Pollan’s ‘Dilemma’ raises corn concerns

It’s disconcerting for an Iowa gal like me, raised on corn-fed beef and accustomed to bragging about corn, to read Michael Pollan’s new book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.”

An omnivore – a term that describes most of us – eats just about anything.

Modern omnivores have almost unlimited menu choices available from various sources: supermarkets, food co-ops, buying clubs, fast food chains, restaurants, farmers’ markets, and community supported agriculture programs.

With such abundance, the dilemma we face three times a day, day after day, is what we should eat, all things considered. Pollan examines this question in the same manner he’s approached previous subjects: with boundless curiosity, a willingness to work very hard, and an insightfulness transformed into prose as pleasurable to read as chocolate is to eat.

Pollan examines four types of meals – fast food, organic, locally produced, and food he hunted and gathered himself – and shows exactly what it took to get that meal on the table.

I’ve been a fan of Pollan’s ever since his first book, “Second Nature,” wherein he proved himself apart from many ecologically minded writers by positing that humans don’t necessarily destroy everything they touch. His affinity for people and pasture over untouched wilderness appeals to my rural sensibilities.

So I’m mentally reeling from Pollan’s close examination of an Iowa cornfield, where he winds up (only 20-some miles from my hometown) after researching the provenance of a McDonald’s lunch. The government’s corn subsidy over the decades has made the crop so cheap and plentiful that it is hidden in almost every processed food. There’s so much corn, in fact, that we force animals to eat it too, especially feedlot cattle, which, I was surprised to learn, can barely tolerate it.

Commercial food producers keep inventing ways to trick us into eating more of it, and we export it around the world, making it harder for others to farm for a living. As Pollan says, looking at a mountain of corn dumped unceremoniously on the Iowa ground: “Such is the protean, paradoxical nature of the corn in that pile, that getting rid of it could contribute to obesity and to hunger both.”

Pollan writes about industrial corn in section one of the book’s three main divisions. It’s a dire beginning, rather like starting in the dead center of Dante’s hell instead of working toward it gradually from the outer edges.

Readers who care about the state of the world and their personal food supply will despair. But Pollan keeps the compelling narrative moving along, thank god, so that salvation, as it were, is just a few chapters away at Polyface Farm, 450 revolutionary acres in the Shenandoah Valley. Here, we meet the alternative to industrial agriculture: sustainable agriculture, aka the “non-barcode people.”

Polyface Farm is almost too Eden-like to be believed, with its complex mix of pastures, forest, cows, chickens, pigs, rabbits, portable electric fences, and a chicken coop contraption called the “Eggmobile.”

Pollan reveals the downside, of course: To eat that delicious chicken, he has to butcher it first. Yet even that, at PolyFace Farm, is rendered bearable by its honesty.

The third section of the book concerns Pollan’s efforts to hunt and gather a meal himself, an academic exercise since it would be impossible for all of us to eat that way. Pollan leaves us with a real choice between a mountain of worthless corn or the pastoral prosperity of a sustainable farm.

We can leave corporate agriculture to continue down its current path, or we can insist on radical changes.

Even skeptics should be left speechless; Pollan is a principled journalist, and his report is ripe with truth, both ugly and beautiful.

The best of it is that Polyface Farm exists. That knowledge will affect readers in different ways. Some may simply spend more time reading labels in the supermarket aisles. Others may make more trips to the local farmers’ market, or buy directly off the farm. The powerful could rewrite federal farm policy, and the greatest of us will create local versions of Polyface Farm.

For myself, well, I own some acres of corn in Iowa I need to get plowed under.