The Ominvore’s Dilemma – making sustainable food choices

You’ll read a lot here at Live Well about the importance of your diet including organic fruits and vegetables, range-free chickens and eggs, grass-fed beef, and wild salmon. But it is important to look at the bigger picture, in a word, sustainability. Sustainability should be the basis for how we produce, process, and choose our foods. Here are two key issues that we need to be looking at:
1) that we insist that crops and animals are grown and raised in ways that preserve the integrity of our soil and water, and maintain the nutrient value of the ground in and on which our foods are grown, and
2) that we choose local foods avoiding the environmental impact of shipping foods thousands of miles using disappearing and polluting carbon fuels.

Michael Pollan addresses the issue of sustainability in an elegant and compelling way in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Pollan describes how the large agri-business farms must use chemical fertilizers to replace the natural nutrients that have been depleted by repeatedly over-farming large areas with single crops, i.e., corn, wheat, or soybeans, year after year. The fertilizer and other chemicals needed for this kind of large-scale farming to work, then run off the land into the rivers and streams. Pollan vividly describes huge feedlots where cattle stand in their own waste, and how it is virtually impossible under these conditions to keep bacteria from getting into the meat after slaughter.

But Pollan also gives us a comparative close-up look at pockets of acreage where sustainable farming persists. On these farms, varied crops and animals are rotated through the fields regularly in a natural way so that the waste product of one life form provides nutrition for the next. Here there are built in natural pest control agents that keep each living thing protected from predation. Therefore, the need for chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and antibiotics is eliminated, protecting our environment and our health.

Pollan’s book provides a refreshing glimpse at an original style of self-contained farming that a relatively few small farmers maintain that takes care of the land, that allows animals to live in a more natural, less stressful style, and that is free of the need for external synthetic products….a farm where local people can get chemical and antibiotic free food by driving just a few miles, rather than from halfway around the world. His story of one of these farmers who expresses his love for self-sustaining farming in both words and actions is both affirming and captivating.

The troubling issue that looms is whether or not there are, and will be, enough young farmers who love this type of stewardship, and are willing to commit to the life of hard work, often with unpredictable results, that it takes to farm this way; and, as importantly, whether the rest of us are willing to invest a bit more financially for food grown in this labor-intensive, but healthy fashion.

There are many lessons to be learned in Michael Pollan’s fascinating book that is fast-becoming a classic. Pollan not only describes in an objective way trends in today’s food industry, but shares with us his own personal experiences as he sought to resolve the omnivore’s dilemma for himself.

Omnivore’s Dilemma is a book that I recommend to all my friends, and now that includes you. If you want to know more about how the food production industry evolved to where it is today, and how we can make choices that have the potential of reversing some of the more destructive trends, Pollan’s book is a great place to start.

Each of us needs to decide what we are willing to commit to…FIRST we must decide what we stand for…THEN we can take action on these standards by making food choices accordingly.

In health-
Jess

Jessica Adlin, MS, CN