The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  I asked Dr. Mel what would happen if drugs were banned from cattle feed. “We’d have a high death rate,” he told me. “We just couldn’t feed them as hard. Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space, I wouldn’t have a job.”

  MY STEER

  I found my steer, number 534, in pen 63. Pen 63 is about the size of a hockey rink, with a concrete feed bunk along the road, and a fresh water trough out back. My first impression was that his home wasn’t too bad. It was far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet and it had a view of what I thought was a pond. Then I noticed the brown scum. The body of water is what is known as a manure lagoon.

  I asked the feedlot manager why they didn’t just use the liquid manure as fertilizer on neighboring farms. The farmers don’t want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that it would kill the crops. (He didn’t tell me that feedlot wastes also contain toxic chemicals and drugs that end up in waterways downstream.) On a farm, manure would be a source of fertility. At a CAFO like Poky it becomes a toxic waste.

  I climbed over the railing and joined the ninety steers, which retreated a few lumbering steps. I couldn’t find number 534 at first. And then I spotted him—the three white blazes on his face—way off in the back. As I gingerly stepped toward him the shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there stood 534 and I, staring dumbly at each other. I had worn the same orange sweater I’d worn at the ranch in South Dakota, hoping that maybe he would recognize me. There was no sign that he did. I told myself not to take it personally. After all, 534 and his pen mates were bred for their meat, not for their memories.

  I noticed that his eyes were a little bloodshot. That was probably from all the feedlot dust, which wasn’t really dust but dried-up cow manure. Aside from that, it was hard to tell how he was getting on. I don’t know enough about cattle to tell you if he was bored or miserable. On the other hand, I would not say he looked happy.

  MEAT MACHINE?

  My steer had certainly grown. He’d put on a couple of hundred pounds since I’d seen him last, which of course was the whole point of the feedlot. Dr. Mel complimented me on his size and shape. “That’s a handsome-looking beef you got there,” he said. (Aw, shucks.)

  That is one way of looking at a steer like 534—the feedlot way, the industrial way. To the industrial food chain, cattle are just machines for turning number 2 field corn into cuts of beef. So number 534 was doing a good job as a meat machine. Yet standing there, I realized once again that number 534, despite his name, was not a machine. Number 534 was a living, breathing organism. My health is directly related to his health (or to the health of other steers just like him). We live in the same habitat as the animals we eat. Whatever happens to them, happens to us.

  While I stood in pen 63 a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed. The black mass of cowhide moved toward the trough for lunch. The $1.60 a day I was paying for my steer’s meal may seem cheap—but it doesn’t include all the costs of the industrial farm, not by a long shot. It doesn’t include the billions the government spends to subsidize corn. It doesn’t include the cost to the environment from manure, pesticide, and fertilizer pollution. It doesn’t include the cost to our health from new superbacteria.

  I stood alongside 534 as he lowered his big head into the stream of grain. At that moment I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to eat one of these animals. Hungry was the last thing I felt. Yet after enough time goes by, and the stink of that place is gone from my nostrils, I will probably eat feedlot beef again. Most people can eat feedlot meat because they just don’t know where it comes from. For me, it will take a lot of forgetting.

  6

  Processed Food

  SPLITTING THE KERNEL

  Do you eat a lot of corn? Looking at it one way, each American eats only about a bushel of corn per year. But that number only includes the corn that looks like corn—corn on the cob, or corn out of a can, or corn chips.

  But if you count all the corn we eat, directly and indirectly the average American eats a ton of corn every year. We don’t recognize it as corn, though, because it’s been turned into something else. Almost half is eaten by animals and turned into beef, chicken, fish, or pork. One-tenth of the U.S. corn crop is turned into processed food.

  To make processed food, corn is first broken down into different parts. Those parts are put back together in new ways to make the sweetener in your soft drink or the starch in your hamburger roll. All of this happens in a factory called a “wet mill.” (The old sort of mill, which simply grinds grain into flour, or meal, is a “dry” mill.) To follow the industrial food chain, I had to follow the river of corn through a wet mill.

  There are twenty-five major wet mills in the United States, most of them owned by two corporations, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. George Naylor’s corn probably went to Cargill’s mill in Iowa City. ADM runs a giant plant in Decatur, Illinois. Both of those companies refused to let me to tour their plants.

  Luckily, I was allowed to visit a smaller mill at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Iowa State really should be called the University of Corn. Corn is the hero of many of the sculptures and murals on campus. (The soybean, Iowa’s second-largest crop, gets its share of attention too.) The school’s wet mill is part of something called the Center for Crops Utilization Research. Larry Johnson, the center’s director, was more than happy to show me around.

  INDUSTRIAL DIGESTION

  Johnson described the wet mill as kind of an industrial digestive system. The mill itself is a maze of stainless steel pipes, valves, filters, and tanks. Corn travels through the maze and is broken down through a series of steps including grinding (like the teeth) and soaking in acid (like the stomach). By the time it reaches the end, the corn is reduced to simple molecules, mostly sugars. Soybeans go through a similar process.

  The first step in the “digestion” of corn is to split the kernel into its different parts:• The yellow skin.

  • The germ, the tiny dark part nearest the cob. That’s the part that holds a tiny embryo of a corn plant.

  • The endosperm. The biggest part of the kernel, filled with carbohydrates.

  When a shipment of corn arrives at the mill, it is soaked for thirty-six hours in a slightly acid bath. This swells the kernels and loosens the skin. After the soak, the swollen kernels are ground in a mill. “By now the germ is rubbery and it pops right off,” Johnson explained.

  The germ is then squeezed for corn oil. Corn oil can be used as a cooking or salad oil. Some of it is hydrogenated. That means hydrogen is forced into the oil molecules. This makes the oil stay solid at room temperature and so it can be used for margarine. Doctors used to think margarine was healthier for you than butter and would not cause heart disease. Now researchers think these hydrogenated trans fats in margarine are actually worse for our hearts than butter. Trans fats are also used in processed snacks, baked goods, and many other processed foods.

  Once the germ has been removed for oil, the kernels are crushed. That makes a white mush of protein and starch called “mill starch.” The mill starch can be used in animal feed.

  STARCH INTO SUGAR

  What’s left after that is a white liquid that’s poured out onto a stainless steel table. It dries to a fine, superwhite powder—cornstarch. Cornstarch was wet milling’s first product back in the 1840s. At first the starch was mainly used for laundry—to make shirts stiff. Then cooks and food companies began adding cornstarch to as many recipes as they could. The starch was cheap and had a nice white color that people thought was “pure.”

  By 1866, the mill owners had learned how to break down cornstarch into a kind of sugar called glucose. The glucose corn syrup wasn’t as sweet as sugar, but it was cheap. Ever since, corn sweeteners have been the industry’s most important product.

  The big breakthrough came in the 1960s. That’s when Japanese chemists discovered an enzyme that could transform glucose into the much sweeter sugar molec
ule called fructose. High-fructose corn syrup was born. It’s a blend of 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose that tastes exactly as sweet as table sugar. Today it is the most valuable food product refined from corn.

  High-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, is by far the biggest food output of the country’s wet mills. But there are hundreds of other food ingredients created from the remaining cornstarch. Some is made into other sugars like maltodextrin, which can be used to make instant pudding or gravy. Some is fermented to become ethanol. Some of the fermented starch is used to make plastic. At the end there’s almost nothing left. Even the dirty water from the process is used to make animal feed.

  The wet mill is like a giant steel beast, with a maze of pipes and machines inside. At one end it eats millions of bushels of corn fed to it every day by the trainload. At the other end of the beast are hundreds of spigots, large and small. Out of each spigot flows a different product made from corn, called “fractions” by the food industry. Many of these fractions, the sugars and starches, the alcohols and acids, the emulsifiers and stabi lizers with the strange names, will be made into food. They are put together to make cereal or snack food or chicken nuggets or TV dinners or just about anything else you can imagine and ingest. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a processed food today that isn’t made from corn or soybeans.

  CEREAL SECRETS

  A few years ago I had the chance to visit one of the places where new foods are invented. I was given a tour of the research and development laboratory for General Mills, the sixth-largest food company in the world. The lab is called the Bell Institute and it is housed in a group of buildings on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Here nine hundred food scientists spend their days designing the future of food.

  Much of their work is top secret, but nowhere more so than in the cereals area. Deep in the heart of the Bell Institute is a maze of windowless rooms called, rather grandly, the Institute of Cereal Technology. The secrecy surrounding cereals like Lucky Charms seemed silly, and I said so. But an executive explained to me that recipes can’t be patented or copyrighted—which means that once you introduce a new cereal, anyone can put out another one just like it. All you can hope for is to have the market to yourself for a few months to establish your brand. That’s why companies keep their new cereals top secret.

  In the interests of secrecy, the food scientists would not talk to me about current projects. But they would talk about past failures, like the cereal in the shape of little bowling pins and balls. “The kids loved it,” the product’s inventor told me, “but the mothers didn’t like the idea of kids bowling their breakfast across the table.” Which is why bowling pins never showed up in your cereal bowl.

  Source: Adapted from Twinkie, Deconstructed, by Steve Ettlinger and www.hostesscakes.com

  Breakfast cereal is a great example of why companies love to make processed foods. A box of cereal contains four cents worth of corn (or some other grain). Yet that box will sell for close to four dollars. Cereals generate higher profits for General Mills than any other food. In the same way, McDonald’s makes much more by selling you a chicken nugget than a piece of recognizable chicken.

  The farmer, on the other hand, makes more money from whole foods than processed foods. For example, for every dollar a consumer spends to buy eggs, forty cents finds its way back to the farmer. But for every dollar a consumer spends on HFCS, say in a soft drink, farmers get only four cents. Companies like ADM and Coca-Cola and General Mills capture most of the rest. That’s why George Naylor told me more than once: “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.”

  Source: USDA.

  CAN YOU EAT MORE, PLEASE?

  It seems that food corporations have got it made. The U.S. government helps pay for their raw materials. They make more money from selling food than farmers. But they have one big problem that limits their sales: the size of the human stomach.

  Unlike many other products—CDs, say, or books—there’s a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. Try as we might, the average person can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. The demand for food rises only as fast as the population grows. In the U.S., that’s around 1 percent per year.

  This leaves food companies like General Mills with two choices. They can figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same amount of food. Or they can get us to eat more food than we need. Which do they choose? Why both, of course.

  Processing food allows companies to charge more for it. Consumers will only pay so much for an ear of corn. But they can be convinced to pay a lot more for the same corn if it has been turned into a funny shape, sweetened, and brightly colored. The industry calls this “adding value.”

  Added value can be anything. It might be the convenience of a dinner you just pop in the microwave. Or it might be a feeling like “this food product is good for me.” Or it might be that a food is fun to eat—like ridged potato chips or cereal bars. That’s why food companies spend so much on advertising—to convince us they really have added value to the corn and soybeans.

  They also try to convince us that their corn or chickens or apples are better (and worth more) than those of another company. They don’t want us to buy just any old chicken, but Tyson chicken or Perdue. They don’t want us to buy any old oat cereal—they want us to buy Cheerios.

  Companies can also try to convince us that their food is healthier, even a sort of medicine. We’re used to having vitamins and minerals added to our food. (Of course, manufacturers wouldn’t need to add them if they hadn’t been removed during processing.) And some manufacturers are going even further than adding vitamins. One company, called Tree Top, has developed a “low-moisture, naturally sweetened apple piece infused with a red-wine extract.” Natural chemicals in red wine called flavonoids are thought to fight cancer. So Tree Top has added value to an apple by injecting it with flavonoids from red wine.

  It seems that an old-fashioned apple just isn’t enough anymore. We need an apple that fights cancer! We need orange juice with calcium that builds strong bones. We need cereal that keeps us from having a heart attack.

  FOOD THAT DOESN’T FEED

  The latest invention to come from the wet mill and the lab is something called resistant starch. This new corn “fraction” has food makers very excited because—it can’t be digested! That’s right, it’s a food that your body can’t use. Since the body can’t break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track. It’s the ultimate diet food—food with no calories. It’s food that isn’t really food.

  You would think this would be a bad thing. Imagine the advertisement: “Our food doesn’t feed you!” But for food companies, it’s an excellent invention. They have finally overcome the natural limit of what the human body will eat. You could eat this stuff twenty-four hours a day, like a human-size corn processing plant!

  Maybe this fake food is corn’s final victory. It has succeeded up until now by being useful to humans. Now it is about to succeed by being of no use at all.

  7

  Fat from Corn

  CAN YOU EAT MORE, PLEASE? PART II

  So food companies have been very successful at getting us to pay more for the same food. What about their other money-making scheme, to get us to buy (and eat) more food than we need? How has that worked out? Well, let’s see . . .

  Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. Among kids, it’s almost as bad. Seventeen percent of kids age six through nineteen are obese. This is a giant public health problem, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children, and the Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop it. Diabetes can mean blindness, amputation, and early death. Because of diabetes and all the other health problems caused by obesity, kids in the U.S. toda
y may turn out to be the first group of Americans with life spans that are shorter than their parents’. To put it simply, Americans are getting fatter and it’s killing us.

  Sources: Journal of the American Medical Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  You hear plenty of explanations for our expanding waistline. We sit all day at desks in school or at work, then sit around all night watching television. We play video games instead of sports. Fast-food advertising encourages us to eat supersized meals. It is actually cheaper to eat high-calorie, fatty, processed foods than whole foods. All these explanations are true, but they don’t tell the whole story.

  EXTRA CALORIES

  Behind our epidemic of obesity lies this simple fact: When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it. Since 1977, an American’s average daily intake of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Since we aren’t exercising more, the calories end up being stored away in fat cells in our bodies. Where did all those cheap calories come from? If you’ve read this far, you already know the answer—most of them come from cheap corn.

  Since 1970, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day. (The average person needs about 2,000 calories a day, but that number varies greatly depending on your age, size, and amount of exercise.) Where are those extra calories going? Some are sold overseas. Some are turned into ethanol for our cars. But a lot of them are going into us.