The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  He clapped me on the back. “Your first pig! Look at the size of it. And with a perfect shot, right in the head. You did it!”

  Did I do it? Was that really my shot? I had my doubts. Yet Angelo insisted—he had fired at a different pig, a black one. “No, this is your pig, Michael, you killed it, there’s no doubt in my mind. You got yourself a big one. That’s some very nice prosciutto!”

  I wasn’t ready to see it as meat, though. What I saw was a dead wild animal, its head lying on the dirt in a widening circle of blood. I kneeled down and pressed the palm of my hand against the pig’s belly above the nipples. Beneath the dusty, bristly skin I felt her warmth, but no heartbeat.

  I was overcome with a strong mix of emotions. The first was a powerful feeling of pride: I had actually done what I’d set out to do. I had successfully shot a pig. I felt a flood of relief too, that the deed was done, thank God, and didn’t need to be done again.

  And then there was this wholly unexpected feeling of thankfulness. For my good fortune, I guess, and to Angelo, of course, but also to this animal, for stepping over the crest of that hill and into my sight, to become what Angelo kept calling her: your pig. I felt it wasn’t my skill that had brought me this animal. It was a gift—from whom or what, I couldn’t say—and thankfulness is what I felt.

  There was one emotion I expected to feel but did not. I felt no sorrow or remorse. Those would come later. But at that moment, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific—completely happy. Angelo wanted to take my picture, so he posed me behind my pig, one hand cradling the rifle across my chest, the other resting on the animal. I thought I should look serious for the picture, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

  FROM ANIMAL TO MEAT

  Angelo posing with my pig after hanging it from the limb of an oak to be gutted and skinned.

  Angelo made a cut across the pig’s belly and pulled the skin loose. The inside-out skin looked like a sweater coming off.

  The happy excitement didn’t last. Less than an hour later I was hugging the pig’s carcass as it hung from the limb of an oak. My job was to hold it steady while Angelo reached in and pulled out the guts. We had used a block and tackle and two hooks to raise the pig by its rear ankles. A scale attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190 pounds. The pig weighed exactly as much as I did.

  Dressing the pig meant getting much closer to it than I really wanted. Angelo made a shallow cut across the pig’s belly and began to gently work the hide loose. I held down a narrow flap of skin while he cut into the fat behind it, leaving as much of the creamy white layer as possible. “This is really good fat,” Angelo explained, “for the salami.” The flap of skin grew larger as we worked our way down the body and then slowly pulled it down over the pig’s shoulders. The inside-out skin looked like a sweater coming off. What hunters call dressing an animal is really an undressing.

  As we drew the skin down over the rib cage it exposed the bullet, or what remained of the bullet. It had passed through the animal and torn a ragged slot in the last rib, where it came to rest just beneath the hide. “Here’s a souvenir for you,” Angelo said, pulling the bloody, mangled chunk of metal from the bone like a tooth and handing it to me.

  Using a short knife, Angelo made another shallow cut the length of the animal’s belly. He talked while he worked, mostly about the dishes he could make from the different parts of the pig. I could not believe Angelo was still talking about food. The pig was splayed open now. I could see all its organs: the bluish intestine and the spongy pink pair of lungs. I’d handled plenty of chicken guts on Joel’s farm, but this was different and more disturbing. That was probably because the pig’s internal organs looked exactly like human organs.

  I held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the liver (“for a nice pâté”). He cut it free and dropped it into a Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled, and the rest of the guts tumbled out onto the ground in a heap. There was a stench so awful it made me gag. It was a mix of pig manure and piss with an odor of death. I felt a wave of sickness begin to build in my gut. I still had my arms wrapped around the pig from behind, but I told Angelo I wanted to take a picture. What I really wanted was a breath of fresh air.

  THE JOY OF HUNTING

  The disgust I felt was so strong I wondered how I could ever eat this animal now. How could I serve it to my friends? Some of the disgust I felt made sense. After all, part of the stench was from the waste in the pig’s intestines. But it was more than that. When we kill an animal, especially a big mammal like a pig, it can’t help reminding us of our own death. The line between their bodies and ours, between their deaths and ours, is not very sharp.

  I recovered from my disgust enough to help Angelo finish dressing my pig. Yet the emotions did not go away. They really hit me late that evening. Back at home, I opened my e-mail and saw that Angelo had sent me some pictures under the subject heading Look the great hunter! I was eager to open them, excited to show my family my pig. (It was hanging in Angelo’s walk-in cooler.)

  Angelo’s walk-in cooler packed full of foraged mushrooms and curing meat.

  The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater is kneeling on the ground behind a pig. From the pig’s head comes a narrow river of blood, spreading out toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest. One hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with a broad, happy grin.

  I looked from the dead, bloody pig to the big, happy grin on the man’s face—my face. Then I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could.

  What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? What was I so damned proud of, anyway? Suddenly I felt ashamed.

  I had set out to do something new and difficult for me. I had messed up the first time I tried it. Now I had succeeded and it made complete sense that I would feel relief and pride. I was okay with that. But was it okay to feel joy over another creature’s death?

  I was confronted with yet another dilemma. What exactly is the joy of hunting? I know what made me feel good when I was out in the woods. I enjoyed feeling totally alive and a part of nature. I enjoyed discovering new abilities that I didn’t know I had. I enjoyed succeeding in my difficult task.

  However, I also knew what made me feel bad about hunting. No matter how I looked at it, I felt regret about killing that pig. The animal is at once different from me and yet as a living creature it is in some ways the same. Maybe this is an important part of hunting too. Hunters ought to be aware of the seriousness of what they are doing and never treat it lightly.

  THINGS AS THEY ARE

  I went hunting to kill a pig and turn it into meat. But I realized I was looking for more than that. When I started my journey down the food chains of our society, I wanted to look at things as they really are. I did not want to look away from the reality. The hardest thing had been looking at where our meat comes from. Now I had seen it as up close and personal as you can get. There was no industrial or organic food chain here. It was just me and my food.

  There was one other picture Angelo sent me. I didn’t look at it until some time later. This was the picture I took of Angelo cleaning my pig when I needed to break away. It’s a simple snapshot of the pig hanging from the tree. You can see in that one frame the animal and the butcher and the oak tree against the sun-filled sky and the pig-plowed earth. In that single picture you could see an entire food chain. There is the oak tree standing in the sun. On the ground are the acorns the tree made with the sunlight. There is the pig that ate the acorns, and the man preparing the pig to be eaten.

  I had started out to see exactly where our food came from and now I had. The man in that photo did not create that food chain, he is just a part of it. Just as the tree took in the sunlight and the pig ate the acorns, the man is taking his nourishment from that na
tural cycle. In the end, whatever we think or feel, triumph or shame, that is the way it is.

  21

  Gathering

  THE FUNGI

  To make my hunter-gatherer meal, I needed not only hunting skills, but gathering skills as well. Since my menu included mushrooms, I would need to learn yet another set of skills and join yet another club, the semi-secret society of wild mushroomers. I found that club even more difficult to join than the club of hunters. Luckily, Angelo was once again going to be my guide.

  At first glance, mushroom hunting looks easy. You just go through the forest happily picking mushrooms, kind of like picking tomatoes in the garden. The only difference is you didn’t have to plant, water, fertilize, and weed the mushrooms. They just grew all by themselves. Easy, right?

  Not so easy, as I was about to discover. For starters, I’ve never gotten lost in a garden. It is surprisingly easy to get lost when you’re deep in the woods with your head down, looking for wild mushrooms. Also in the garden, you know where the vegetables are growing. Mushrooms hide from you.

  And of course, there’s the whole poison thing. I have never once worried that a cucumber I grew from seed would kill me if I ate it. But picking and eating the wrong mushroom can get you killed. Mushrooms, you soon discover, are wild things in every way. That’s why people who go looking for them call it mushroom hunting—not harvesting.

  THE MUSHROOM HUNTER

  It was a Sunday morning in late January when I got the call from Angelo.

  “The chanterelles are up,” he announced.

  “How do you know? Have you been out looking?”

  “No, not yet. But it’s been three weeks since the big rains. They’re up now, I’m sure of that. We should go tomorrow.”

  At the time I barely knew Angelo (we had yet to go pig hunting), so I was very grateful for the invitation. To a mushroom hunter, a good chanterelle spot is a closely guarded secret. Before Angelo agreed to take me I’d asked a bunch of other mushroom hunters to take me along. Some of them acted like I had asked to borrow their credit card. Others promised to call me back, but never did. A few used the same old joke: “I could show you where I get my mushrooms, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  Even Angelo wasn’t really giving away a secret. The place he took me was on private and gated land owned by an old friend of his. No one could get to it without permission from the owner.

  The chanterelle lives on the roots of oak trees, usually very old ones. There must have been hundreds of ancient oaks on the property, but Angelo seemed to know every one of them. “That one there is a producer,” he’d tell me, pointing across the meadow to a tree. “But the one next to it, I never once found a mushroom there.”

  I set off across the meadow to hunt beneath the tree. I looked around for a few minutes, lifting the dead leaves with my stick, but I saw nothing. Then Angelo came over and pointed to a spot no more than a yard from where I stood. I looked, I stared, but still saw nothing but a mess of tan leaves. Angelo got down on his knees and brushed the leaves away to reveal a bright squash-colored mushroom the size of his fist. He cut it at the base with a knife and handed it to me. The mushroom was heavy, and cool to the touch.

  Looking for chanterelles at an undisclosed location in Sonoma County, California.

  How in the world had he spotted it? The trick, he explained, was to look for signs of something pushing up the leaves. Then you had to look at the ground sideways to see if you could catch a glimpse of the gold stems of the chanterelle. Yet when Angelo pointed to another spot under the same tree, a spot where he had seen another mushroom, I was still blind. Not until he had moved the leaves with his stick did the golden nugget of fungus flash at me. I became convinced that Angelo must be smelling the chanterelles before he saw them.

  But that wasn’t the case. I just had to learn how to look. The way the mushroom hunters put it is to get your eyes on. And after following Angelo around for a while, I did begin to get my eyes on, a little. Before the morning was out I’d begun to find a few chanterelles on my own. The mushrooms started to pop out of the landscape, one and then another.

  FIVE CHANTERELLES

  But after a brief run of luck I promptly went blind again—and failed to find another mushroom all day. I would say there were no more mushrooms left to find, except that Angelo was still finding them in spots I had just visited. I had managed to find just five, though several of them weighed close to a pound each. My five chanterelles were tremendous, beautiful things I couldn’t wait to taste.

  That night I washed off the dirt, patted them dry, and then sliced the chanterelles into creamy white slabs. They smelled faintly of apricots. I knew at once that this was the same mushroom I had found near my house, the one I had been afraid to taste. The orange color matched, and these had the same shallow ridges running up the stalk. I cooked them as Angelo had recommended, first in a dry frying pan to sweat out their water, and then with butter and shallots. The mushrooms were delicious, with a light flavor—fruity with a hint of pepper—and a firm but silky texture.

  And I wasn’t the least bit concerned about waking up dead. What had happened to resolve my omnivore’s dilemma? Even after reading guidebooks or looking at photographs on my own, I still wasn’t sure I’d had a true chanterelle. But when Angelo handed one to me, my doubts vanished. I knew that the next time I found a chanterelle anywhere, I would recognize it and not hesitate to eat it.

  I spoke with other mushroom hunters who had the same experience. It seems we need to learn this information in person, from another human being. Maybe that’s part of our omnivore’s instinct. It’s certainly an advantage we have over the omnivore rat, which cannot share its hard-won knowledge of food with other rats.

  MUSHROOMS ARE MYSTERIOUS

  Mushrooms each have their seasons. Once the rains stopped in April the chanterelles were done for the year. The next important mushroom hunt would be for the morels, in May. I used the time in between to read about mushrooms and talk to mycolo gists. I had a lot of questions, like: What made mushrooms come up when and where they did? Why do chanterelles live on oaks and morels on pines? Why under some trees and not others?

  I learned that there aren’t a lot of answers to even the most basic questions. Scientists know very little about the fungi, which are the third kingdom of life on earth. Part of the problem is simply that fungi are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only a small part of a fungus. Most of it is underground, consisting of a network of microscopic cells called mycelium. These thin, threadlike cells form a web buried in the soil. You can’t dig up a mushroom to study it because the mycelium is too tiny and delicate. If you try to separate them from the soil they just fall apart.

  We know the basic parts of a plant—roots, stem, leaves, flowers. But we don’t even know for sure if fungi have parts, aside from mushrooms. We don’t know exactly why or when the fungus produces a mushroom either. It can go years or even centuries without producing one.

  Thanks to chlorophyll, plants are able to transform sunlight, water, and minerals into carbohydrates. Fungi work sort of in reverse. They recycle organic matter with powerful enzymes that can break down organic molecules into simple molecules and minerals.

  A mycorrhizal fungus has cells that surround or even go into the roots of a plant. The fungus and the plant have a deal. The fungus gives the plant simple elements and minerals it has taken from the soil. In return, the plant gives the fungus a drop of the simple sugars (carbohydrates) it has made. The fungus cells reach far underground and so act as a second root system for the plant. Trees need these fungal networks to thrive. It is also possible that the fungus gives the tree protection from bacteria or other fungi.

  Fungi are an essential part of the life cycle on earth. They are the masters of decay and recycling. Without fungi to break things down, the earth would soon be covered with a blanket of dead plants and animals.

  That might be why some people just don’t like mushrooms. Even the ones t
hat don’t poison us are closely linked to death and decay. Their job is to break the dead down into food for the living. That’s much less appetizing than a plant that creates food from sunlight. Cemeteries are usually good places to hunt for mushrooms. (Mexicans call mushrooms carne de los muertos—“flesh of the dead.”)

  FANTASTIC FUNGI

  About those poisons. Scientists aren’t sure why some mushrooms produce them. The poison might be a defense against being eaten, or it might just be one of the chemicals the fungus needs to do its work that happens to be toxic to humans.

  As a food, fungi (or mushrooms, which are the part we eat) don’t have much nutritional value. They contain some vitamins, minerals, and some amino acids (the building blocks of protein) but few calories. So mushrooms are not a good source of energy for us. Yet they have enough energy to do some amazing things.

  Consider:

  MUSHROOMING IS NO PICNIC

  Through Angelo’s friend Jean-Pierre I met another mushroom hunter named Anthony Tassinello. Anthony said he’d be willing to take me morel hunting. He wasn’t too worried about keeping the spot secret since we would be hunting “burn morels.” These are morels that come up in the spring following a pine forest fire. The fire had been big news and every mushroom hunter in California would be out looking for morels there. Plus, whatever spots we found would only be good for a couple of weeks.