I admit I’m impressionable. After I first read Siddhartha, I fasted for 3 days…twice. I remember sitting on a lawn chair out in the brutal midwest summer sun down at Earthcircles, watching the flies land on my bare feet and reveling in the connection I felt with one of mankind’s least respected creatures. I’m sure–though I don’t remember this part–I wanted to give up all my worldly possessions in my lightheaded delerium. And now I’m a raging capitalist. Well not exactly…but 10 years later I haven’t gotten rid of all my stuff just yet.
Anyway, I mention that because I just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and it left quite an impression. It’s an excellent book and I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in where their food comes from. And if you don’t care where your food comes from…well, read it anyway and maybe you will when you’re done.
He traces four meals from their very origin through all their stops on the way to his dinner plate. In the case of a McDonald’s hamburger that means going from the cornfields where the cattle feed is grown to the feedlot, the slaughterhouse, the processing plant, etc. all the way to the drivethru. For a meal he hunts and gathers himself, it means shooting and butchering a wild pig, picking wild cherries, growing lettuce and herbs and hunting morel mushrooms.
The section that I found most fascinating was on grass farming. He spends a couple weeks with a farmer in Virginia who uses an aggressive management technique to feed his cows, chickens, pigs and rabbits without using pesticides, fertilizers or practically any external input whatsoever. The animals, the grass, the surrounding woods all form a complete, sustainable ecosystem. It’s only the expertly-timed moving of the animals so they always get the grass at it’s peak and for just long enough to stimulate the grass to grow back quickly that accelerates the natural process enough for him to make a living selling eggs and meat. And what eggs and meat! The eggs are eggier, the chickens more chickeny, and of course all the animals live a decent life, free to graze the little parcels of grassy land and move on a few days later to the next parcel. It’s almost enough to make a vegetarian have second thoughts…especially when you read the sections on Industrial Organic (i.e. The Whole Foods empire) and the history of the animal rights movement. But rather than start eating grass-fed, free-range cows, what it really made me want to do was to become a grass farmer myself.
If you thought all you had to do was look for the little green USDA Organic sticker to know you were getting “good, safe, healthy” food, think again. It’s a good start, but unfortunately there’s much more to it than that. I won’t recount the entire book here, but it delves into all these issues. Check it out.
