The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 4

THE MODERN OMNIVORE.

Over thousands of years, human beings built a culture of food that helped us figure out what to eat and what to avoid. We learned what was safe to eat and what could kill us. We learned how to find and cook local foods. These rules and habits made eating a lot easier. When it was time to eat, people didn't have to think about it much. They ate what their parents and grandparents had eaten.

If you lived in Mexico you ate rice, beans, and corn tortillas. If you lived in West Africa you ate ca.s.sava, yams, beans, and millet. What you ate also depended on the season. You ate apples in the fall and leafy greens in the spring. In most places people ate small portions of meat, though not at every meal. By following simple rules like these, people solved the omnivore's dilemma.

Today, the modern omnivore has almost no culture to fall back on. Standing in our giant supermarkets, we feel more lost than someone standing in a forest ten thousand years ago. We no longer know for sure which foods are good for us and which aren't. Thanks to the food industry, we don't even know what it is we're eating. Sometimes it even seems like we've forgotten why why we eat. we eat.

Modern Americans have lost the solution to the omnivore's dilemma and today the problem is bigger than it has ever been. But it's not an unsolvable problem. We need to recover the skills and knowledge people used to have.

THE OMNIVORE'S BRAIN The first thing we should remember is that our bodies have evolved to help us solve the omnivore's dilemma. For example, we have different teeth for different jobs. We can bite like a carnivore, or chew like an herbivore, depending on the dish. Our digestive tract is also good at digesting different types of foods.

The omnivore's dilemma is one reason our brains are so large. The koala doesn't need a lot of brainpower to figure out what to eat. As it happens, the koala's brain is so so small it doesn't even fill up its skull. Zoologists think the koala once ate a more varied diet than it does now. As it evolved toward eating just one food, it didn't need to think as much. Over generations, unused organs tend to shrink. In other words, as the koala's diet shrank, so did its brain. small it doesn't even fill up its skull. Zoologists think the koala once ate a more varied diet than it does now. As it evolved toward eating just one food, it didn't need to think as much. Over generations, unused organs tend to shrink. In other words, as the koala's diet shrank, so did its brain.

Humans, on the other hand, need a lot of brainpower to safely choose an omnivore's diet. We can't rely on instinct like the koala does. For us, choosing food is a problem that has to be solved with our brains and our senses.

To help it make food decisions, our brain developed taste preferences. We think of taste as something that helps us to enjoy food, but our sense of taste evolved to help us screen foods. Our tastebuds divide food into two groups: sweet foods that are good to eat and bitter foods that might harm us.

Sweetness is a sign that a food is a rich source of carbohydrate energy. We don't have to be taught to like sweet foods-we are born liking them. A sweet tooth is part of our omnivore's brain. It is an instinct that evolved to help us through times of food shortage. It says: Eat as much of this sweet high-energy food as you can because you never know when you're going to find some again. This built-in sweet tooth is so strong that we will keep eating sweets even after we are no longer hungry. Our instinct doesn't realize that in modern times there are always sweet foods available to us. We don't have to go hunting and gathering to get more-all we have to do is walk to the refrigerator.

THE BITTER AND THE SWEET.

We are also born with a built-in signal that tells us to stop eating certain foods. That's the taste we call bitter. Many plant toxins (poisons) are bitter. Avoiding bitter foods is a good way to avoid these toxins. Pregnant women are very sensitive to bitter tastes. This instinct probably developed to protect the developing fetus against even the mild toxins found in foods like broccoli. But this is not a good excuse to stop eating broccoli. It turns out that some of the bitterest plants contain valuable nutrients, even useful medicines. We can't only rely on our sense of taste when we choose what we eat. (Besides, many people like the taste of broccoli.) The bark of the willow tree is extremely bitter, but early humans learned to make tea from it anyway. Why? Because willow bark contains salicylic acid, a pain reliever. (It's the active ingredient in aspirin.) Our food choices are not just dictated by instinct. We can learn to eat bitter foods if they are good for us. We sometimes even decide that we like them.

One way we have overcome the bitterness of some plants is by cooking. Acorns are very bitter. But Native Americans figured out a way to turn them into a rich food by grinding, soaking, and roasting them. The roots of the ca.s.sava, a plant in Africa, contain the poison cyanide. This keeps most animals from eating them. But once again, humans figured out a way to safely eat ca.s.sava, by pounding and then cooking it. And humans had the ca.s.sava roots all to themselves, since pigs, porcupines, and other animals wouldn't touch them.

Once it was discovered, cooking became one of the most important tools of the human omnivore. Cooking vastly increased the number of plants and animals we could eat. In fact, cooking probably was a turning point in human evolution. Anthropologists think early primates (pre-humans) learned to use fire and cook about 1.9 million years ago. That was around the same time the human brain grew larger and our teeth and jaws grew smaller.

RATS!.

Rats are also omnivores. But unlike us, rats can't pa.s.s lessons or food habits down to their many, many children. When it comes to the omnivore's dilemma, each rat is on its own.

Rats solve the omnivore's dilemma by testing new food. If a rat finds something new to eat, it will nibble a very tiny bit and wait to see what happens. Most poisons in nature are not that strong. A tiny amount will make the rat sick but not kill it. If the rat doesn't get sick, then it knows it can eat the whole thing-a knowledge it retains for the rest of its life. This ability to learn is what makes poisoning rats so difficult.

Luckily, we don't have to use the rat method for solving the omnivore's dilemma. And in fact, over thousands of years, people in every corner of the globe built a large body of food knowledge. Through experience, they learned what combinations of local foods made them healthy. They learned which foods to avoid. They learned how to cook and prepare those foods and pa.s.sed all this knowledge on to their children. You grew up knowing what to eat and how to cook it.

The culture of food didn't just solve the omnivore's dilemma. It was also an important glue that bound people together. It was part of the ident.i.ty of a tribe or a nation. People hold on to their national foods, even after they move to other countries. Visit any neighborhood where there are immigrants, and you'll see shops that sell food from the home country-pastas from Italy, kielbasa sausages from Poland, curry spices from India.

National food cultures are more than just a list of foods. They are a set of manners, customs, and rules that cover everything from the correct size of a serving to the order of dishes served at a meal. Some of these rules have clear health benefits. If you live in j.a.pan and eat raw fish (sushi), then it makes sense to eat it with spicy wasabi. Raw fish can contain bacteria, and wasabi kills bacteria. The people who developed the custom of eating sushi with wasabi didn't even know there was such a thing as bacteria. But somehow they figured out that eating wasabi kept them healthier.

People in Central America cook corn with lime and serve it with beans. It turns out there are important health reasons for doing these things. Corn contains niacin, an important vitamin. The way to unlock the niacin in corn is to cook it with an alkali like lime. And eating corn and beans together supplies all the amino acids humans need.

FOOD FADS.

We have never had a national food culture in the United States. There's really no such thing as "American food." (Fast-food hamburgers don't count.) We have few rules about what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat. We don't have any strong food traditions to guide us, so we seek food advice from "experts." This may be one reason we have so many diet fads in this country.

One of the earliest of these so-called experts was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that's the same Kellogg whose name is on Kellogg's Corn Flakes and other cereals. Kellogg was a doctor who ran a "sanitarium," or health clinic, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Large numbers of wealthy people traveled there and followed Kellogg's nutty ideas about diet and health. Some of his advice included all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas. (An enema is a cleansing of the bowel in which . . . Oh, never mind.) He followed the enemas with doses of yogurt, applied to York Times Magazine York Times Magazine said that carbs make you fat. Suddenly millions of Americans gave up bread and other carbohydrates and started eating mainly meat. Fifty years from now that diet might seem as crazy as Kellogg's enemas. the digestive tract from both ends. (Half was eaten and the other half was . . . Well, you can figure it out.) said that carbs make you fat. Suddenly millions of Americans gave up bread and other carbohydrates and started eating mainly meat. Fifty years from now that diet might seem as crazy as Kellogg's enemas. the digestive tract from both ends. (Half was eaten and the other half was . . . Well, you can figure it out.) The earliest so-called "food expert" was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who prescribed all-grape diets and hourly enemas before going on to launch the cereal company.

A scene from the Swedish treatment room at Kellogg's health spa, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, circa 1900.

Around the same time, millions of Americans got caught up in the fad called "Fletcherizing." This involved chewing each bite of food as many as one hundred times. It was named after its inventor, a man named Horace Fletcher, also known as the Great Masticator.

It's easy to make fun of the people who paid good money to follow his advice. But are we really so much smarter today? Food fads still come and go with alarming speed: A scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can change our nation's diet overnight. In 2002, one article in the New New

THE NO-FAD FRENCH.

Relying on experts or magazine articles is a very new way of solving the omnivore's dilemma. But there are still lots of countries where people solve it the old-fashioned way. They eat traditional foods, following customs that haven't changed for hundreds of years. And amazingly, in those countries where people pick their foods based on custom and taste, the people are actually healthier than we are. They have lower rates of diet-related illness such as heart disease.

Take the French, for example. They eat by and large as they have for generations. They drink wine, eat cheese, cook with b.u.t.ter, and eat red meat. Oh yes, they also eat bread without worrying about it! Yet their rates of heart disease and obesity are lower than the health-crazy Americans'. How can that be? Maybe because how how we eat is just as important as we eat is just as important as what what we eat. we eat.

French culture includes a set of customs or rules about how to eat. For example, the French eat small portions and don't go back for seconds. They don't snack-you'll almost never see a French person eating while driving or walking down the street. They seldom eat alone. Instead they eat with family or friends, and their meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food allows the French to enjoy their food and be healthy at the same time.

Because we have no such food culture in America, almost every question about eating is up for grabs. Fats or carbs? Three square meals or little snacks all day? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Vegetarian or vegan? We seem to have even forgotten what real food looks and tastes like. Instead we make "meals" of protein bars and shakes. Then we consume these non-foods alone in our cars. Is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders?

MARKETING NEW MEALS.

And so for us, the omnivore's dilemma becomes bigger and bigger. We can't rely on taste to choose among processed foods. We can't just eat foods that we enjoy. We have no stable food culture to guide us, handed down over generations. We are told instead to rely on science. Science (and the industrial food system) will tell us which foods are good for us and which are not. But the "science" keeps changing with every new study.

This situation suits the food industry just fine. The more anxious we are about eating, the more likely we are to listen to claims from food marketers. Food companies make more money if they can get us to change our eating habits and buy their processed foods. They spend billions to create a constant stream of these new foods and then spend billions more to get us to buy them.

Some of these foods are marketed as being healthy. Others are sold under the banner of "convenience." Many are not meant to be eaten at a dinner table. The protein bar or Pop-Tart is designed to be consumed in the car on the way to school or to work. Campbell's has even designed a microwavable soup that can be eaten in a car.

About 47 percent of American families say they still eat together every night. But research shows that many of those "family dinners" are in fact something quite new. In many houses now, each member of the family prepares something different to eat. Mom might cook something vegetarian, while the kids take a pepperoni pizza from the freezer and zap it. They don't all gather at the table at the same time. By the time Dad sits down, with his own low-carb meal, the kids may have gotten up. Is that a family dinner? Not in my opinion.

What difference does it make if families don't eat together? Well, let me answer that question with another question. Is eating just a task that we have to get done as fast and "conveniently" as possible? Is it something we do only because we have to, like taking medicine or brushing our teeth? Looking at food that way robs us of one of life's greatest pleasures. We should not only enjoy and appreciate our food, we should enjoy making it and eating it in the company of others. Food is not just fuel. It's also about family and friends and community.

Yet in spite of this, as part of my research I decided to have one of these alone-but-together meals. My family and I were going to share our separate processed meals, from a fast-food restaurant at the end of the industrial food chain. We were going to solve the omnivore's dilemma the way millions of Americans do every day. We were going to McDonald's.

9.

My Fast-Food Meal

FAST FOOD.

Every food chain ends in a meal. When it came time to eat my industrial food chain meal, since it was impossible to follow Naylor's corn or steer 534 directly to my plate, I had a lot of choices. I could have bought a meal from KFC or Pizza Hut or Applebee's, or from hundreds of other fast-food outlets. I could have bought a bunch of prepared foods and heated them up (I don't want to say cooked cooked) at home. In the end I decided to buy a meal at a McDonald's and eat it in a moving car. Somehow it seemed like the thing to do.

My eleven-year-old son, Isaac, was more than happy to join me at McDonald's. He doesn't get there often, so it's a treat. (For most American children today, it is no longer such a treat: One in three American kids eats fast food every single day.) Judith, my wife, wasn't quite as happy. She's careful about what she eats. To her, having a fast-food lunch meant giving up a "real meal."

Isaac pointed out that she could order one of McDonald's new "premium salads" with the Paul Newman dressing. I read in the business pages that these salads are a big hit, but even if they weren't, they'd probably stay on the menu. Marketers know that a salad or veggie burger in a fast-food chain gives kids something to say to overcome parents' objections. "But Mom, you can get the salad . . ."

Which is exactly what Judith did: order the Cobb salad with Caesar dressing. At $3.99, it was the most expensive item on the menu. I ordered a cla.s.sic cheeseburger, large fries, and a large c.o.ke. Large turns out to be a full thirty-two ounces (a quart of soda!). Of course, thanks to the magical economics of supersizing, it cost only thirty cents more than the sixteen-ounce "small." Isaac went with Chicken McNuggets, plus a double-thick vanilla shake, and a large order of fries. He also ordered a new dessert treat consisting of freeze-dried pellets of ice cream.

We would be eating alone together. That each of us ordered something different is one of the wonders of the industrial food chain. Marketers break the family down into its various groups (parents, kids, moms, dads) and sell something slightly different to each group. That way we each have a reason to go to McDonald's. The total for the three of us came to fourteen dollars, and was packed up and ready to go in four minutes. Before I left the register I picked up a handout printed in tiny type that was called "A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You."

CHICKEN OR NUGGETS?.

We could have slipped into a booth, but it was such a nice day we decided to put the top down on the convertible and eat our lunch in the car. Both the food and the car have been designed for eating on the road. These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in a car. In fact, we could have ordered, paid for, and picked up the food without opening the car door.

Our car has cup holders, front seat and rear, and, except for the salad, all the food could be eaten with one hand. Indeed, this is the genius of the chicken nugget. Now it is just as easy to eat chicken in a car as a hamburger. No doubt the food scientists at McDonald's are right now hard at work on the one-handed salad. By the way, the car was running on gas mixed with ethanol. So while we were eating corn, the car was eating corn too.

I ate a lot of McDonald's as a kid. This was back when you still had to order a second little burger or sack of fries if you wanted more. The chicken nugget had not yet been invented. I loved everything about fast food. The individual portions were all wrapped up like presents and I didn't have to share with my three sisters. I loved the combination of flavors when I bit into a burger-the soft, sweet roll, the crunchy pickle, the tasty moistness of the meat.

Fast food has a flavor all its own. That flavor has little to do with the flavors of hamburgers or french fries you might make at home. It's flavor created from chemicals in a laboratory. These "fast food" flavors make a lot of fast-food meals taste the same. Even Chicken McNuggets have the same fast-food taste as the hamburgers or french fries, though they're technically chicken, not potato or beef.

Isaac announced that his white-meat McNuggets, a new McDonald's recipe, were tasty. When I asked Isaac if the new nuggets tasted more like chicken than the old ones, he seemed surprised by the question. "No, they taste like what they are, which is nuggets." He then dropped on me a withering two-syllable "duh." In his mind, at least, there is no real link between a nugget and a chicken except the name. No doubt a lot of you feel the same.

Isaac pa.s.sed one up to the front for Judith and me to sample. It looked and smelled pretty good, with a nice crust and a bright white inside that looked sort of like chicken breast meat. Yet all I could really taste was salt and that all-purpose fast-food flavor. Maybe there was a hint of chicken in there somewhere, but not much.

Later I looked at the flyer I had grabbed to see exactly what goes into a nugget. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can come from corn. Among them are the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch; mono-, tri-, and diglycerides; dextrose; lecithin; yellow corn flour; regular cornstarch; vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, items that come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible. They keep the food from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road.

WHERE'S THE BEEF?

Compared to Isaac's nuggets, my cheeseburger is a fairly simple food product. According to the McDonald's handout, the cheeseburger contains only six ingredients: a 100 percent beef patty, a bun, two American cheese slices, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions, and "grill seasoning," whatever that is. It tasted pretty good too, though what I mainly tasted were the ketchup, mustard, pickles, and onions. By itself, the gray patty had hardly any flavor.

Eating it, I had to remind myself that the burger came from an actual cow. (Probably an old burned-out dairy cow, which is where most fast-food beef comes from.) Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless forms allow us to forget we're eating animals. I'd been on the feedlot at Poky only a few months earlier, yet I had trouble connecting that place to my cheeseburger. I could not taste or smell the feed corn or the petroleum or the antibiotics or the hormones-or the feedlot manure, even though I knew they were there.

By the time it reaches us, industrial food has been processed so much it no longer seems like something made from plants and animals. Where did my cheeseburger come from? It came from McDonald's. As far as industrial food companies are concerned, that's all we need to know. But it's just not so. My cheeseburger came from slaughterhouses and factory farms in towns like Garden City, Kansas, from ranches in Sturgis, South Dakota, from food science laboratories in Oak Brook, Illinois, from flavor companies on the New Jersey Turnpike, from processing plants owned by ADM and Cargill, from grain elevators in towns like Farnhamville, and, at the end of that long and twisted trail, from a field of corn and soybeans farmed by George Naylor in Churdan, Iowa.

How much corn did Judith, Isaac, and I consume in our McDonald's meal?

Add it up: Hamburger: corn fed to a cow = 2 pounds corn 6 nuggets: corn fed to a chicken = pound High fructose corn syrup in 3 drinks = 1 pound Subtotal: 3 1/2 pounds of corn.

There's more corn in the meal, but it's harder to measure. There are corn products everywhere. For example, there's more corn sweetener in my cheeseburger. The bun and the ketchup both contain HFCS. It's in the salad dressing too, and the sauces for the nuggets, not to mention Isaac's dessert. (Of the sixty menu items listed in the McDonald's handout, forty-five contain HFCS.) The nugget is made with corn products called binders and emulsifiers and fillers. Isaac's shake contains milk from corn-fed animals. Judith's salad contains cheese and eggs from corn-fed animals. The salad's grilled chicken breast is injected with a "flavor solution" that's also full of corn products. In fact, the majority of calories in the "healthy" salad come from corn. And the french fries? You would think those are mostly potatoes. Yet half of the 500 calories in a large order of fries come from the oil they're fried in. That means the source of those calories is not a potato farm but a field of corn or soybeans.

CORN EATERS 'R' US Some time later I found another way to figure out just how much corn we had eaten that day. Scientists can use a machine called a spectrometer to look at the carbon in food and tell how much of it came from corn. I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, to run a McDonald's meal through his spectrometer.

Dawson and his colleague Stefania Mambelli prepared a graph that showed roughly how much of the carbon in the various McDonald's menu items came from corn. In order from most corny to least, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: Soda (100 percent corn) Milk shake (78 percent) Salad dressing (65 percent)Chicken nuggets (56 percent) Cheeseburger (52 percent) French fries (23 percent) What looks like a meal with lots of variety turns out to be mainly corn. But so what? Why should it matter that we have become a race of corn eaters such as the world has never seen? Is this a bad thing? The answer all depends on where you stand.

If where you stand is in agribusiness, processing cheap corn into forty-five different McDonald's items is a great thing. It is a way for agribusinesses to sell us more food than we need and so a way for them to make more money. We may not be expanding the number of eaters in America, but we've expanded how much food they eat, which is almost as good. Judith, Isaac, and I together consumed a total of 4,510 calories at our lunch, which is about two-thirds of what the three of us should eat in a day. We had certainly done our parts in chomping through the corn surplus. (We had also consumed a lot of petroleum, and not just because we were in a car. To grow and process those 4,510 food calories took at least ten times as many calories of fossil energy, something like 1.3 gallons of oil.) Corn-based food does offer cheap calories, if you don't count the billions the government spends to support cheap corn. For people with low incomes, this might seem like a good thing. In the long run, however, these cheap calories come with a high price tag: obesity, Type II diabetes, heart disease.

For poor people in other countries, America's industrial food chain is a complete disaster. If you eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) you consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost. It is used up to make bones or feathers or fur, or just to keep the steer or chicken alive. This is why vegetarians say we should all eat "low on the food chain." Every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten. Processing food also burns energy. All of this means that the amount of food energy lost in the making of a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just Isaac.

Source: See page 77, also USDA Economic Research Service.

And how does this corn-based food chain look to the corn farmer? As you've seen, the industrial food chain has been an economic disaster for the farmers who grow the food in it. Growing corn and nothing but corn has also damaged the soil of our farmlands, polluted the water, and threatened the health of all the creatures downstream. And of course it means that billions of animals are doomed to live out their lives on factory farms.

Every step up the food chain, or "trophic pyramid," approximately 90% of energy is lost, which is why there are fewer carnivores than there are herbivores.

Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica Yet there is one winner in all of this-corn itself. Of all the species that have adapted to thrive in a world dominated by humans, surely no other has done better than Zea mays Zea mays. Imagine an Iowa farm with corn, corn, corn as far as the eye can see, ten-foot stalks in perfect thirty-inch rows to the horizon. That farm is just a small part of an eighty-million-plus-acre corn lawn rolling across the continent. If the corn could, it would laugh at us, the humans eating and drinking it as fast as they can. You have to wonder why we Americans don't worship this plant as the Aztecs did. Like they once did, we make great sacrifices to it.

These were my thoughts as we sped down the highway putting away our fast-food lunch. What is it about fast food? Not only is it served in a flash, but more often than not it's eaten that way too. We finished our meal in under ten minutes. From the packaging to the taste, fast food is designed to be eaten quickly. Real food is a pleasure to eat. You want to take your time and enjoy every bite. There's no point in taking your time with fast food. After a few bites, you forget what you're eating. It's not exactly food, but a kind of food subst.i.tute. So you eat more and eat more quickly, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied, exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.

PART II.

The Industrial Organic Meal

10.

Big Organic

ONCE UPON A TIME.

I'm certainly not the only one who has learned the truth about the industrial food chain. In recent years, more and more Americans have discovered the same sad facts. A lot of them are trying to get away from the kingdom of corn and processed foods by buying organic food. And in my part of the world, there is no greater temple to all things organic, natural, and unprocessed than my local Whole Foods supermarket.