Journalist Michael Pollan can’t help but view his surroundings with a literary eye. In the supermarket, a canon of “grocery literature” sprawls before his shopping cart, as deli brands reflect the supposed free-range and grass-fed bliss of the cows and chickens they package. And in the anthropology department, when Pollan argues to a professor that Americans could be better described as “people of corn” than our Mexican, traditionally maize-eating neighbors, he learns that this statement is more than a metaphor and that it can be proven by analyzing human hair follicles and particles of foods we eat for traces of the carbon imprint unique to corn.
When Pollan lectured on his best-selling, gut-turning book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: a natural history of four meals” June 12 at the Neurosciences Institute, he first pondered how his research into the way we eat relates to neuroscience.
“We have as many neurons in our digestive system as we have in our brains,” Pollan said, asking the audience to chew on that before skewering the food industry for its contribution to what he perceives as the deterioration of the American diet and ecosystem.
Pollan, an environmental journalist teaching as a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, found as he began researching the origins of typical fast-food and home-cooked meals that the problem begins in the human gut, with the “omnivore’s dilemma.” As omnivores, or “generalists” such as rats and cockroaches, Pollan explained, humans can eat anything. But this also means that we eat everything, including a variety of chemicals, hormones and additives, either added to packaged foods for preservation or fed to livestock and crops to prevent infestation and disease. With the overprocessing of groceries to include these ingredients, Pollan said, the simple question of “What am I eating?” becomes increasingly difficult to answer.
The answer, Pollan concluded, is often corn. Pollan quoted from a passage of his book titled “The Naturalist in the Supermarket”: “Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia … The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt … typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.”
Pollan went on to list chicken nuggets fried in corn oil, soft drinks sweetened with corn syrup, beers, waffles, salad dressings, Twinkies and even the disposable diapers, trash bags and batteries stocked in the nonfood aisles of the supermarket as other consumer items that have been commandeered by corn.
What’s wrong with all this corn? First, it takes large amounts of fossil fuel to grow corn. In fact, wet-milling, a production method that transforms corn into cattle feed, burns ten calories of fossil fuel for every single calorie of food it creates, according to Pollan. Nonetheless, government subsidies have made corn a cheap commodity, encouraging farmers to feed the surplus to ruminants that naturally consume grass and must be given antibiotics to tolerate their grain diets.
For human consumers, this diet amounts to more saturated fat and less of the healthier omega-3 fatty acid, Pollan said.
Corn-centric agriculture is no healthier for the environment, Pollan added, citing the growing prominence of “corn-on-corn” farming rotations, for which farmers grow corn out of season with the help of pesticides that create poisonous, chemical runoff.
Pollan lamented the absence of “diversified” farm fields that grow a variety of produce and allow for a “dance of symbiosis between [farm] animals and plants” in the mainstream American economy. One solution Pollan suggested is a reinvestment in farmers markets, which may be in want of barcodes, microwavable dinners and “tomatoes in December” but feature a cornucopia of locally grown produce and meats instead.
Pollan writes in his book, “The decision to eat locally is an act of conservation, too, one that is probably more effective (and sustainable) than writing checks to environmental organizations.”
In San Diego, residents have a range of options for sustainable eating. The La Jolla Elementary School Certified Farmers Market is held every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 7335 Girard Ave.
In addition to this yearlong venue, farmers set up booths along UCSD’s Library Walk every Tuesday during the academic year. Farmers markets also convene every Wednesday from 4 to 8 p.m. in Ocean Beach on the 4900 block of Newport Avenue and every Friday from 3 to 7 p.m. in North Pacific Beach on the Corner of Cass and Chalcedony streets.
Other local venues serving organic and sustainable food include the Ocean Beach People’s Organic Foods Market, a vegetarian co-op located at 4765 Voltaire St., Seabreeze Organic Farm and the restaurant A.R. Valentien of the Torrey Pines Lodge.
For more information about local farmers markets, visit sdfarmbureau.org.
Pollan, who spoke at the Neurosciences Institute as part of the Revelle Forum, also suggested that concerned consumers view eatwellguide.com, an online directory to local stores that sell sustainable meat, poultry and dairy.