THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, PART 2

I finally finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read all year. All the provocation is probably why it took me so long to finish; sometimes it’s just harder to enjoy your food when you can’t stop yourself from thinking about it. As food is a personal obsession with me, at times I was resentful of Michael Pollan for coming into my head and messing with it. He was hitting me where I live. Still, for all the uncomfortable truths and dire situations it forced me to acknowledge, it wasn’t a downer book. Not only did I finally learn the etymology of “corned beef” (as well as “cornhole”), but I also enjoyed (and agreed with) his informed, passionate writing. Even though I think I was already a much more conscious eater than most Americans (what with my penchant for farmers’ markets, menu planning, homemade meals, delicious vegetables, etc.), I’m now thinking about food in an entirely new way.

Here are a few paragraphs to chew on:

The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality…A few years ago the English writer John Berger wrote an essay called ‘Why Look at Animals?’ in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals—and specifically the loss of eye contact—has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (?!). Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays it seems we either look away or become vegetarians.

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There does seem to be an evolutionary trade-off between big brains and big guts—two very different evolutionary strategies for dealing with the question of food selection. The case of the koala bear, one of nature’s pickiest eaters, exemplifies the small-brain strategy. You don’t need a lot of brain circuitry to figure out what’s for dinner when all you ever eat is eucalyptus leaves. As it happens, the koala’s brain is so small it doesn’t even begin to fill up its skull. Zoologists theorize that the koala bear once ate a more varied and mentally taxing diet than it does now, and that as it evolved toward its present, highly circumscribed concept of lunch, the bear’s underemployed brain actually shrank. (Food faddists take note.)

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The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America were suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensely cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone.

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The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places….To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility—in the form of manure—would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can guild a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.