The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  If you include all the farmland growing fruits and vegetables for Earthbound it comes to a total of 25,000 organic acres. The Goodmans estimate that this has eliminated some 270,000 pounds of pesticide and 8 million pounds of petrochemical fertilizer that would otherwise have been applied to those fields.

  THE SALAD FACTORY

  The Earthbound Farm land looks like a giant patchwork of color: dark green, burgundy, pale green, blue green. Each color block is a different type of lettuce.

  The lettuce is grown in raised beds. Each bed is eighty inches wide, and smooth and flat as a tabletop. Workers use a laser to make sure they are perfectly level. That’s so that the custom-built harvester can snip each leaf at precisely the same point.

  Earthbound Farm’s lettuce-washing assembly line in San Juan Bautista, California.

  To control pests, one out of every seven beds is planted with flowers. The flowers attract lacewings and a type of fly that eats the lettuce-eating bugs. Pesticides, even the ones allowed by the USDA organic rules, are seldom sprayed.

  The leaves are harvested with a machine that Earthbound designed. It moves down the rows, cutting the baby greens at the same point just above the crown. Spidery arms gently rake through the bed in advance of the blade, scaring off any mice that might find their way into the salad. The leaves are blown into plastic trays and the trays are loaded by hand into refrigerator trucks. From that point they will be refrigerated until they reach your supermarket.

  Once filled, the trucks deliver their cargo of leaves to a processing plant. There the leaves are sorted, mixed, washed, dried, and packaged. The whole plant is kept at thirty-six degrees. Because of the refrigeration, the employees, most of them Mexicans, are dressed in full-length down coats. The plant washes and packs 2.5 million pounds of lettuce a week. That’s a truly amazing amount of lettuce.

  It also represents a truly amazing amount of energy. Think of the electricity bill to refrigerate a 200,000-square-foot plant. Think of the diesel fuel needed to truck all that salad to supermarkets across the country or to manufacture the plastic containers it’s packed in. A one-pound box of pre-washed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. Growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food.

  What could be more healthy than eating a salad? It’s basically a bunch of leaves, eaten raw. And organic salad has to be even better, right? Still, the idea of packing lettuce in plastic boxes and shipping it five days and three thousand miles away didn’t feel very organic to me.

  Like Gene Kahn, Drew and Myra Goodman make no apologies for the way they do business. Their company has done a world of good, for its land, its workers, the growers it works with, and its customers. But is this kind of organic the best we can do? Before I could make up my mind, I had to visit one more industrial organic farm. I was on my way to meet Rosie, the organic chicken.

  11

  More Big Organic

  MEET ROSIE, THE FREE-RANGE CHICKEN

  I visited Rosie the free-range organic chicken at her farm in Petaluma. Of course, this wasn’t the same Rosie as the chicken I had bought at my Whole Foods market. Rosie is the brand name for a type of chicken raised by Petaluma Poultry. Like Earthbound Farm, Petaluma Poultry is a large industrial organic company.

  When I got to Petaluma, I looked for a pretty little red barn, a cornfield, and farmhouse, like the ones on the Petaluma package. By now you’ll have guessed that I couldn’t find it. Petaluma turns out to be more animal factory than farm. Rosie lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies. Ah, you ask, what about the “free-range” words on Rosie’s label? Doesn’t that mean they can “freely range” outside? Not exactly. It’s true there’s a little door in each shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But here’s the catch: The door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five weeks old. By that time they are so used to the shed that none of them go outside. And then all of them are slaughtered two weeks later.

  Rosie chickens like this one spend their lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies.

  Rosie and all the other chickens raised at Petaluma are the same breed: Cornish Cross broilers. The Cornish Cross is a type of chicken bred for the industrial food chain. It is the fastest-growing chicken ever, turning corn into meat faster than any other bird. They go from egg to full size in just seven weeks. In fact, the birds grow so rapidly that their poor legs cannot keep up. Often, by seven weeks, Rosie can no longer walk.

  Organic or not, factory farms typically keep at least 20,000 broiler chickens in huge sheds such as this one.

  IT’S A BIRD’S LIFE

  The folks at Petaluma gave me a tour of the fully automated processing plant. The machinery there can turn a chicken from a clucking, feathered bird into a shrink-wrapped pack of parts in just ten minutes. After the tour the head of marketing drove me out to the chicken houses.

  The sheds look more like a military barracks than a barn. They are long, low buildings with giant fans at either end. To go inside I had to put on a white hooded suit. Since the birds receive no antibiotics and they are all genetically alike, if one gets sick, they will all get sick. An infection could kill 20,000 birds overnight.

  Twenty thousand is a lot of chickens. Inside the shed they formed a moving white carpet that stretched nearly the length of a football field. The air was warm and humid and smelled powerfully of ammonia from their droppings. The fumes caught in my throat.

  Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good. They get a few more square inches of living space per bird. (It was hard to see how they could be packed together much more tightly.) Because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to speed growth, they get to live a few days longer.

  I stepped back outside into the fresh air, grateful to escape the humidity and smell. Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide. USDA rules say an organic chicken should have “access to the outdoors.” But as I’ve said, the birds never go outside, even when the doors are opened. This is no accident. The last thing Petaluma wants is for these birds to go outside and catch a cold.

  MY ORGANIC INDUSTRIAL MEAL

  After visiting Cascadian, Earthbound, and Petaluma, I decided it was time to make my industrial organic food chain meal. (There isn’t any organic fast-food restaurant chain to visit, at least not yet.) I planned a simple Sunday night dinner and bought the food at my local Whole Foods supermarket.

  I’d prepare roast chicken (Rosie) with roasted vegetables: yellow potatoes, purple kale, and red winter squash. All but one of them was grown by a company called Cal-Organic Farms. They pretty much share the organic vegetable market with Earthbound. On the side would be steamed asparagus and a spring mix salad from Earthbound Farm. Dessert would be even simpler: organic ice cream from Stonyfield Farm topped with fresh organic blackberries from Mexico.

  I also bought one of those Cascadian Farm organic TV dinners. I had a hunch it probably wasn’t quite ready for prime time (or at least for my wife). So I ate it myself for lunch, right in its microwaveable plastic bowl. Five minutes on high and it was good to go. As I peeled back the film from the bowl, I felt a little like a flight attendant serving meals. Indeed, the meal looked and tasted very much like airline food.

  To be fair, one shouldn’t compare an organic TV dinner to real food but to a conventional TV dinner, and by that standard Cascadian Farm has nothing to be ashamed of. Still, the chunks of white meat chicken had only a faint chicken taste. That probably came from the “natural chicken flavor” mentioned on the box. The “creamy rosemary dill sauce” was made without cream or milk. I’m betting it got its creaminess from xanthan gum or some other additive.

  AIRLIFT ASPARAGUS

  The dinner went much better, if I don’t mind saying so myself. I roasted the bird in a pan surrounded by the p
otatoes and chunks of winter squash. After removing the chicken from the oven, I spread the crinkled leaves of kale on a cookie sheet, sprinkled them with olive oil and salt, and slid them into the hot oven to roast. After ten minutes or so, the kale was nicely crisped and the chicken was ready to carve.

  The one vegetable I cooked that wasn’t grown by Cal-Organic or Earthbound was the asparagus. It had been grown in Argentina. It had been picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north and put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, and steamed, by me, Sunday night.

  Source: USDA Economic Research Service

  That one bundle of asparagus presented its own little dilemma. How much fossil fuel was burned to keep it refrigerated and fly it to the U.S.? Should farmland in South America be used to grow expensive food for well-off North Americans? Should we even try to eat asparagus (or any vegetable) out of season?

  Yet there are good arguments on the other side. My purchase helps the economy of Argentina. It also keeps some of that country’s land free from pesticides or chemical fertilizer. This was all a lot of baggage for a few spears of asparagus to carry, I admit.

  So how did it taste?

  My jet-setting Argentine asparagus tasted like damp cardboard. After the first spear or two no one touched it. All the other vegetables and greens were much tastier—really good, in fact. Of course, we live in California, so they didn’t have far to travel to our table. Whether they would have been quite so sweet and bright after a cross-country truck ride is doubtful.

  I have to admit that the Earthbound greens, in their plastic bag, stayed crisp right up to the expiration date, a full eighteen days after leaving the field. This is partly due to the space-age technology used to pack them. But as the Goodmans had explained to me, organic greens just last longer. Since they’re not pumped up on synthetic nitrogen, the cells of organic leaves grow more slowly. These slower-growing leaves develop thicker walls and take up less water, helping them stay fresher longer.

  IS ORGANIC BETTER FOR YOU?

  My industrial organic dinner certainly wasn’t cheap, considering I made it from scratch. Rosie cost $15 ($2.99 a pound), the vegetables another $12 (thanks to that six-buck bunch of asparagus), and the dessert $7 (including $3 for a six-ounce box of blackberries). That comes to $34 to feed a family of three at home. (Though we did make a second meal from the leftovers.) That’s a hefty price compared to the same meal from the industrial food chain. So why buy organic anyway? Is the extra cost worth it? What exactly are you paying for?

  Does organic food taste better? I think the answer is probably, but not always. A freshly picked non-organic vegetable is bound to taste better than one that’s been riding in a truck for three days. On the other hand, organic Rosie was a tasty bird, with more flavor than mass-market birds fed on a diet of antibiotics and animal by-products. Those “unnatural” feeds make chickens with mushier and blander meat.

  Okay, so organic food sometimes tastes better. But is it better for you? I think the answer to this is also yes, but I can’t prove it scientifically.

  I know the dinner I prepared contained little or no pesticides. Those chemicals have been proven to cause cancer, damage nerve cells, and disrupt your endocrine system—your hormones. These poisons are routinely found in non-organic produce and meat. Yet I can’t prove that the low levels of these poisons in food are enough to make you sick. The government says the levels are low enough that our systems can “tolerate” them.

  Very little research has been done to determine the effects of low levels of these poisons. One problem is that the official tolerance levels are set for adults, not children. Since children are smaller and still growing, the danger for them is greater than for adults. Given what we do know about the dangers of these chemicals, it makes sense to keep them out of a kid’s diet.

  It was important to me that the organic ice cream came from cows that did not receive injections of growth hormone to boost their productivity. We don’t know if these hormones are affecting kids who drink non-organic milk, but again, I think it’s better to avoid them. Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. The tiniest amount of this chemical (0.1 part per billion) has been shown to change the sex of frogs. There’s been no study to show what it does to children.

  So it seems to me I have two choices: I can wait for that study to be done or I can decide that it’s better to be safe than sorry and buy foods without atrazine. As you may recall from chapter four, although the U.S. government allows atrazine spraying, the chemical is already banned in Europe.

  IS IT HEALTH FOOD?

  Okay, getting rid of poisons is a no-brainer. But there’s still another question about organic food. Is it healthier for you? Does it contain more nutrients—vitamins, minerals, and natural substances—that our bodies need to stay healthy?

  As far as the USDA is concerned, all carrots are created equal, organic and non-organic. Yet there is some real evidence that this is not so. In 2003, a study by University of California, Davis, researchers studied two crops of corn, strawberries, and blackberries. The plants were identical and grown in side-by-side plots. One set of plants was grown using organic methods. The other set was grown conventionally with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides.

  The study showed that the organic fruits and vegetables contained higher levels of vitamin C. They also had a wider range of natural chemicals called polyphenols. Polyphenols are a group of chemicals made by plants that seem to play an important role in human health. Some help prevent or fight cancer; others fight infections. You may have seen one of these polyphenols advertised on your ketchup bottle—one called lycopene. There are many others.

  Why in the world should organically grown blackberries or corn contain more of these polyphenols? These compounds help plants to defend themselves against pests and diseases. Perhaps plants that are sprayed with man-made pesticides don’t bother to produce much of their own.

  The soils in industrial farms are often lifeless. Perhaps these dead soils don’t supply all the raw ingredients plants need to make polyphenols. Artificial fertilizer may be enough to get plants to grow, yet still may not give a plant everything it needs to make enough lycopene or resveratrol (another one of the polyphenols).

  Here is what we do know. We have evolved over millions of years eating plants that today we would call “natural” or “organic.” Those plants, growing in complex, living soils, produced polyphenols to protect themselves from pests and disease. Our bodies evolved to use those same compounds to protect us from disease. Yet in the last fifty years we have built a food system that strips many of those healthy compounds out of our foods.

  Who knows what other healthy substances are in plants that we have yet to discover? The industrial food chain breaks all food down into a few simple elements. But what if our bodies need more than that? The evidence is starting to come in that this is the case.

  EATING OIL

  I hope I’ve made it clear that I think organic industrial food is a big improvement over the non-organic food chain. To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker’s bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were wasted, no government subsidy checks were written. And yet . . .

  The wages and working conditions of the farmworkers in an organic field aren’t much different from those on non-organic factory farms. “Organic” factory farm chickens live only slightly better lives than non-organic factory chickens. In the end a CAFO is a CAFO, whether the cattle are fed organic corn or not. An organic label does not guarantee that cattle have spent any time in a real pasture, any more than “free-range” chickens really range freely.

  To top it off, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as a non-organic meal. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberri
es trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked to the moment I walk it out the doors of my supermarket. That takes a lot of energy and a lot of fossil fuel. Organic farmers generally use less fuel to grow their crops. Yet most of the fuel burned by the food industry isn’t used to grow food. Almost 80 percent of the fuel burned is used to process food and move it around. This is just as true for an organic bag of lettuce as a non-organic one.

  The original organic food movement thought organic farming should be sustainable. That means it should be, as much as possible, a closed loop, recycling fertility and using renewable energy. The industrial organic food chain is anything but a closed, renewable loop. The food in our organic meal had floated to us on a sea of petroleum just as surely as the corn-based meal we’d had from McDonald’s.

  Well, at least we didn’t eat it in the car.

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF FOOD CHAIN

  But I wasn’t done searching for more responsible food. As part of my research I kept hearing about this incredible farmer in Virginia. His name was Joel Salatin and he and his family ran a 500-acre spread called Polyface Farm near the town of Swoope. So I gave him a call. I wanted to interview him and I also wanted him to ship me some of his food so I could taste it myself. Well, I got my interview, but Salatin said he couldn’t ship me any chicken or steak. I figured he meant he wasn’t set up for shipping, so I offered him my FedEx account number.