The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  An awful lot of those extra corn calories are being eaten as high-fructose corn syrup. Not surprisingly, HFCS is the leading source of sweetness in our diet.

  A SWEET DEAL

  In 1985, the average American consumed 45 pounds of HFCS a year. In 2006, it was 58 pounds. You might think that it has replaced other sweeteners in the American diet, but that isn’t so. In addition to the extra HFCS, Americans are eating more old-fashioned cane sugar too. In fact, since 1985 our consumption of all sugars—cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever—has climbed from 126 pounds to 139 pounds per person. That’s what makes HFCS such a “sweet deal” for the food industry since we like sweet things, adding it to our food increases the amount we eat.

  Lately the companies that make HFCS have been fighting back. Their trade group, the Corn Refiners Association, has been running ads on television and in newspaper suggesting that corn syrup has been unfairly criticized, and that it is no worse for us than sugar. They may be right about that, but the problem with HFCS is not that it is worse for us than sugar, but that it is everywhere in the food supply—in products that never used to be sweetened at all.

  Read the food labels in your kitchen and you’ll find that HFCS is everywhere. It’s not just in our soft drinks and snack foods, but in the ketchup and mustard, the breads and cereals, the relishes and crackers, the hot dogs and hams.

  But it is in soft drinks that we consume most of our fifty-eight pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. We can trace this back to the year 1980—an important year in the history of corn. That was the year corn first became an ingredient in Coca-Cola. By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched over entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Why? Because HFCS was a few cents cheaper than sugar and consumers couldn’t taste the difference.

  The soft drink makers could have just switched one sugar for another. That would not have led us to drink more. But that wasn’t all they did. They began to increase the size of a bottle of soda.

  HFCS was so cheap that Pepsi and Coke could have cut the price of each bottle they sold. But they had a much better idea: They would supersize their sodas. Since corn sweetener was now so cheap, why not get people to pay just a few pennies more for a bigger bottle? Drop the price per ounce, but sell a lot more ounces.

  Did you ever see an old-fashioned Coke bottle, from around 1950? It looks tiny, because it only held eight ounces. Today the standard size of a Coke or Pepsi is twenty ounces.

  SUPERSIZE!

  Soda makers don’t deserve credit for the invention of supersizing. That belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. In the 1950s Wallerstein worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas. Movie theaters make most of their profits from their snack counters, not from ticket sales. It was Wallerstein’s job to figure out how to sell more soda and popcorn. Wallerstein tried everything he could think of but found he simply could not get customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish.

  Wallerstein discovered that people would buy more popcorn and soda—a lot more—as long as it came in a single giant serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn and the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp. In 1968, Wallerstein went to work for McDonald’s, but try as he might, he couldn’t convince Ray Kroc, the company’s founder, to try supersizing.

  “If people want more fries,” Kroc told him, “they can buy two bags.” Wallerstein explained that McDonald’s customers wanted more but didn’t want to buy a second bag. “They don’t want to look like gluttons.”

  Finally Kroc gave in and approved supersized portions, and what followed was a dramatic rise in sales. People had been holding back because they didn’t want to seem greedy. Now Wallerstein and McDonald’s had figured out a way to make them feel okay about eating more. After all, it was still just one serving, even if it was twice the size. They had discovered the secret to expanding the (supposedly) fixed human stomach.

  One might think that people would stop eating and drinking these huge portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn’t work that way. Researchers have found that people (and animals) will eat up to 30 percent more if they are given larger portions. Our eating habits were formed over millions of years of evolution. Early humans, who lived by hunting and gathering, didn’t always have enough food. Our bodies tell us to eat more when we have the chance, because hunger might be just around the corner. The problem is that with the mountain of cheap corn, hunger never comes (at least not for most Americans).

  In the same way, our built-in instincts tell us to eat lots of sugar and fat. Humans, like most other warm-blooded creatures, have a built-in sweet tooth. The taste of sweet or fat tells our body we’re eating an energy-rich food. Our instinct is to eat as much as we can, in case we can’t find food tomorrow. Yet in nature we would never find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda. We would never find a piece of animal flesh with as much fat as a chicken nugget.

  You begin to see why processing foods is such a good way of getting people to eat more. The fast-food chains have been able to build foods that push our evolutionary buttons. Huge amounts of sweets and fats fool our instincts and we wind up eating much more than we should. Animal experiments prove this is so. Rats presented with solutions of pure sugar or tubs of pure lard will gorge themselves sick.

  CHEAP FAT

  Surprisingly, the health problems of eating too much hit poor people hardest. That’s because if you count the calories, foods loaded with sugar and fat are the cheapest foods in the market. A recent study showed this was true. In a typical supermarket, one dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies. The same dollar could only buy 250 calories of carrots and other whole vegetables.

  On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar. But a dollar will only buy you 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate. These numbers show why people with limited money to spend on food spend it on the cheapest calories they can find. It makes even more sense when you realize that those cheap calories reward our instincts for fat and sugar.

  King Corn shoved the other plants and animals off the farm. Now it is winning out in the supermarket too. It is so cheap and comes in so many different forms, the other foods just can’t compete.

  As we have seen, it has had a lot of help. The U.S. government (spending taxpayer dollars) helps pay farmers to grow corn and soybeans, but not to grow carrots. That means the government helped pay for your soft drink or cookies, but it won’t help pay for green vegetables. One part of the government puts out food pyramids telling you to eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer sweets. Meanwhile another part of the government is making it cheaper for you to eat more sweets. The government says it wants you to eat healthy, then it makes sure that the cheapest calories in the supermarket are the unhealthiest. Talk about mixed messages!

  The processed food industry has brought us corn in a thousand different forms. It’s given us cheap corn sweeteners and hundreds of extra calories a day. It’s managed to confuse our instincts, to get us to eat more food than we need. All of this is part of a bigger problem, and not a new problem either. It’s the problem of figuring out what we should and shouldn’t eat.

  It boils down to this: As creatures who can eat many different things, how do we know what’s good to eat and what’s not? That’s the omnivore’s dilemma and it’s growing bigger every day.

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  The Omnivore’s Dilemma

  IS THAT FOOD?

  For some animals, there is no dilemma at dinnertime. The koala eats eucalyptus leaves. Period. To the koala, eucalyptus leaves=food. The monarch butterfly only eats milkweed. There’s no choice to make. Everything else in nature is not food.

  The koala gets all the nutrients it needs from eucalyptus leaves. The monarch gets everything it needs from milkweed leaves. But, unlike koalas and monarch butterflies, omnivores not only can eat different foods, we need to eat a variety of foods to sta
y healthy. For example, we need vitamin C, which is only found in plants. But we also need vitamin B-12, which is only found in animals. Ultimately, our omnivore’s dilemma is rooted in our nature as human beings—but we’ve made our choices much harder than they used to be.

  The industrial food chain has brought the world to our supermarkets. Today we can buy just about any sort of food from anywhere in the globe, in any season. We can buy kiwis from New Zealand and grapes from Chile. We can buy fresh tomatoes in the middle of the winter, flown in from Israel or Holland or Mexico. Add that to the thousands of new processed foods—about 17,000 each year—and we have an incredible amount of food choices (even if most of them are made from corn). With all this variety and the constant stream of messages from the food industry and the media, how can we ever make up our minds?

  THE MODERN OMNIVORE

  Over thousands of years, human beings built a culture of food that helped us figure out what to eat and what to avoid. We learned what was safe to eat and what could kill us. We learned how to find and cook local foods. These rules and habits made eating a lot easier. When it was time to eat, people didn’t have to think about it much. They ate what their parents and grandparents had eaten.

  If you lived in Mexico you ate rice, beans, and corn tortillas. If you lived in West Africa you ate cassava, yams, beans, and millet. What you ate also depended on the season. You ate apples in the fall and leafy greens in the spring. In most places people ate small portions of meat, though not at every meal. By following simple rules like these, people solved the omnivore’s dilemma.

  Today, the modern omnivore has almost no culture to fall back on. Standing in our giant supermarkets, we feel more lost than someone standing in a forest ten thousand years ago. We no longer know for sure which foods are good for us and which aren’t. Thanks to the food industry, we don’t even know what it is we’re eating. Sometimes it even seems like we’ve forgotten why we eat.

  Modern Americans have lost the solution to the omnivore’s dilemma and today the problem is bigger than it has ever been. But it’s not an unsolvable problem. We need to recover the skills and knowledge people used to have.

  THE OMNIVORE’S BRAIN

  The first thing we should remember is that our bodies have evolved to help us solve the omnivore’s dilemma. For example, we have different teeth for different jobs. We can bite like a carnivore, or chew like an herbivore, depending on the dish. Our digestive tract is also good at digesting different types of foods.

  The omnivore’s dilemma is one reason our brains are so large. The koala doesn’t need a lot of brainpower to figure out what to eat. As it happens, the koala’s brain is so small it doesn’t even fill up its skull. Zoologists think the koala once ate a more varied diet than it does now. As it evolved toward eating just one food, it didn’t need to think as much. Over generations, unused organs tend to shrink. In other words, as the koala’s diet shrank, so did its brain.

  Humans, on the other hand, need a lot of brainpower to safely choose an omnivore’s diet. We can’t rely on instinct like the koala does. For us, choosing food is a problem that has to be solved with our brains and our senses.

  To help it make food decisions, our brain developed taste preferences. We think of taste as something that helps us to enjoy food, but our sense of taste evolved to help us screen foods. Our tastebuds divide food into two groups: sweet foods that are good to eat and bitter foods that might harm us.

  Sweetness is a sign that a food is a rich source of carbohydrate energy. We don’t have to be taught to like sweet foods—we are born liking them. A sweet tooth is part of our omnivore’s brain. It is an instinct that evolved to help us through times of food shortage. It says: Eat as much of this sweet high-energy food as you can because you never know when you’re going to find some again. This built-in sweet tooth is so strong that we will keep eating sweets even after we are no longer hungry. Our instinct doesn’t realize that in modern times there are always sweet foods available to us. We don’t have to go hunting and gathering to get more—all we have to do is walk to the refrigerator.

  THE BITTER AND THE SWEET

  We are also born with a built-in signal that tells us to stop eating certain foods. That’s the taste we call bitter. Many plant toxins (poisons) are bitter. Avoiding bitter foods is a good way to avoid these toxins. Pregnant women are very sensitive to bitter tastes. This instinct probably developed to protect the developing fetus against even the mild toxins found in foods like broccoli. But this is not a good excuse to stop eating broccoli. It turns out that some of the bitterest plants contain valuable nutrients, even useful medicines. We can’t only rely on our sense of taste when we choose what we eat. (Besides, many people like the taste of broccoli.)

  The bark of the willow tree is extremely bitter, but early humans learned to make tea from it anyway. Why? Because willow bark contains salicylic acid, a pain reliever. (It’s the active ingredient in aspirin.) Our food choices are not just dictated by instinct. We can learn to eat bitter foods if they are good for us. We sometimes even decide that we like them.

  One way we have overcome the bitterness of some plants is by cooking. Acorns are very bitter. But Native Americans figured out a way to turn them into a rich food by grinding, soaking, and roasting them. The roots of the cassava, a plant in Africa, contain the poison cyanide. This keeps most animals from eating them. But once again, humans figured out a way to safely eat cassava, by pounding and then cooking it. And humans had the cassava roots all to themselves, since pigs, porcupines, and other animals wouldn’t touch them.

  Once it was discovered, cooking became one of the most important tools of the human omnivore. Cooking vastly increased the number of plants and animals we could eat. In fact, cooking probably was a turning point in human evolution. Anthropologists think early primates (pre-humans) learned to use fire and cook about 1.9 million years ago. That was around the same time the human brain grew larger and our teeth and jaws grew smaller.

  RATS!

  Rats are also omnivores. But unlike us, rats can’t pass lessons or food habits down to their many, many children. When it comes to the omnivore’s dilemma, each rat is on its own.

  Rats solve the omnivore’s dilemma by testing new food. If a rat finds something new to eat, it will nibble a very tiny bit and wait to see what happens. Most poisons in nature are not that strong. A tiny amount will make the rat sick but not kill it. If the rat doesn’t get sick, then it knows it can eat the whole thing—a knowledge it retains for the rest of its life. This ability to learn is what makes poisoning rats so difficult.

  Luckily, we don’t have to use the rat method for solving the omnivore’s dilemma. And in fact, over thousands of years, people in every corner of the globe built a large body of food knowledge. Through experience, they learned what combinations of local foods made them healthy. They learned which foods to avoid. They learned how to cook and prepare those foods and passed all this knowledge on to their children. You grew up knowing what to eat and how to cook it.

  The culture of food didn’t just solve the omnivore’s dilemma. It was also an important glue that bound people together. It was part of the identity of a tribe or a nation. People hold on to their national foods, even after they move to other countries. Visit any neighborhood where there are immigrants, and you’ll see shops that sell food from the home country—pastas from Italy, kielbasa sausages from Poland, curry spices from India.

  National food cultures are more than just a list of foods. They are a set of manners, customs, and rules that cover everything from the correct size of a serving to the order of dishes served at a meal. Some of these rules have clear health benefits. If you live in Japan and eat raw fish (sushi), then it makes sense to eat it with spicy wasabi. Raw fish can contain bacteria, and wasabi kills bacteria. The people who developed the custom of eating sushi with wasabi didn’t even know there was such a thing as bacteria. But somehow they figured out that eating wasabi kept them healthier.

  People
in Central America cook corn with lime and serve it with beans. It turns out there are important health reasons for doing these things. Corn contains niacin, an important vitamin. The way to unlock the niacin in corn is to cook it with an alkali like lime. And eating corn and beans together supplies all the amino acids humans need.

  FOOD FADS

  We have never had a national food culture in the United States. There’s really no such thing as “American food.” (Fast-food hamburgers don’t count.) We have few rules about what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat. We don’t have any strong food traditions to guide us, so we seek food advice from “experts.” This may be one reason we have so many diet fads in this country.

  One of the earliest of these so-called experts was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that’s the same Kellogg whose name is on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and other cereals. Kellogg was a doctor who ran a “sanitarium,” or health clinic, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Large numbers of wealthy people traveled there and followed Kellogg’s nutty ideas about diet and health. Some of his advice included all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas. (An enema is a cleansing of the bowel in which . . . Oh, never mind.) He followed the enemas with doses of yogurt, applied to York Times Magazine said that carbs make you fat. Suddenly millions of Americans gave up bread and other carbohydrates and started eating mainly meat. Fifty years from now that diet might seem as crazy as Kellogg’s enemas. the digestive tract from both ends. (Half was eaten and the other half was . . . Well, you can figure it out.)