Secondhand Nation

Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

If you live in the Midwest and have been noticing little bits of sparkly fluff explosively cartwheeling about the atmosphere late at night, don't panic.  It's not an alien invasion or evil wizards or anything like that.

No, that's just my mind, getting totally BLOWN AWAY, while I stay up late reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2006). 

Okay, I admit that it's not like I never heard of a farmer's market or that I imagined what transpires in modern slaughterhouses to be a day at the beach.  But who knew that over 100 pages on the history of corn in North America could be so riveting?  Or mushroom hunting?  Or just plain old hunting after all?  Did you know that there are wild pigs in California?  The cocktail-party trivia factor alone makes this book worthwhile.

Since I'm late to the party on reviewing, many others have complained that Pollan offers too much description and not enough proscription for us clueless omnivores out there who think food comes from grocery stores, drive-thrus and vending machines.  But getting a feel for the industrial-food business and its strangle-hold on our gullets is unfortunately necessary these days.  Industrial food production is a long and winding chain that has very little to do with nurturing people or the environment for that matter.  You'd think people would be more interested in where the chow they shovel into their maws comes from, but this isn't the case.  Clearly, we've got better things to do, like not read books or continually sit on our asses.

Pollan reviews the ethics of meat-eating , with a primer on animal rights that made me want to read everything written by animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, but manages not to shove down your throat - excuse the pun - any dietary decrees.  After being told that margarine is okay but not to eat bread, I'm a bit weary of magic bullets, thanks.   

The discussion Big Organic left me feeling embarrassed for ever darkening the door of Whole (Paycheck) Foods, not to mention the constant pats on the back I gave myself for buying organic cherries and prebagged and pre-washed salad. 

(Long Rambling Aside:  Uh, let's define what the prefix "pre" really means in the case of the bagged and pre-washed salad.  Yes, it's clearly bagged.  But that little green inchworm I find in there from time to time?  Suggests that my definition of "washed" clearly diverges in a yellow wood with that of Earthbound Farms.) 

What I appreciated about The Omnivore's Dilemma is that the author leaves you asking more questions than you would have guessed you'd need answers to prior to unpacking his heavy tome. But that's cool with me.  Every 15 seconds I am told by some dumbshit from the modern media machine noteworthy proclamations like having fat friends makes you fat or no-shit-sherlock revelations like talking to babies makes them smarter than plopping them in front of televisions.

Enough with this rickety advice masquerading as certainty!  We are a nation obsessed with certainty, unable to sit still through the discomfiting consideration that complex concepts require. We need to wrestle with the omnivore's dilemma for a while, deal with our squirming desire to grasp at the nearest conclusion before making catchy-headline pronouncements. 

Since reading the book, I've calculated the logistics of buying local food and pondered the offerings of my local foodshed.  I've researched food preservation and wondered how I can figure out the proper timing to can and freeze according to the harvest.   I've considered the work involved in changing to a meatless diet.  I've been wracked with guilt for how much household wisdom we have lost, in just a few generations, about how to wrest our meals from nature in ways that don't produce giant lagoons of pig shit.  I'm cogitating and contemplating and making lists of everything I know and don't know.  I don't think I've been as moved to act by a book since I was a rambunctious liberal arts major.   

And I'm not the only one.  A great blog with a great name, The Ethicurean, (featuring an enviably fabulous tagline:  Chew the Right Thing) has been similarly inspired and offers constant comment on the state of our national eating disorder.  The Ethicureans follow the Gospel of Pollan and have introduced me to a great new acronym - S/O/L/E food, which encourages people to make choices that are either Sustainable, Organic, Local or Ethical. 

A pretty good guideline, and quite a ringer, too, with the homonym and double meaning.  But I'm still in the middle of my own personal food dilemmas and will be for some time to come, which underscores again to me what an important book Pollan has written. 

Food Not Lawns: Book Review

All Urban-Squatting Black Flaggers take note:  I am a homeowner.  Yes, I decided to rent out my hard-earned money so that I could live in a box that sits out in the rain and rots. 

Owning my home means I have a lawn, too.  A while back I selected some review titles for a publication that has since folded (Clamor Magazine) and one of them piqued my interest:

Food Not Lawns: How to Turn your Yard into a Garden and your Neighborhood into a Community by H.C. Flores

Wow, I thought.  I'm gonna re-haul my lawn, grow vegetables, freak out the neighborhood and transform my front yard into a meeting space where we can all get acquainted, eat raspberries from the bush, create harmony and collapse in a heap of naked bodies like in 70's nature porn...

Well.  Not quite.  But I did want to see about transforming my lawn.  Having nothing but boring grass seems like a waste of time, plus there's that mowing business, which requires gas and effort and a slight sense of timing.  And having a wild rumpus of plants where sedate, changeless grass once grew all supports my vision of living in a witch cottage, where children dare to ring the bell...

Unfortunately, Flores' doesn't offer much for someone like me.  There's a lot of rehashing about why I should give a shit about the environment (which I do) and why I should learn the pleasures of growing my own food (which I have) and why I should quit my job, work from home and be barefoot more often (yes, yes and no, I hate calluses.)  So after being beaten with the Eco-Stick, I'm sitting there waiting for the actual information that will help me:  How to transform this bitch of a monoculture surrounding my house? 

What Flores wrote with respect to that topic could have filled a pamphlet. (The gist?  Cover your lawn with mulch, let it kill the grass, add poop and soil, plant.  The End.) Instead, she goes on for 333 pages about why our planet is being pillaged and rapined and why we must acquire the painful urgency required to give a big stinging shit about it. 

I wanted to punch a hole in the book and scream "I Do!  I Do Give a Shit!  But I'm not getting rid of my refrigerator or my car just yet and I'm not making a water pond to filter greywater in the backyard because I live in Minnesota where there are 876 trillion mosquitoes who would love to breed there.  And I'm not raising chickens or doing skill shares in the park or dumpster diving behind greenhouses!  So put down your damn acoustic guitar and tell me how to convert the grass to the garden already!"

I mean, I'm a homeowner and so are my neighbors.  We obviously are paying mortgages to somebody.  So we're not going to quit our jobs and dread our hair and start raising chickens in the garage.  But can't we still make a difference environmentally-speaking?  I mean, the people who don't have lawns might be riding around on these kinda tall single-speed bikes and not eating meat and planting guerilla gardens, but shouldn't you try to meet the lawn-mongers where they mow? 

It's an interesting book, cram-packed with ideas and how-tos:  seed saving, garden layering, composting, working with children, kinship gardens, water-wise garden plans, consensus-building.  I hate to bash a book that offers so many solutions, except that I believe the author spent too much time belaboring the point about environmental degradation.  If I'm buying a book about transforming my lawn into a garden, chances are good that I'm already converted. 

So buy it (or dig it out of the dumpster behind the book collective, whatever) and keep it on the shelf as a good reference as you grow more ambitious and radical.   Don't be tempted to do everything at once, as I was, otherwise you'll get pissed at the book and throw it in your compost (which you can do, as it's printed on recycled paper).