Ciao, panas! After the all-out pace of the last couple months, the special project at work is drawing to a close (el fin de la super-fiesta en el sotano, como decimos), so that, coupled with the better half being off traveling the next few weeks, gave me the opportunity to finish the book I'd been pecking away at the last month or two, the phenomenal Omnivore's Dilemma. Written by Michael Pollan, this one deals with the inordinate problems plaguing our food industry and our equally harmful patterns of eating, which has led to sick animals and fallow fields in the former (requiring increasing amounts of medication and harmful fertilizers to counter the effects), and a wave of obesity and diabetes in consumers in the latter.Pollan draws the root of the problem to a single source, one that permeates virtually everything we put onto or into our bodies: corn. It shows up in the meat we eat (as all mass-produced meat survives almost exclusively on its golden nuggets), our soft drinks (high-fructose corn syrup), our snack foods (a range of corn-based additives, flavorings, and preservatives), as well as our shampoos, cosmetics, and lotions. (A similar spread of additives and stabilizers culled from those yellow logs of happiness.) All of this, not to mention its most obvious and natural incarnations -- on the cob or in kernel form -- eaten by the truckload by Midwesterners like me. (We were given whole cobs of corn to suck on instead of pacifiers when we were kids.)
This monocultural saturation is obviously not natural -- cows are no more supposed to eat corn than humans are to eat dirt -- but due to an overabundance of the one, the biological predispositions of the other are overthrown in order to accommodate the excess. The problem that built this mountain of corn comes from two events, according to Pollan -- the move to trading corn as an anonymous mass quantity -- as a commodity -- rather than a specific good tied to a particular farmer, and the direct cash subsidization of farmers for corn they couldn't sell rather than just floating them temporary loans for what the market couldn't sustain.
Previously, farmers would sell their corn in giant sacks that were labeled based on their provenance -- Jesper's Field of (Corn) Dreams, or something like that --which meant that the product always had someone to answer for it; always had someone accountable for any problems that might arise. This bred a farming culture where quality was prized over quantity since the corn you bought was always traceable back to a specific individual, from the pasture to the plate. However, when the government began treating the farmers' wares as a commodity and lumping them into anonymous pools, it let quality control fall and encouraged a mindset of quantity over all else. (The reason corn became such a lucrative crop in the first place is because it is simply the single most efficient converter of solar energy into a vendable good around, yielding more product per acre with the least inputs and maintenance.)
Similarly, in earlier periods of hardship or unforeseen surpluses -- due to a drop in the market, lower yields, bad weather, etc. -- the government would bail the farmer out by issuing them a loan until the market recovered -- demand rose, yields jumped, the weather changed -- at which point they could sell their surpluses and pay back their debt. However, in the 60s and 70s the government shifted towards direct cash payments for all unsold surpluses (making them the proud owners of an unwanted commodity). By doing so, rather than temporarily sustaining the farmers through the downturn in the market, the government removed all reason for them to think about what they were producing and just produce at all costs -- the money was going to come anyway. Therefore the massive surpluses created by these farmers -- who no longer acted like traditional businessmen because they no longer feared having more supply than demand -- pushed the move to corn-fed meat and the start of the downward spiral.
For as Pollan describes, something had to be done with the corn -- it's what led to its being force-fed to animals who naturally survive on grasses (causing their need for medication as their systems rejected the unnatural diet) and the array of processed goods chemical wizardry allowed it to be added to. But part of the problem lies in the nature of the food industry itself -- there is a limit to how much humans can physically consume. As Pollan explains,
"The farm, being vulnerable to the vicissitudes of weather and pests, is prone to crises of over- and under-production, both of which can hurt business. Rising material prices cut into profits, obviously enough. Y et the potential boon of falling raw material prices -- which should allow you to sell a lot more of your product at a lower price -- can't be realized in the case of food because of the special nature of your consumer, who can only eat so much food, no matter how cheap it gets."
This leaves the food companies two options: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food (the average amount consumed each year), or entice them to actually eat more than that, which -- as has become abundantly clear in this country lately -- are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As explained in an interesting write-up of some similarly-themed books in The New Yorker a few weeks back,
"The food business once lamented what it called the problem of the 'fixed stomach' -- it appeared that demand for food, unlike other products, was inelastic, the amount fixed by the dimensions of the stomach itself, the variety constrained by tradition and habit. In the past few decades, however, American and European stomachs have become as elastic as balloons, and, with the newly prosperous Chinese and Indians switching to Western diets, much of the rest of the world is following suit."
This leads to a range of health problems, such as diabetes and obesity, as mentioned earlier, whose deleterious effects "must be worn on our bodies," often making us "miserable, and ill, but medical advances mean that it takes a long time to kill us, so we keep on eating."
Pollan explores the alternative to the mass-produced food chain -- the burgeoning behemoth that is the organic industry -- and details both its excesses (through its industrialization, which has led to a hybridization of the two options, mass-produced monocultures and small-scale multicultures) and its exemplars (sustainable multi-crop farms that follow the natural life cycle of its components. These latter farms -- epitomized by the case of Polyface Farms and its resident wizard Joel Salatin in rural Virginia -- are more labor-intensive than the streamlined, assembly-line approach of the big industrial farms, but because they more closely mimic the patterns of nature itself, the environmental impact is diminished and the end product is better.
These chapters were a revelation, as Salatin explained how things are supposed to work on a farm, with each piece playing a key role that furthers the life of the farm and allows its component parts to realize their most fundamental desires. Cows graze the grass, taking it down enough for the chickens who come by afterward, who eat the grass down more and pick insects and parasites out of the cow patties, which would otherwise harm the grass. These patties fertilize the soil (and can be used on other crops), which enables the grass to grow back up for the cows, who meander around and take it down enough for the chickens, who come by again and eat it down more. And so on and so forth.
There are a million other parts to this process that I'm leaving out (rotating the acres grazed, rotating crops on the acres), but this is the essence of the approach, and one that's fascinating in its own right in comparison to how we've surreptitiously moved to getting our food. The farm doesn't need the harmful fertilizers for its crops or medicines for its livestock that the industrial farms do because everything is healthy; everything is in balance. Pigs are allowed to be pigs, cows are allowed to be cows, chickens are allowed to be chickens. (Meaning they eat what they are supposed to -- that which they are biologically predisposed to, not what we're forcing them to -- and are happier/healthier as a result.) It is completely sustainable and natural and leads to a better product because of it.
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. It's a fascinating book, obviously one of the best I've read in recent years, and it will change the way you think about what (and how) you eat. Normally I can plow through a book in a week or two without blinking, but this one forces you to slow down and grapple with what Pollan is saying, because it has such pertinence to your daily life. After all, what is more fundamental to your being than the food you eat? This one will make you reevaluate what you put in your mouth and challenge your philosophy of health and well-being, and as such it is not something to be rushed (or missed). Great stuff.
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As for the tunes of the week, this double dip starts with a track off Portishead's long awaited new album, Third. It's a great return to form after 11 years in hiding, a dense, slightly unsettling gem along the lines of their first two, full of moodiness, lush melody, and dark foreboding. This track, "We Carry On," highlights the band at its best, mixing Beth Gibbon's delicate, echoey voice, Geoff Barrow's propulsive beats, and Adrian Utley's smoldering guitar in layers that build until combustion halfway through. The rest of the album charts a similar path, growing in intricacy and power until they erupt with this week's track halfway through the album. From the moment the crackly Portuguese voice comes in at the beginning of "Silence," you're hooked. After that it's the growling, disconcerting guitar of "Hunter," the tribal rhythms of "Nylon Smile," the cool arpeggios of "The Rip," and the cataclysmic electronic swirls of "Plastic" that pull you into the explosive "We Carry On." The back half of the album continues the tense excellence, with the old-timey backing vocals of "Deep Water" and the undeniable single, "Machine Gun," representing two more high points. It's a great album, one that's rewards listening to it as a whole, rather than sampling it on the Pod on shuffle. Check out the video for the aforementioned gem here:
The back half of this sonic dip in the pool calms things down a bit, an overlooked track from my beloved National -- "About Today" -- off their 2004 Cherry Tree EP. The song is the band's traditional closer in concert, and sure enough a live version shows up on the recently released Virginia EP, a must-have accompaniment to the documentary, A Skin, A Night, that shows the band trying to record what would become their masterful Boxer, one of the best albums of last year. (And one of my all-time faves of recent years, an album that borders on obsession for me.) There's not much I can say about these guys that I haven't before, but if you're new to the group, this song's a perfect representation of what they do so well. Whether it's Bryan Devendorf's thumping rhythm, Matt Berninger's baritone and melancholy lyrics, the swirling viola and guitar, the band charts the waters between beautiful melody and sad sentiment without sacrificing either component and overpowering the emotion. A wonderful band that's really come into their own the last few years, I can't wait to see them this summer back home on the lake. Check out the tune here:
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