The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  The Omnivore s’Solution: Some Tips for Eating

  I’ll bet I know your last burning question: “What now?” Now that you know all that you know about the food chains we depend on, how exactly should you fill up your plate? Most of my readers have the same question, so I’ve developed a handful of everyday rules to guide you through the newfound challenges (and possibilities!) of mealtime. (You can find more of them in the book I wrote after The Omnivore’s Dilemma, called In Defense of Food.)

  My advice comes in three parts:

  EAT REAL FOOD.

  That sounds pretty simple, but you now know it’s not so easy to do. There are many things disguised as food in our supermarkets and fast-food restaurants; I call them “edible food-like substances” (EFLS for short) and suggest you avoid them. But how do you tell the difference between real food and EFLS? Here are a few rules of thumb:A. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognizeasfood.Imagineshe’sbyyoursidewhenyou’re picking up something to eat. Does she have any idea what that Go-GURT portable yogurt tube is or how you’re supposedtoeatit? (She might think it’s toothpaste.)Thesame goes for that Honey-Nut Cheerios, cereal bar, the one with the layer of fake milk running through the middle, or the (even weirder) cereal “straw.”

  B. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or with ingredients you don’t recognize or can’t pronounce. As with the Twinkie, that long ingredient list means you’re looking at a highly processed product—an edible food-like substance likely to contain more sugar, salt,and fat than your body needs, and very few realnutri ents.

  C. Don’t eat anything containing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Think about it: only corporations ever “cook” with the stuff. Avoid it and you will automatically avoid many of the worst kinds of EFLS, including soda.

  BUY REAL FOOD.

  To make sure you’re buying real food:1. Get your food from the outside perimeter of the supermarket and try to avoid the middle aisles. In the cafeteria, go for the salad bar or the fruit basket. These places are where you still find fresh plant and animal foods that have only been been minimally processed. In the middle aisles of the store—and in the school vending machines—are where most of the EFLS lurk.

  2. Don’t buy, or eat, anything that doesn’t eventually rot. A food engineered to live forever is usually full of chemicals. Food should be alive, and that means it should eventually die.

  3. Shop at the farmers market, through a CSA, or at a farmstand whenever you can. Get out of the supermarket, the corner deli, and the gas station, and you won’t find those flashy fake foods.

  4. Be your own food detective. Pay attention to where your food comes from (were those berries picked in your state or halfway around the world?) and how it is grown (organic? Grass-fed? Humanely raised?). Read labels and ask questions. What’s the story behind your food? And how do you feel about that story?

  EAT REAL MEALS.

  How you prepare and eat food is often just as important as what you eat. So:1. Cook. The best way to take control of your meals is to cook whenever you can. As soon as you start cooking, you begin to learn about ingredients, to care about their quality, and to develop your sense of taste. You’ll find over time that, when you prep are and eat real food, fast food gets boring—more of the same old taste of salt, fat, and sugar in every Chips Ahoy! or microwave pizza. There are so many more interesting tastes to experiment with in the kitchen and to experience at the table.

  2. Garden. The freshest, best-tasting food you can eat is freshly picked food from the garden. Nothing is more satisfying than to cook and eat food you grew yourself.

  3. Try not to eat alone. When we eat alone we eat without thinking, and we usually eat too much: Just think about how thoughtlessly you can put away a bag of chips or cookies in front of the television or computer, or while doing your homework. Eating should be social; food is more fun when you share it.

  4. Eat slowly and stop when you’re full. The food industry makes money by getting you to eat more than you need or even want to. Just because they offer a supersized 64-ounce Big Gulp and 1,250-calorie, 5-cup restaurant plate of spaghetti and meatballs doesn’t mean that’s the amount you should eat. Take back control of your portions (a normal-size serving of spaghetti is about a cup and a half).

  5. Eat at the table. I know, it sounds obvious. But we snack more than we dine these days;19 percent of the mealscon sumed in America today are eaten in the car. The deepest joys of eating come when we slow down to savor our food and share it with people welove. The real meal—family and friends gathered around a table—is in danger of extinction. For the sake of your family’s health and happiness, and for your own, do what you can to save it. You might be surprised how much enjoyment it can bring.

  Q&A with Michael Pollan

  DID YOU EVER EAT PART OF STEER 534?

  My plan was to eat a steak from my steer, but it never happened. I published an article about No. 534 before he was slaughtered, and the people at the feedlot and processing plant were so angry about it that they refused to give me my meat. They thought I had portrayed their business in an unfavorable light, which was true. This happens sometimes when you publish controversial articles.

  So I did the next best thing: the night before No. 534 was scheduled to be slaughtered, I went to a steakhouse, ordered a rib eye cooked medium rare, and thought about my steer as I ate it.

  The Blair Brothers did send me a check for my steer after he was processed and sold. I made a small profit of $30 on my $600 investment in No. 534.

  WHY DIDN’T YOU NAME STEER #534?

  I thought about it. In fact my son, Isaac, suggested I name him “Night,” since he was black. But I decided that was a bad idea. He wasn’t a pet and I didn’t want to bond with him. I also didn’t want my readers to bond with him, because if they did they might be angry with me when I allow him to be slaughtered.

  WOULD YOU EVER GO HUNTING AGAIN?

  I haven’t been hunting since my adventure with Angelo and I’m not sure I will do it again. It was a very emotional experience for me, and while I’m happy I did it, and learned a lot from hunting a boar, I don’t feel like I need to do it again. Hunting is one of those experiences that it is important to do once—a rite of passage. But, like my bar mitzvah, once is probably enough for me. For one thing, I’m such a klutz that if I spent enough time in the woods with a gun, sooner or later someone would probably get hurt.

  I have, however, gone mushroom hunting many times since writing the book, and find that I really enjoy it. It’s still incredibly hard, but also incredibly rewarding when you find a nice fat porcini or chanterelle.

  WHAT WAS THE WORST PART OF KILLING A CHICKEN?

  The worst part of killing a chicken is discovering how quickly you can get used to it, especially when you’re on an assembly (or disassembly) lines with other people for whom the work is routine. After the fifth or sixth chicken, it felt like a job, and I lost my sensitivity to what was at stake. That scared me.

  WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD?

  My favorite food is probably paella, a one-pot dish from Spain that consists of clams, lobster, chicken, and chorizo sausage cooked on a bed of saffron rice. My mother, who makes the best paella anywhere, prepares it once every summer, when the family is together at the beach, so it’s a special occasion meal.

  LEAST FAVORITE FOOD?

  My least favorite food would probably be organ meats, though I don’t mind the occasional taste of pâté. I believe you should really eat the whole animal if you’re going to eat meat, but most of the organs still gross me out.

  HOW ABOUT WHEN YOU WERE A KID?

  As a kid, I loved fast food and could eat three or four McDonald’s hamburgers at a meal—not Big Macs, which hadn’t been invented yet, but the single-patty ones. I loved the french fries too. I loved eating it all in the car, how the beefy french-fry smell would fill the station wagon! Now the very thought of that makes me a little nauseous.

  DID YOU GARDEN WHEN YOU
WERE GROWING UP?

  Yes! I loved to garden when I was a kid. I learned how to do it from my grandfather, who had a big vegetable garden that he loved working in every spare moment. Starting around age ten, I planted a vegetable garden of my own behind our house on Long Island, though I didn’t call it a garden—I called it a farm. And every time I had five or six ripe strawberries, I’d put them in a paper cup and sell them to my mom.

  WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE THING THAT YOU GROW IN YOUR GARDEN NOW?

  These days I have a little vegetable garden in my front yard, where the lawn used to be. The best thing growing in it? These yellow cherry tomatoes called “Sun Gold”—they’re so sweet that they hardly ever make it to the kitchen. We eat them before they get there.

  WHERE, AND HOW, DO YOU SHOP FOR FOOD?

  I live in Berkeley, a food-obsessed city, and that makes eating fresh organic food and grass-fed meat easier than in some other places. Also, our farmer’s market operates fifty weeks of the year, because the weather is so good. (I know, we’re very lucky.) I shop at the farmer’s market every Thursday, and get most of my produce there; I also buy my eggs and some of my meat and fish there. But we also go to the supermarket every week. There, I try to buy organic, which is increasingly common (even Wal-Mart now sells organic), and I look for local produce too, which shows up in the summer. Some supermarkets now sell grass-fed meat, but I ask for it even when they don’t, as a way to encourage them to stock it.

  But I think eating vegetables and fruit is so important that I buy them even when they’re not organic—and even when they’re not fresh. There’s nothing wrong with frozen vegetables, and they’re usually a bargain. Some canned vegetables are a great deal too, though they often have too much salt. The key thing? Eat plants (including grains), animals, and fungi as lightly processed as you can find them at the prices you can afford.

  HOW DID YOU LEARN TO COOK? HOW CAN I ?

  I’m still learning how to cook. But I started out by helping my mother in the kitchen. She’s a great cook and doesn’t think of cooking as a chore. I especially loved frying chicken, scrambling eggs, and baking brownies—all magic transformations.

  Later on, I bought a few simple cookbooks and learned by trying out recipes that sound appealing—this is something worth trying if your mom isn’t much of a cook. Sometimes I’ll try to figure out how to make something I’ve liked in a restaurant, which can be an interesting challenge when you don’t have a recipe. But I’ve learned you can’t go too far wrong in the kitchen, and people are more intimidated than they should be, probably because we watch cooking shows on TV that make cooking look like rocket science. As long as you start with good ingredients, don’t get too fancy, and taste things along the way, it’ll probably come out all right. Baking is different: You really need to follow recipes or you’ll end up with stuff you don’t want to eat.

  WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE RECIPE?

  At the moment, it’s a trick I learned from Angelo Garro for making poached eggs, which is my favorite breakfast. The challenge of poaching a perfect egg is keeping the thing together—the white part tends to wander off. Here’s the trick: Boil water in a shallow pan. Before you crack the egg, sink the whole egg in the boiling water for exactly ten seconds. Then crack the egg into a big kitchen spoon and gently slide it into the water. The egg will hold together, and in three minutes you’ll have a perfectly poached egg that you can removed with a slotted spoon. If you want to get fancy, put a few drops of balsamic vinegar on the egg. That’s the way they serve poached eggs in Sicily, and it’s delicious.

  FURTHER RESOURCES

  INTERNET

  100 Mile Diet (www.100milediet.org) seasonal food charts for your state are here )

  Active Kids Get Cooking (www.activekidsgetcooking.org.uk) is a program which promotes healthy cooking and eating in schools throughout the UK

  BBC Good Food: Get Kids Cooking! (www.bbcgoodfood.com/content/knowhow/kids-cooking/1) wants to get kids into cooking. Recipes and tips galore!

  Center for Informed Food Choices (www.informedeating.org) encourages a diet based on whole, unprocessed, local, organically grown plant foods; their Web site contains a useful FAQ page about food politics and eating well and an archive of other important articles.

  Chefsters (http://chefsters.com/) is an online club based on the TV show, Chefsters. Members share recipes and other ideas for healthy eating.

  Eat Local Challenge (www.eatlocalchallenge.com) offers resources and encouragement for people trying to eat locally.

  Eat Well (www.eatwellguide.com) is an online source of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs. Enter your zip code to find healthful, humane, and eco-friendly products from farms, stores, and restaurants in your area.

  Eat Wild (www.eatwild.com) lists local suppliers for grass-fed meat and dairy products.

  The Edible Schoolyard (www.edibleschoolyard.org) started as a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, and now has a small network of affiliate schools.

  Food Routes (www.foodroutes.org) is a national nonprofit dedicated to “reintroducing Americans to their food—the seeds it grows from, the farmers who produce it, and the routes that carry it from the fields to our tables.”

  Jamie Oliver: School Dinners (www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners) is the chef’s website devoted to his campaign for better and healthier school meals.

  The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture (www.leopold.iastate.edu ) “explores and cultivates alternatives that secure healthier people and landscapes in Iowa and the nation.”

  Local Harvest (www.localharvest.com) helps you connect with local farmers, CSAs, and farmers’ markets.

  Mycolog (www.mycolog.com) includes a variety of fascinating mushroom facts.

  National Family Farm Coalition (www.nffc.net) is an organization to help support the livelihood of food producers, and feed the world’s people within their own borders.

  Pesticide Action Network (www.panna.org) promotes the elimination of dangerous pesticides and offers solutions that protect people and the environment.

  Sky Vegetables (www.skyvegetables.com) builds and maintains sustainable gardens on rooftops.

  Slow Food USA (www.slowfood.com) supports good, clean, and fair food while preserving traditional methods of preparation and farming.

  Spoons Across America (www.spoonsacrossamerica.org) is a national non-profit that promotes and organizes children’s culinary education.

  Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org) offers a variety of excellent resources on local, sustainable, and community-based food, including special features for teachers and educators.

  The Vertical Farm Project (www.verticalfarm.com) promotes indoor farming in urban settings.

  Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org) is an archive of information on the sorts of traditional whole-food diets advocated by Weston A. Price. Local chapters are good resources for finding some of the best pastured animal foods.

  W.K. Kellogg Foundation (www.wkkf.org) helps fund some great initiatives surrounding food attitudes and food policy—look at “Food and Society” and “Food and Fitness.”

  VIDEO

  Nourish is a public television program, aimed at high school students and narrated by Cameron Diaz, that looks at our relationship to food from a global perspective, connecting our food choices to the environment and to our health.

  Fresh by Ana Jones is an inspiring look at the burgeoning movement to reform our food system.

  Food Inc. is an investigative documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner about industrial farming and its effect on our health.

  What’s on Your Plate is a documentary by Catherine Gund that follows two girls from New York City as they explore their place in the food chain.

  King Corn is a documentary featuring two East Coast college grads who move to the Midwest to plant an acre of corn and follow it all the way to the dinner plate.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

&nbs
p; I HAD A LOT OF HELP IN THE KITCHEN PREPARING THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA.

  First to Gerry Marzorati, my longtime friend and editor at the New York Times Magazine, who first suggested five years ago that I spend some time writing about food for the magazine. Unbeknownst to either of us, he was pointing me down the path that led to this book.

  I am especially grateful to the farmers and the foragers I write about here. George Naylor in Iowa, Joel Salatin in Virginia, and Angelo Garro in California were my food-chain Virgils, helping me to follow the food from earth to plate and to navigate the omnivore’s dilemma. All three gave unstintingly of their time, their wisdom, and their always excellent company. Thanks, too, to the hunters and gatherers who graciously welcomed so rank an amateur on their expeditions: Anthony Tassinello, Ben Baily, Bob Carrou, Richard Hylton, Jean-Pierre Moulle, Sue Moore, and David Evans.

  In educating myself on food and agriculture, I’ve incurred a great many debts. Among my most generous and influential teachers have been: Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Fred Kirschenmann, Alice Waters, Todd Dawson, Paul Rozin, Wes Jackson, and Wendell Berry. Thanks also, for information and insight, to Bob Scowcroft, Allan Nation, Kelly Brownell, Ricardo Salvador, Carlo Petrini, Jo Robinson, David Arora, Ignacio Chapela, Miguel Altieri, Peter Hoffman, Dan Barber, Drew and Myra Goodman, Bill Niman, Gene Kahn, and Eliot Coleman.