Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  The degradation of Pollan’s argument occurs as he switches track from large-scale phenomena of environmental effects and collective public health to the small-scale phenomena of human body composition and optimization. Seemingly the most memorable moment in the early part of the book occurs when Pollan gets chemical tests to prove how much of the average American body has been built from molecules originating in corn. More than one person I know who read it has recalled to me how he developed a visceral disgust for all corn not recognizably in the form of yellow kernels. But this implies a dream of internal differentiation and superior makeup that works against humanity. The expanded use of staple crops was one of the great dreams of the progress of food: a single source of nutrition, widely growable, that could feed everyone, or be broken down and re-created in any form—a dream of man since the fantasy of manna. For dwellers on each home continent, your body should show molecules traceable to one particular staple: rice, wheat, millet, sorghum, or cassava, for example. It’s not surprising for North and South Americans to be people of maize. Instead, the sophistication of a thousand different foodstuffs making up your elegant body is a rival fantasy that, chemically analyzed, points to excessive wealth.

  Pollan’s critique becomes increasingly privatistic as the book advances (in worries about individual weight gain and disease from meat and corn syrup), and it shades into a hostility to the widespread, easy provision of food itself. He attacks the large-scale success of organic farming, which he believes has caused the organic movement to lose its soul. I’m all in favor of countercultural soul. But the lone “grass farm” that Pollan prefers as an alternative, where livestock farming depends on the successful management of grass, casts agriculture as an artisan enterprise requiring a high degree of charismatic genius just to run from day to day. Its master farmer may be doing something for his soul, but I think Pollan is not. His championing of it entrenches a form of localism that stays dependent on the patronage of a few buyers at the very top of the income distribution, where Pollan seems to sit.

  After this, The Omnivore’s Dilemma becomes openly self-directed. Can Pollan forage food? He learns to pick extremely expensive mushrooms. Can he kill his meat? He hunts a wild boar. (What difference does it make to have killed this one rare creature, among the thousands that will die to feed him before and after?) How will Pollan enjoy his book-ending meal, a dinner so maddeningly elite (the fava beans don’t help) as to make one momentarily sympathetic to Pollan’s most petty critics—those who say he defends “nature” at all only to justify the sort of egotistic luxury trade that pays the rent on a thousand Whole Foods Markets?

  Whether or not one admires Pollan’s conclusions, in his reasoning from first principles he is undeniably antiprogressive. He defends nature but moves quickly from outer nature (trees, earth) to an inner nature (or “human nature”) that he believes is fixed in crucial respects. The invariant parts of human nature, for Pollan, are rooted in our evolutionarily acquired attitudes to just such things as food. As is true for much other conservative thought about human nature (conservative with a little c), Pollan has a fundamental belief that past practices are likely to be superior simply because they were the past, “our” past. They must suit us in some deep way. He holds an underlying preference for the nature to be found beneath the vanity of reason. This line of thought intensifies in his short follow-up, In Defense of Food (2008). Pollan cuts through contemporary, ever-changing studies of nutritional science by appealing to his evolutionary model, in which human beings are adapted to eat many very different traditional diets, so long as that diet is not the new “Western diet” of twentieth-century invention. He seems to believe, against present food culture, that adopting any traditional diet of his grandparents’ generation or earlier would lead us now, when combined with modern medicine, to live longer than we will on our own current diet (post–World War II Western foods). He has much to say in this book that is more honest than what other mainstream figures will allow themselves to say—not least, that food anxiety is beneficial to “the food industry, nutrition science, and—ahem—journalism.” (Pollan’s brand of journalism is almost uniquely beneficial to one particular food industry, the luxury food trade, and to one particular nutrition science, the luxury “alternative” one, though I fear this isn’t what he thinks he’s saying.) But Pollan’s philosophical commitment to tradition as his truest guide, and his Burkean-Hayekian imputation that reason is always inadequate to decide anything “complex,” like human dietary or social practices, distorts his thought in a particular direction.

  The most progressive food philosophy of the present day, in the strict sense of progress as opposed to conservation, is vegetarianism. On the basis of reason and morality, it calls for a wholesale change in the way that human beings have always eaten, and a renunciation of a central part of the human dietary past and all its folkways. Vegetarianism has not given up on utopia. The point in The Omnivore’s Dilemma at which Pollan must lose the goodwill of many of his readers, I think, is in his discussion of vegetarianism. I speak as a nonvegetarian. (Nonvegetarian because I am immoral, not because I think there are superior arguments for carnivorousness. It is not true, as some philosophers say, that genuinely to hold a belief is necessarily to act on it. I hope to behave better, by and by.) Everything in Pollan’s book concerning meat animals and their damage to the environment really points to the conclusion that we should stop eating meat in any serious way. It is at this point that Pollan’s traditionalism splits with his hope for social change, and one sees which matters more. “What troubles me most about…vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from…a whole dimension of human experience…For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive…we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth.” That’s a peculiar “we”—Pollan doesn’t seem to mind being alienated from his living countrymen who eat burgers and chicken nuggets and tacos and dumplings, as much as he does from his imaginary past with evolving Homo sapiens.

  Vegetarians are often the eaters who seem to have the greatest stake in progressive food industry and food chemistry while still paying attention to the socially harmful forms of overproduction that critics like Pollan identify. For them, Quorn (protein made of fungus) or Boca Burgers (protein made of soy) and multivitamin pills all have their place in a rational and future-oriented diet, just as heirloom lentils do, or quinoa, or Thoreau’s beloved beans.

  The health impulse may be expanded to include what our medicalized culture calls “quality of life”—satisfaction of the palate, crumbs of happiness, dinner-table sociability, and Pollan’s sort of conservative natural piety—but it never ceases to be medical health. Its fulfillment may accidentally require progress in science and progress in medicine. But it is always, fundamentally, antiprogressive progress in an antisocial mode. Though health claims to purify and strengthen the body politic, health has nothing to contribute to (horizontal) solidarity and democracy. It leads individuals back into themselves, as those selves try to meet the (vertical) demands of experts. Too much focus on purity and optimization has a way of contravening the attitude of democracy. Democratic imagination desires that which is unlikely, unfitted to itself, unfit. It incorporates the sick and unknown not just for the sake of justice, but for a reckless joy.

  —

  Could there be anything I know that the usual food critics, like Pollan, don’t? I know that each of them can escape the system of flawed nutritional science only by looking for more and different science. And yet if one were really to get out of this system, one would have to embrace a will to discover a different origin for value. The rules of food, of sex, of exercise, of health, give us ways to avoid facing up to a freedom from care that we may already have within reach. This would be an accomplished freedom from biology, lacking nothing, which we simply don’t know what to do with. What if life were not really a possessive commodity that came in quantities that you gained or lost by your efforts? What if there were no further overcoming of som
e obstacle (disease, mortality) still to be attained, and we are now in the era of life assured and made free?

  “Know thyself,” said the ancient injunction. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” added Socrates. Modern prophets reformulated this for our changed times, once we had become complacent about scientific examination, but stayed mystified by how to be: Become what you are.

  “Know thy food,” says the health ideology. Unexamined food is not worth eating. Commonsense wisdom used to say, “You are what you eat,” which meant, “Put that donut down and pick up an apple. Choose God’s first fruit over fried fluff.” The health ideology says something that sounds similar, but is really very different, for it has become existential and grave, crowding out both common sense and the contemplation of true goals: Become what you eat.

  —

  What is health? It is stored care. It is good foods intaken, converted into a kind of currency, with your body as piggy bank. It is vile, careless pleasures kept from the mouth, rejected. It is a set of predictions about the future of your body based on correlations from others’ lives. It is a set of attitudes and feelings about your body as it is now, based on introspection, feeling, combined with chancy outside expert information. It is putting in the hours of exercise to keep your heart pumping far into your old age. It is not bad, nor good. It is not assailable, nor is it the only truth.

  I find it hard not to want to live longer. I also want to live without pain. This means I want “health.” But when I place myself at a point within the vast constellation of health knowledge and health behaviors, I can’t help feeling that these systems don’t match up with my simple projects of longevity and freedom from pain. There is something too much, or too many, or too arbitrary, or too directed—too doom-laden, too managerial, too controlling.

  —

  The ultimate quarry and ultimate obstacle in any different way of thinking about food is this concept of health. How would one truly get outside of the rules of the game? By rejecting health as a goal, and choosing some other reason for living?

  We have no language but health. Those who criticize dieting as unhealthy operate in the same field as those who criticize overweight as unhealthy. Even those who think we overfixate on the health of our food call it an unhealthy fixation. But choosing another reason for living, as things now stand, seems to be choosing death. Is the trouble that there seems to be no other reason for living that isn’t a joke, or that isn’t dangerous for everyone—like the zealot’s will to die for God or the nation? Or is the problem that any other system than this one involves a death-seeking nihilism about knowledge and modernity, a refusal to admit what scientists, or researchers, or nutritionists, or the newest diet faddists, have turned up? As their researches narrow the boundaries of life.

  Health is our model of all things invisible and unfelt. If, in this day and age, we rejected the need to live longer, what would rich Westerners live for instead?

  [2008]

  * * *

  *1 In 2005 USDA statistics, about 4 percent of American households, at some point during the year, found their normal eating habits disrupted because of lack of money to buy food. About one-third of those households faced disruption in one or two brief episodes; another third experienced disruption frequently. In the developing world, the problem is different—there, portions of the population may face starvation or disease from the inability to buy food. The World Food Programme puts the proportion of the developing world that experiences undernourishment at 16 percent of the total population.

  *2 This raises the matter of commensurability. Right now, your actions every day become foods, or the wiping away of foods, their eradication. If you do a certain number of minutes on the treadmill, measured in calories, that wipes out a bagel. But so does having sex wipe out calories. We’re frequently told this, too, by the health magazines. With the three central bodily activities of our time (exercise, food, and sex), whatever draws the links to make them all expressible in a common measure contributes to the underlying attitude. Which leads to a troubling question: Why would it be necessary or useful to express all the forms of bodily life in common metrics? The instinctive suspicion is that when incommensurable goods and activities are modified to be expressible through some common medium, it is because the transformed goods are easier to “monetize,” or to render accessible to either commercial or social-functional intervention. Because it is a way of reducing all things to a common coin, outside our control, when all the processes of the body are evaluated in the same metric, which we have no access to on our own, it helps the effort of convincing someone that he needs tangible equipment, or intangible expert knowledge, to accomplish what he did previously without it—for example, eat. Whenever formerly private and habitual practices are penetrated by a need for outside equipment and specialized knowledge, the individual hands himself over to experts, and integrates both his time and his spending power into the wider system.

  OCTOMOM AND THE MARKET IN BABIES

  The news crews that arrived at Nadya Suleman’s parents’ house, where the young mother lived, in January 2009, thought they were reporting on a different kind of story than the one they got. They came to celebrate the minor miracle of only the second set of octuplets to have been born alive in the United States. But a few days later, Nadya, now “Octomom,” had been made the most hated woman in America, through this same media’s ministry.

  I suppose it will be the octuplets who go into the history books, if any of it does. On the 26th of January, eight babies were born by cesarean section. They ranged in size from one pound, twelve ounces, to two pounds, nine ounces. Only seven had been noted on ultrasound. The eighth, emerging as a minuscule hand clinging to the ob-gyn’s latex glove, amazed the delivery room.

  I think Octomom deserves another glance, in the midst of our compulsive forgetfulness, as the central actor in perhaps the only non–Bernard Madoff, ostensibly nonfinancial story to stir the boiling pitch of the nation’s passions in those historic months of September 2008 to March 2009, when American news outlets were trying to cope with the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. (Also enacting their own greatest moral collapse since their collusion in the 2003 Iraq War, at a rare moment when different messengers might really have led American society on a different path into history.) In those months, not only the red-faced steam kettles of Fox or MSNBC, and the sawdust-shedding Pinocchios of network news and Time, but the puff purveyors at People and Us Weekly, felt an obligation, before saying much else, to acknowledge the meltdown of the American economy—if only because they were addressing audiences who were newly unemployed, foreclosed on, picked clean of retirement funds, and blamed for their poor judgment, despite twenty years of sky’s-the-limit blandishments in “money news” and vast structural mischief by finance architects. The babies were supposed to be an oasis in the midst of the day’s gloomy news of AIG perfidy, mortgage defaults, bank closures, toxic assets, and spiking unemployment. Instead, the camera teams camped on the lawn of the nice one-story house in Whittier, California, in the glitter of an LA winter, stumbled on an in vivo accompaniment to the crisis.

  —

  Who was Nadya Suleman? Not so unreasonable a person: dark-haired, thirty-three years old, Caucasianesque, with that slightly ethnic Coppertone cast that’s the norm for new celebrities originating in Southern California; well-spoken enough, and not obviously unattractive—a figure, that is, that television could take seriously. She had a college degree, a former life as a medical technician, and credits from graduate work in counseling. She was churchgoing, shampooed—a slightly droopy flower raised in the warm air of Orange County, who had always known her “passion in life” was to be “a mom.”

  Who was the dad? Here was trouble. A single mother nowadays is a media Madonna: righteous in the face of the absentee father, and promised our support. She becomes a harpy if we learn she pushed the father away. It was tougher for the reporters to explain that in this case, as they quickly le
arned, there never had been a father, or any thought of one. The babies had been created in vitro and implanted as embryos. The search turned quickly to a male donor. The sperm had originated somewhere. Perhaps the octuplets’ begetter could be found? (On cable news, odd debates took place on whether an unwitting donor could be made responsible for the children’s upkeep.) The Suleman family said the donor was “David Solomon,” nicely linking Nadya’s brood to a Charles Murray–ish Bell Curve fantasy of the intellectual superiority of Ashkenazi Jews (had she given life to a race of supergeniuses?), until everybody noticed that this patrimony was just a transformation of Nadya’s own last name. No such father could be located among all the David Solomons of Los Angeles. Instead of a father, the octuplets had a doctor, Michael Kamrava—a Beverly Hills fertility-clinic director with a controversial IVF practice near Rodeo Drive. Thus the shadow of Hollywood vanity crept over Nadya Suleman’s story. At her request, she said, Dr. Kamrava had implanted six embryos in her womb, a number wildly above all professional recommendations. Suleman claimed two had split, adding pairs of twins.

  It emerged that the house Nadya lived in was being foreclosed on. This made it like everyone else’s house, it seemed, in certain towns, from Stockton to Bakersfield, all over California, where the state couldn’t fund its budget anymore and would soon be issuing IOUs even to the people who filled its soda machines. Could Octomom also be a victim of the financial crisis? Well, she’d had no job to have lost. She hadn’t for a while. The Los Angeles Times reported $2,379 a month in federal public assistance and $490 in food stamps, information available in public records. Suleman played down the food stamps. As for the public assistance, it was for her disabled children, three of her first six—her children before the octuplets. It seemed that Dr. Kamrava had performed other multiple-implantation procedures for Nadya in recent years. That half her previous babies arrived with birth defects, physical or mental, was not an entirely unlikely outcome when more than one or two were gestated at a time. A womb provides only limited real estate for the development of bodies and brains. And Nadya was opposed on principle to “selective reduction”—that is, the abortion of some among multiple developing embryos or fetuses, even embryos or fetuses that are identified in utero as less likely to survive, and more likely to be underdeveloped or disabled at birth—even though to do so would give the others a better chance. This detail was passed over lightly in the press, in recognition of sensitivities about “the unborn.”