You just think you're an omnivore, Corny Cornerson

As promised, a little on The Omnivore's Dilemma. I first heard about this book a couple of months ago at a groovy-homeschool-knitting-mama gathering. Leslie related Michael Pollan's tale of what it really means to be an organic chicken on a factory farm, and it piqued my interest. I'm halfway through now, and it's one of those books that compels me to read passages aloud to Hombre and take notes as I go.

In the first of the book's three sections, Pollan traces the food chain from an Iowa cornfield to a McDonald's to see all the steps involved in getting his meal from field to table. It's a long road, to say the least. Along the way, a couple of facts jumped out at me.

The first was that industrial agriculture was turbocharged by Fritz Haber, a German scientist who figured out how to do in the lab what had heretofore been the sole province of certain soil bacteria and lightning strikes: fixing the nitrogen from the air into a form plants and animals can use. (Pollan notes that Haber, a Jew, also developed poison gases including Zyklon B, which was used in Nazi concentration camps.) Haber's biographer is quoted as saying that without that ability to jack up the amount of nitrogen available for plant and therefore animal consumption, "two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive". (43) Put that in your global-population-growth pipe and smoke it for a while.

The other thing that got my attention is just how much corn is in our food:

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget'’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "“fresh"” can all be derived from corn. [...]

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. (18-19)

To explain the rise of corn, Pollan takes us through plant evolution and American history, lessons on alcohol and food processing, plant hybridization, the origin of the term "corn hole," leftover military explosives, the role of capitalism and what scientific hair analysis reveals about the American diet. Bottom line: Americans eat a hell of a lot of corn, whether we realize it or not, even if we think we're eating a varied diet.