful number to consider would be the amouont of sugar in added sweeteners, and one might guess that this is what Pollan is using when he refers to “our consumption of all added sugars.” However, in the first sentence I’ve quoted, he refers to the weight of HFCS (and not of sugar in HFCS), which makes me think he’s referring to the latter. I think the point he’s trying to make here is probably a valid one, but I wish he’d express it more precisely (or at least offer a citation so that the interested reader can figure out what’s going on).

  • Pollan reports some results from a study:

    A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the “energy cost” of different foods in the supermarket. The researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. (107)

    This strikes me as a misleading comparison because the chosen whole food, carrots, is not energy dense and is thus typically not consumed for the calories. When people eat carrots, it’s rarely for the calories. You have to eat a lot of carrots to get a good number of calories, and that’s a fact that has nothing to do with price. Offhand, I can think of at least one whole food, sunflower seeds, which provide calories about as cheaply as potato chips or cookies. I’ll usually buy organic sunflower seeds for $2.39 per pound. Sunflower seeds contain 584 calories per hundred grams, which comes out to 1109 calories per dollar. That number would be larger if the sunflower seeds, like the junk food, were not organic.

  • Pollan tells us, “What it has done, of course, is to sell an awful lot of chicken for companies like Tyson, which invented the nugget—at McDonald’s behest—in 1983” (114). In fact, the nugget was invented in the 1950s, well before McDonald’s introduced the McNugget.
  • Pollan writes, “I figure my 4-ounce burger, for instance, represents nearly 2 pounds of corn (based on a cow’s feed conversion rate of 7 pounds of corn for every 1 pound of gain, half of which is edible meat)” (115). Based on these numbers, I calculate that the quarter-pound burger represents 3.5 pounds of corn.
  • Pollan writes, “A 32-ounce soda contains 86 grams of high-fructose corn syrup (as does a double-thick shake), which can be refined from a third of a pound of corn; so our 3 drinks used another 1 pound” (115). According to the nutritional information, 86 grams is the mass of sugars in the soda. The mass of high-fructose corn syrup, which includes some water mass, is surely higher.
  • Pollan writes, “If you walk five blocks north from the Whole Foods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight Street, you’ll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few dozen homeless people” (140). The road on which you would need to turn right is more correctly referred to as Dwight Way.

Since the book lacks citations, it would be too time-consuming for me to check facts in a way that was at all comprehensive. If you think I’ve missed something, please share it in the comments.

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A critical take on Pollan’s view of obesity

June 10, 2010 at 8:43 pm · Filed under The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , ,

I want to go a little bit out of order in my reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma to return to Pollan’s chapter called “The Consumer: A Republic of Fat.” Fascinated as I was by Pollan’s exposition of the supersizing trend, I was a bit uneasy with his treatment of obesity for reasons that I couldn’t quite put into words. It turned out that Julie Guthman, a professor at UC Santa Cruz, had already written about it. The piece, unfortunately, was published in Gastronomica, which is not freely available, but I’ll do my best to restate the key points. (UPDATE 7/16/2010: A condensed version of Guthman’s piece is available for free.)

The subject of Guthman’s piece is broader than Pollan, and includes books that “extol the virtues of the organic and the local while arguing for a commonsense, ecumenical approach to diet choices.” This includes books by Peter Singer, Jane Goodall and Marion Nestle, in addition to The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Guthman expresses strong agreement with Pollan’s criticism of American crop subsidies, but says, “in evoking obesity, Pollan turns our gaze, perhaps inadvertently, from an ethically suspect farm policy to the fat body.” She then sets out to consider “whether it is necessary for fat people to bear the weight of this argument.”

Guthman argues that it’s not really clear that there is an obesity epidemic at all. She points out that the claims of an epidemic depend on average Body Mass Index, which doesn’t distinguish between fat and lean body mass and doesn’t tell us “whether a relatively small number of people have become extremely fat, or whether many people have put on a few pounds.” She adds that we don’t understand the relationships between diet and obesity and between obesity and disease, telling us that Michael Gard and Jan Wright argue in a review of obesity research that “obesity research itself has become so entangled with moral discourses and aesthetic values that the ‘science of obesity’ can no longer speak for itself.”

Guthman then turns to the psychological effects of these books:

These popular renditions are also remarkably insensitive, and not necessarily just to those who feel themselves to be too fat. Rather, these authors seem unaware of how obesity messages work as admonishment….[S]wipes at obesity, especially coming from those who themselves have never been subject to such scrutiny or objectification, or the pain and frustration of weight loss, strikes me as naïve. Yet, entirely absent from the pages of the recent popular books is any authorial reflection on how obesity talk further stigmatizes those who are fat, or on how this social scolding might actually work at cross-purposes to health and well being.

Guthman is particularly disturbed by one claim of Pollan’s: “When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat” (102). She asks, “[W]hy are Pollan, Goodall, and Nestle not fat? If junk food is so ubiquitous that it cannot be resisted, how is it that some people remain (or become) thin?” This is troubling because “[i]f junk food is everywhere and people are all naturally drawn to it, those who resist it must have heightened powers.”

I found Guthman’s piece to be a thought-provoking read, and I’d certainly recommend the full article to anybody who has access to it through an institutional subscription. With that said, I don’t know if I agree with everything in it. The point that we don’t know that much about obesity seems like a good one, particularly in light of more recent evidence (another piece that requires a subscription, sorry) that fat cells may actually be a defense against – rather than a cause of – disease. I also agree that it’s important to look at how talk stigmatizes obesity.

If there’s something I find unsatisfying about the article, it’s that I don’t quite know what to make of the question of why some people are thin. It seems to me that her argument that thin people must have “heightened powers” is exaggerated. Perhaps the difference could be explained (for example) by differences in genetics, access to healthful foods, and nutritional education. Even though Pollan doesn’t make that argument, such circumstances could be consistent with a claim that “[w]hen food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat,” so it seems like a bit of a reach for Guthman to tell us that thin people must have “heightened powers.”

I’d be very interested to get readers’ takes in the comments. What do you think?

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On short rules

June 8, 2010 at 8:53 am · Filed under In Defense of Food, News, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , ,

Comment added August 21, 2010: For some reason, search engines seem to send a lot of people to this post when they search for my name. I consider this to be one of my least interesting and important posts. If you’re going to read one thing I wrote, please consider reading any of the posts in the “Important Posts” menu at the top of the sidebar instead of this.

One of the things I didn’t like about In Defense of Food was that it ended with a number of concise rules for deciding what to eat. It seemed to me that much of Michael Pollan’s work was a warning about what can happen when we don’t think about our food choices (not to mention that Pollan wrote in the introduction to The Omnivore’s Dilemma that the pleasures of eating are “only deepened by knowing”). I could see that having a few short rules was better than eating anything the supermarket had to offer, but it still seemed like a weak substitute for information.

Of all the rules Pollan presents, the one I have the most trouble comprehending is the suggestion that we not eat anything with more than five ingredients. While some products with long ingredient lists have things I’d choose to avoid, it seems to me that the problem there is the choice of ingredients rather than the quantity.

Now it would seem that the five-ingredient rule has become a target of marketers.  Joe Kita calls this the Worst New Health Trend.

Kita’s article focuses on Haagen-Dazs Five ice creams, which (as the name indicates) have only five ingredients. As the title of his article suggests, Kita is unimpressed, pointing out that it’s still calorie rich and high in fat and sugar.

Compare Five to the can of lentil soup in my cabinet. I’ve had it for many months. It’s something of a relic from a time when I ate more packaged foods, but I keep it around just in case I should find myself too busy to prepare something else. With a whopping nine ingredients (organic lentils, filtered water, organic celery, organic carrots, organic onions, organic potatoes, organic extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, spices), it easily fails the five-ingredient test. It’s certainly not a perfect food; it’s a bit too salty for my tastes, and I would much prefer a fresh soup with organic vegetables from the local farmers’ market. It’s still probably one of the better meals I’ve seen in a package, though.

Kita asks for Pollan’s take on Five:

“The food industry is incredibly clever at transforming any criticism of its practices into a new way to sell us more food,” says Pollan. And in that, he is 100 percent correct. Never believe anything you read on the front of the packaging or hear on a commercial.

I don’t completely agree with Pollan, though. It seems to me that it’s a certain oversimplification in his proposed solution that enables this kind of marketing. While having a few guidelines like Pollan’s is certainly better than making largely uninformed decisions, it’s not the same as making thoughtful and informed decisions. Therefore, I find it entirely unsurprising to see that the five-ingredient rule has spawned a new marketing niche for the food industry to exploit.

Of course, some people don’t want to think much about their food choices, and the five-ingredient rule might do them some good. We can’t know everything there is to know about each of our meals, so we all have to find a level of knowledge with which we’re comfortable. Others might insist on knowing more about their food than I do. After all, I don’t know where or how the lentils or vegetables in my can of soup were grown, how the soup was made, or how it found its way to the store. Even so, I’d much prefer that lentil soup, with all nine of its ingredients, to Haagen-Dazs Five.

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