The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  E, and folic acid. These natural chemicals are important for a healthy diet. Animals that eat grass have high levels of these and other important nutrients. (It’s the beta-carotene that gives the Polyface egg yolks their carroty color.)

  Animals raised in pastures have less fat than grain-fed animals. Part of this is because pasture-fed animals get exercise. Not only that, but the kind of fats in pastured animals are the ones that are healthier for us to eat. For example, they have higher levels of polyunsaturated fats instead of monounsaturated fats. They also contain more omega-3s. These are essential fatty acids and they are very important for human health. Among other things, omega-3s are important for the growth of brain cells and other neurons.

  Omega-6 is another fatty acid essential to humans. Our bodies need both of these and they need them in the right balance. (Omega-3s are made in the leaves of plants. Omega-6s are made in the seeds.) There is a lot of evidence that a healthy diet has a pretty even balance of omega-3 and omega-6. And that’s exactly the balance in the meat of wild animals. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Human beings evolved to survive and be healthy on a diet of wild meat and plants.

  Now go one step further. The meat of grass-fed cows also has the same healthy balance of omega-3 and omega-6. Why? Because grass-fed cows are eating the same diet as their wild ancestors.

  It turns out that corn-fed cows don’t have the healthy balance of omegas. Their meat has a ratio of about 14 omega-6 to 1 omega-3. Some scientists think this imbalance might help explain the high levels of heart disease in our society. In other words, it’s not eating meat so much as eating corn-fed meat that is bad for us.

  The point is that all beef is not the same. All salmon is not the same. All eggs are not created equal. The type of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten.

  Once shoppers know this, they begin to look at food costs differently. Polyface Farm’s eggs at $2.20 a dozen might be a better deal than supermarket eggs at $0.79 a dozen. Polyface grass-fed chickens produce eggs with more omega-3s, beta-carotene, and vitamin E. And they do it in a way that’s better for the environment. Doesn’t that sound like a bargain?

  THE MEAL

  Okay, so a pastured chicken might be better for you, but how different does it actually taste? It certainly smelled wonderful when I raised the lid on the barbecue to put the corn on. The chicken was browning nicely, the skin beginning to crisp and take on the toasty tones of oiled wood. The corn, on which I’d rubbed some olive oil and sprinkled salt and pepper, would take only a few minutes. All it needed was to heat up and for a scattering of kernels to brown.

  While the corn finished roasting, I removed the chicken from the grill and set it aside to rest. A few minutes later I called everyone to the table. Ordinarily I might have felt a little funny hosting a dinner in someone else’s home. But Mark and Liz are such close friends, it seemed perfectly natural to be cooking for them. That’s not to say I didn’t feel the cook’s usual worries about whether everything would come out right. Liz is a great cook too, so I was anxious to measure up.

  I passed the platters of chicken and corn and proposed a toast. I offered thanks first to my hosts (who were also my guests) and then to Joel Salatin and his family for growing the food before us (and for giving it to us), and then finally to the chickens, who in one way or another had provided just about everything we were about to eat. This was my non-religious version of grace, I suppose.

  We dug in and, as usually happens during a good meal, there was little talking at first, just a few murmurs of satisfaction. I don’t mind saying the chicken was out of this world. The skin had turned the color of mahogany and the texture of parchment. The meat itself was moist, dense, and almost shockingly flavorful. I could taste the brine and apple wood, of course. But even more important, the chicken held its own against those strong flavors. This may not sound like much of a compliment, but to me the chicken smelled and tasted exactly like chicken. Liz agreed, saying it was a more “chick eny” chicken. What accounted for it? I know what Joel would have said: When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens too.

  GRASS-FED MAGIC

  Everyone was curious to hear about the farm, especially after tasting the food that had come off it. Liz and Mark’s older son, Matthew, who is fifteen, asked a lot of questions about killing chickens. (He’s currently a vegetarian and would only eat the corn.) I didn’t think it was wise to go into detail at the dinner table. But I did talk about my week on the farm, about the Salatins and their animals. I explained the circle of chickens and cows and pigs and grass. I managed to avoid the details of manure and grubs and composted guts.

  Slowly the conversation drifted off from my adventures as a farmhand. We talked about Willie’s songwriting (he is, mark my words, the next Bob Dylan), Matthew’s summer football camp, Mark’s and Liz’s writing, school, politics, the war in Iraq, and on and on. Being a Friday late in June, this was one of the longest evenings of the year, so no one felt in a rush to finish. Besides, I’d just put the soufflé in to bake when we sat down, so dessert was still a ways off.

  While we talked and waited for the soufflé to complete its magic rise, the smell of baking chocolate seeped out of the kitchen and filled the house. Though I had avoided talking about it, my mind went to the long chain from manure to grass to cow to grubs to chicken to eggs. The chain didn’t stop there, for I had turned the eggs into something else—at least I hoped I had. When at last I told Willie the time had come to open the oven and cross your fingers, I saw his smile blossom first, then the great crown of soufflé puffing out from the cinched white waist of its dish. Triumph!

  There’s something amazing about any soufflé, how a half dozen eggs flavored by nothing more than sugar and chocolate can turn into something so air-like. (Soufflé, “to blow,” comes from the Latin word for breath. When done right, it’s more like a breath of food, rather than something solid.) This particular soufflé was good, not great. Its texture was slightly grainier than it should have been, which makes me think I may have beaten the whites a little too long. But it tasted wonderful, everyone agreed, and as I rolled the rich yet weightless confection on my tongue, I closed my eyes and suddenly there they were: Joel’s hens, marching down the gangplank from out of their Eggmobile, fanning out across the early-morning pasture, there in the grass where this magical bite began.

  PART IV

  The Do-It-Yourself Meal: Hunted, Gathered, and Gardened Food

  18

  The Forest

  SURVIVOR: FOOD

  There was one more meal I wanted to make. It was the meal at the end of the shortest food chain of all. What I had in mind was a dinner made entirely from foods I had hunted, gathered, and grown myself. Now, there are some people in the world (not many anymore) who make that sort of meal three times a day. I am not one of them.

  The growing part was the only part I knew I could handle. I’ve been a gardener most of my life, and have made countless meals from my garden. That left hunting and gathering.

  I had never hunted in my life. Indeed, I had never fired a gun. (Unless you count cap pistols.) I’ve always thought of myself as pretty clumsy. Walking around with a loaded gun never seemed like a good idea.

  Thanks to my mother, I did have some childhood experience as a gatherer. During the summer she would take us to the beach at low tide to dig for clams. We’d walk along the sand, looking for the airholes the clams made. Then we’d dig them up, until they squirted us in self-defense. At the end of summer we would pick beach plums that she would make into a delicious jelly the color of rubies. All winter long her beach plum jelly brought back memories of summer vacation: August on toast.

  What I most remember from these early foraging (food-gathering) trips were the scary warnings from my mother. Some mushrooms and berries have poisons in them, and she made sure I knew exactly how terrible it would be to eat one of them. When she was done I thought eating wild mushrooms
was as dangerous as touching a downed power line. As a result I only gathered fruits I absolutely knew, like blueberries. And I never, ever touched a wild mushroom.

  But I was determined to have wild mushrooms on the menu of my do-it-yourself meal. I think that’s because mushroom hunting seems to be a perfect example of the omnivore’s dilemma. Is that mushroom good food or is it poison? I’d have to learn to tell the difference.

  THE FIRST FOOD CHAIN

  Why go to all this trouble? It’s not as though we can bring back hunting and gathering as a way of life for most people. There’s just not enough wild game and fruit to feed everyone. Of course, if we did go back to that way of life, some of us might really enjoy it. Ancient hunter-gatherers worked much less than modern-day humans. It took them about seventeen hours a week to hunt and gather enough food for them and their families. Compare that to the forty-hour (or more) workweek we have today. And you’ll be surprised to learn that hunter-gatherers ate better, grew taller, lived longer, and were healthier than “civilized” people. It’s only in the last century that modern society has been able to match the health of its hunter-gatherer ancestors.

  But whether we’d like it or not, we are clearly not returning to those days. So why did I want to make this last meal? Because it was as close as I could get to the original food chain, the way people fed themselves for the tens of thousands of years before agriculture. It is the food chain we evolved to be part of. I thought this meal might take me back to a time when the omnivore’s dilemma wasn’t as complicated, when we had a more direct connection with our food. It would give me a chance to look at the omnivore’s dilemma in a new (or rather old) light.

  It has often struck me that even though modern Americans don’t ever need to grow, hunt, or gather our own food, a lot of us still do. We garden, we hunt, we pick wild mushrooms or berries. Even if all you can do is grow a few tomatoes in your backyard (and even if those tomatoes end up costing twice as much as the ones you can buy in the supermarket), you do it anyway. Why? I think it’s an effort to be connected once again to our food. We don’t want to be passive consumers, sitting at the end of a food chain and eating what we are served. My meal would be an extreme experiment in being an active and conscious eater.

  I had been part of three different food systems—industrial, industrial organic, and beyond organic. Now I was going to be the food system. There would be nothing between me and my food, from start to finish.

  POLLAN THE HUNTER

  I have to confess that there was more behind my desire to go hunting. Hunting is one of those skills that the all-American boy is supposed to have. (At least in some parts of the country.) Even the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau said so. “We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,” he wrote in his famous book Walden. This idea had always annoyed me. Was I less of a boy (or man) because I had never been hunting?

  Now I was finally going to hunt. Yet deciding to hunt was one thing; doing it was another. How was I going to learn to fire a gun, let alone hunt? Did I need a license? What if I actually managed to kill something—then what? How do you “dress” an animal you’ve killed? (Dress is the word used to skin and gut an animal. A pretty weird choice of words when you think about it.) And what about those killer wild mushrooms? Would I be able to learn enough to overcome my fear of eating them?

  What I badly needed, I realized, was a kind of hunter-gatherer tutor. I needed someone skilled in the arts of hunting and gathering who also knew a lot about the animals, plants, and fungi of northern California. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that. On the eve of this experiment I had just moved to northern California, far away from the New England woods and fields I knew. I was going to have to learn to hunt and gather and garden on what amounted to a different planet, full of animals and plants I didn’t know. What did people hunt here, anyway, and when did they hunt it? What time of year do the mushrooms mushroom around here, and where? I had a lot to learn.

  MY FORAGING GUIDE

  As luck would have it, a perfect tutor appeared in my life at exactly the right moment. Angelo Garro is a stout, burly Italian with a five-day beard, sleepy brown eyes, and a passion about getting and preparing food. Shortly after we moved to California, I started running into Angelo.

  We’d be invited to a dinner party and there would be Angelo among the guests. Only unlike the other guests, Angelo always had some story to tell about the meal. Maybe he’d gotten the halibut from a fishing boat that morning. Or he’d picked the fennel along the highway on the drive over. Or he’d made the wine or the ham himself. And unlike the other guests, Angelo always wound up in the kitchen cooking the dinner or passing platters of his famous fennel cakes. Meanwhile he would explain the proper way to make pasta or salami or balsamic vinegar. (Hint: For the last one, you need at least ten or twelve years and the right kind of barrels.) The guy was a one-man traveling Food Network.

  Angelo Garro with a chanterelle.

  After a few of these dinners, I began to piece together Angelo’s story. He’s a fifty-eight-year-old Sicilian who left home at eighteen, following a girl to Canada. Twenty years later he followed a different girl to San Francisco, where he has lived ever since. He makes his living forging wrought iron items like garden gates and fences, railings, stairs, and fireplace tools. He lives in a forge that has been a blacksmith shop since the time of the California Gold Rush in 1849. Yet his consuming passion is food. He seems driven to recapture the flavors of his childhood back in Sicily. A successful dish, he will say, is one that “tastes like my mother.”

  Several months after I met Angelo he appeared again, this time, strangely enough, on my car radio. He was being interviewed on public radio for a story about foraging. The reporter followed Angelo on a porcini mushroom hunt and then into a duck blind at dawn. While he waited for the sun and the ducks to rise, Angelo spoke in a whisper about his past and his passions. “In Sicily I could tell by the smell what time of the year it was,” he said. “Orange season, oranges, persimmons, olives, and olive oil.

  “I have the passions of foraging, passion of hunting, opera, my work,” he told the reporter. “I have the passion of cooking, pickling, curing salamis, sausage, making wine in the fall. This is my life. I do this with my friends. It’s to my heart.”

  Even before the radio segment ended I knew I had found my guide. The next time I bumped into Angelo I asked him if I could tag along on his next foraging trip. “Sure, okay, we go hunt chanterelle in Sonoma. I call you when it’s time.” Feeling bolder, I asked about going hunting too. “Okay, we could hunt one day, maybe some duck, maybe the pig, but first you need license and learn to shoot.”

  The pig? Clearly there was even more to learn than I had thought.

  HUNTING FOR DUMMIES

  It took me a couple of months to sort out the rules for getting a hunter’s license. They involved taking a hunter education course and taking a test. It seems they’ll sell a high-powered rifle to just about anybody in California, but it’s against the law to aim the thing at an animal without a fourteen-hour class and a multiple-choice exam. The next class was on a Saturday two months off.

  Once I knew I would be going hunting and gathering, something strange happened. I started looking for food everywhere I went. Suddenly a walk in the woods wasn’t just a walk. It was now a search for supper. Woody Allen once said as a joke that “nature is an enormous restaurant.” Maybe he was right.

  I started dividing everything I saw into two groups. Some things were probably good to eat. Others were not. Of course, in most cases I had no real idea which was which. Still, I began to notice things. I noticed the soft yellow globes of chamomile flowers on the path I hiked most afternoons. They’re used to make chamomile tea. I spotted clumps of miner’s lettuce off in the shade. That’s a tasty green I had once grown in my Connecticut garden. And there was wild mustard, another green, growing out in the sun. There were blackberries in flower. I even saw some wild birds that were good to eat: a few quail, a pair of dov
es. I began looking at field guides to help me identify all the different unfamiliar species.

  Okay, maybe I went a little overboard. You don’t really want to turn nature into a big restaurant. But looking for food did change the way I looked at nature. It made me look more closely at everything. It made me pay attention in a way I hadn’t in years.

  THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, PART II

  Hiking in the Berkeley hills one afternoon in January I followed the path into a grove of big oaks. I was looking for chanterelle mushrooms. I knew that they grew around old live oak trees. The problem was that up until now, I’d only seen a chanterelle over pasta or in the market. Would I be able to recognize a wild one?

  I knew I was looking for a yellowish-orange, thick trumpet shape. I carefully scanned the fallen leaves around a couple of oaks, hoping to spot one. Nothing. After a while I decided to give up. Then I noticed something bright and yellow pushing up through the carpet of leaves. It was not two feet from where I’d just stepped. I brushed away the leaves and there it was, this big, fleshy, vase-shaped mushroom that I was dead certain had to be a chanterelle.

  Or was it?

  Was I really dead certain?

  I took the mushroom home, brushed off the soil, and put it on a plate. Then I pulled out my field guides. Inside one I found a picture and a description. Everything matched the mushroom on my plate. The color was right. So were the shape, the smell, and the markings on the underside. I felt fairly confident this was a chanterelle. But confident enough to eat it? Not quite. The field guide said there was something called a “false chanterelle.” It looked roughly the same as the real one. Uh-oh.