Are you what you eat? Or how you eat?

Book Review

After a 400 mile day, after the tent’s all set up, nothing’s better than plopping down in a camp chair with a beer and a good book. It’s an essential part of motorbiking, second only to food.

If you’re a typical American it’s highly likely that you have a store-bought rotisserie chicken cooling in your fridge right now. According to the meat counter guy at the local Sam’s Club in Santa Fe, they sell about 60 fully cooked chickens an hour on any given Saturday afternoon. And it’s no wonder, they’re really easy, very tasty; and three-pound bird is just five bucks.

If you’ve ever wondered how such a thing is possible you may have also wondered where that particular chicken is from, how it is grown, even what it is fed. You may have even wondered if cheap, delicious chicken … is really a good thing. The answers to those kinds of questions, and many more, can be found in a book by Michael Pollan called The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, Paperback. $16 retail, about $10 from Amazon.com).

According to his biography, Pollan is a San Francisco bay area foodie, professor of journalism at Berkeley and a contributing food writer for the New York Times. Clearly an old-school journalist, sometimes called a “Big J” journalist, who is not afraid to dig for a story, even a story about food, and keep digging until all the roots are exposed. The first big scoop is that what we eat isn’t what we think it is. That chicken, for instance, really is a chicken, but it’s a chicken made from corn. Same with that steak and that pork chop.

It’s called “commodity corn” and bears only a passing resemblance to what we normally think of as corn. Pollan breaks down a dinner-for-three from McDonald’s with assistance from a Berkeley biologist and a mass spectrometer — now that’s digging. What he exposes is that his family’s cheeseburger, fries, McNuggets and Cobb Salad represents about six pounds of corn; that the soda pop is 100% corn, the burger 52%, McNuggets 56%, and the salad dressing 65%.

When the book focuses on beef we learn that animals evolved to eat grass are now forced to eat corn, which will eventually kill them if the slaughterhouse doesn't come first. The reasons for force feeding corn to grass eaters are a complicated knot of economics, politics, pharmaceuticals, and tradition. This much is for sure, beef would not be as plentiful or available year round, and much more expensive, without the current system.

Pollan explores niche agriculture, organic, and corporate-organic farming to explain that there exists more than one way to feed a nation. Sure, it’s probably better for our health and for the environment, but it’s not cheap and it’s not big or organized enough to satisfy our National Hunger.

The book goes beyond what we are eating and into how we are eating, with an extensive breakdown of a meal that is personally hunted, gathered, and cooked by the author. The imagery alone of a neophyte city-boy crashing around in the woods with a loaded rifle hunting wild Sonoma County pig while worrying about the ethics of his actions is worth the price of the book.

Thinking about food and where to get it, whether that be a grocery, farmer’s market, or restaurant; and how to prepare it, whether that be a campfire, cooking system or restaurant, takes up a lot of brain space when motoring down the road on two wheels. This book provides a whole new perspective on those ruminations. It’s not enough to make you stop eating bacon, but when you’ve finished Omnivore’s Dilemma you’ll not soon forget the stories of happy pigs, cows, and chickens allowed to be their essential selves instead of simple commodities at a place called Polyface Farm before they give up their lives to be our dinner.