New from the Wordsmiths

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

By Michael Pollan. Penguin, New York, 2007. ISBN-10: 0143038583
Reviewed by Jessica Penchos, FOSS Developer, Lawrence Hall of Science
jessica_penchos@berkeley.edu

As a child growing up in urban and suburban settings, I never really gave thought to where the food I ate came from, at least not beyond the grocery store. At the occasional county fair or road trip, I would be exposed to farm land or farm life and had developed a concept of "farm" that included a family working some land with a tractor or two, rising early to gather the eggs, tend the fields, and so on.

It wasn't until recent years, with our news headlines dominated by the most recent salmonella outbreak, food recalls, and tainted imports, as well as an increasing public awareness of organic and local foods, that I began to wonder, "where does my food really come from?"

This is why Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is so timely. Pollan spent time thoroughly researching how farming takes place in America, and it's often not the quaint family farm scene I had imagined while growing up. The family farm tending a variety of crops and animals does still exist to a small extent, but like much of America, farming has been redesigned for efficiency, for getting the most bang out of your man-hours and your buck. The problem is that we are dealing with living organisms and ecosystems, not a typical factory setting—though that is precisely how many farms now deal with their livestock and crops.

"Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms such as the Naylor's used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste product of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops . . . a closed ecological loop." Pollan provides a number of examples of mixed farms that still use these ecological principals. My favorite example is the "Eggmobile" conceived of by farmer Joel Salatin, who rotates his cows through various grass pastures and follows them with his home-built portable hen house. Waiting three days after the cows have left allows grubs a chance to fatten up in the cow feces. Hens "pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal's droppings, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease." And let's not forget the free, high-protein meal for the hens. The hen droppings? Natural fertilizer for the grass in the pasture, which prepares the fields for the return of the cows.

As a scientist, the beauty of using nature's complex food web to one's advantage on a farm seems logical and a bit genius in the way it solves countless problems. What is the alternative? It's the CAFO, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Most of the meat Americans typically eat three times a day comes from feedlots such as these. The following is a scene from one of the cattle CAFOs Pollan visits.

Tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and supplements. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen beside pallets stacked with fifty-pound sacks of antibiotics.

Pollan spends a large amount of time going into the numerous ecological effects of CAFOs, but the one that jumps out the most to me has to do with another recent headline—the news about swine flu. Creating monocultures of single species within close confines creates a breeding ground for diseases to thrive and evolve. The current swine flu scare has brought some of these concerns to the foreground.

What are the implications of this book when teaching science? For any science teacher who incorporates current events in the class, this is a good opportunity to learn more about the science behind a number of those headlines and to generate better classroom discussions and understanding with your students. Teachers of life sciences or ecology will appreciate the way Pollan details the ecological complexity of systems (such as the grass, chickens, larvae, parasites, and cattle), inspiring an awe for the balance found in nature. Chemistry teachers can draw connections with the synthetic substances used in processed food. But the biggest messages are important for any teacher of science: the health of a farming ecosystem affects the health of the larger ecosystem we live in, and we all share this planet.

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