Omnivore's Dilemma book review

This book is about the modern industrial food system. The government long ago decided that cheap food was a political winner. Except with the farmers. Enter the government subsidies to corn farmers. This begets a lot of cheap corn. Despite the subsidy, the corn farmer still struggles because of low corn prices. To make up for it, he plants more corn. And prices go even lower as a result. So he plants more corn. This all leads to a bunch of corn. At the same time, scientists have discovered that you can do a lot of things with that corn if you take it apart and chemically process it - sweetners, plastics, fuel. It's in everything too, at least at the grocery store. If we are what we eat, then we're corn.

Alas, we've still got mountains of the stuff. Here's an idea, let's feed it to our cattle. Never mind that the cow isn't designed to eat the stuff. But they'll eat if they have to, plus it makes them big really quick. Aha! cheap corn begets cheap beef!

Do you know where your hamburger comes from? Most likely from a feedlot. Let the corn feast begin. Here's the ramifications of that. Unlike any other time in history, beef is now affordable to the masses. I guess that's generally a good thing, except for the increase in obesity and heart disease that we've seen as a direct result. But back to the feedlot. Here the cattle is kept in compact feeding lots with millions of other cattle, feasting on vast amounts of corn (as well as beef and other animal parts) and living ankle deep in their own waste. These confined feedlots are literally breeding ground for pestilence and disease. Another problem: cattle don't naturally eat grains, they eat grass. In fact, eating corn makes them sick. To combat both of these problems, we feed them large quantities of antibiotics. When they finally get their date at the slaughterhouse, they've got months of excrement caked on their bodies from the feedlot pits full of disease. Try as they might to get it off, some of it still gets through to our meat, along with the pathogens, most notably E. Coli. And yet another problem ensues. We've taken healthy cows off of healthy, disease-free farms to a cattle gotham and force prophylactic antibiotics on them in massive quantities and then wonder why all the sudden antibiotic-resistance pathogens keep creeping up.

Do you know what's on that Chicken McNugget? It's called TBHQ, or tertiary butylhydroquinone and it's to "help preserve freshness." The problem is that ingesting a single gram of the stuff can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse. Ingesting five grams can kill. My kids are no longer allowed Chicken McNuggets.

Do you know where that incredible, edible egg comes from? The poor egg laying hen perhaps gets perhaps the shortest straw of all the agricultural animals. Given life for these hens consists of living in a cozy cage the size of four normal pieces of paper with a half dozen of her mates,

every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral "vices" that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breasts against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding...the 10% or so of the hens that can't endure it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the survivors begins to ebb, the hens will be "force-molted"-- starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done.

Prior to WWII, our farms were multi focused. We grew corn and beans and chickens and tomatoes and pork and milk. The cycle was complete. But for efficiency's sake (a la Adam Smith's division of labor) we abandoned this model and went for a single product farm - most likely corn. The cycle was broken. No longer did the pastured beef and pigs and chickens fertilize the crops. We had to bring in chemical fertilizer to do the job. This of course has larger geopolitical and environmental ramifications itself.

Regardless, we're now a nation of people much like those feedlot cows. We're happily eating an unnatural diet that is making us sick. We're blithely eating whatever the figurative feedlots put in front of us. At least until you read this book. Recommended.