Collection to Consumption: A Visual Companion to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma
I love food. I don’t qualify that much, because I try not to make judgments about food. I don’t have many dietary absolutes except I’ll always devour chocolate and never again ingest balut. As a former chef and cooking teacher, I’ve certainly put my love of food where my mouth (and the rest of my body) is, turning a serious hobby into a profession for a few years.
Eating may be the one thing we have to do consciously to stay alive and, owing to the incredible variety and quantity of food available to most people in the West, eating to live is easier now than it’s ever been in human history. In fact, many people eat too much, which is a relatively recent phenomenon. Given that we have a choice of what to eat not only because we’re capable of eating a very wide variety of food but also because in the West (and increasingly around the world) we’re producing more than we need, we no longer have to eat to live — we can actually live to eat. But what to eat?
This first food dilemma for humans spawns several other dilemmas, the “who, what, when, where, and how” questions that journalists are trained to ask. But this is food, and because food is both hedonistic and absolutely necessary to stay alive they’re very easy questions not to ask. The book most responsible for making the source of our food a cause célèbre, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is Michael Pollan's authoritative attempt to answers those questions by using four types of meals as a way to dissect the materials and methods that make up those types of meals: fast food, big organic, natural agriculture, and foraged. He writes about the advantages of each of these meals and their corresponding farming methods (or collection method in the case of foraging), contrasting them against each other, moving from modern factory farming, through the government-controlled organic standard, to the completely unregulated natural agriculture philosophy, to foraging, which is almost completely controlled by nature.
Like I said, I love food, and didn’t want to pick and choose to photograph just those types of meals which would normally most appeal to me, so I covered all four meals. While Pollan’s comprehensive arc for each meal is truly fascinating and inspiring, the most interesting parts for me start at the consumer’s collection of the food and end with their consumption of it. I feel I adhered to the spirit of each type of meal, though I didn’t necessarily achieve the same level of purity Pollan did simply because as a writer treating himself as a subject wholly involved from collection to consumption, he had more control. Of course he does this to most effectively make his points, and the result is a great book that’s changed the way many people think about food and what they eat, which in my opinion is a very good thing.
This is my photographic essay for Journalism 4980: The Picture Story and Photographic Essay, a class taught at the University of Missouri - Columbia by David Rees during the Spring 2010 semester.
Fast Food
Even when it would appear that a family would be opposed to fast food in almost every way, the realities of life can dictate food choices more than a general philosophy. Claire and Mark Osborne, born in England and Malaysia respectively, grew up and went to school in England, moved to the U.S. when Claire got a job as an occupational therapist. They cook and eat at home most of the time and subscribe to a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program (in fact, they act as their neighborhood’s distribution point). Each member of the family is part of an organized sport; in Claire’s case, she teaches free, well-attended yoga classes twice a week. All the signs would seem to point to them giving fast food a wide berth, but not so. It’s ironic that some of the things which make them healthy, especially their physical activities and the attendant time commitment, make fast food very tempting, perhaps even necessary.
Fast food is convenience food. It’s ready within minutes nearly every hour of the day and provides lots of calories very quickly at relatively low cost. I have a difficult time being judgmental about even this type of food because for busy people and families, it’s sometimes the best way to eat. Of course, there are abominations like Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “Double Down” (an interesting sandwich that substitutes fried chicken breast patties for bread), and many other creations in the same spirit of excessiveness (peruse This Is Why You’re Fat for many fine examples). While huge fast-food chains have many food and food-like products, and chemicals to work with, after having worked in food service for several years, I can assure you that chefs who work in every restaurant in the world are trying to push the same rich/sweet/salty buttons we have in our brains that McDonald’s food scientists are trying to push in their laboratories.
Big Organic
Heather Frederick first started cooking for herself in college and began buying whatever organic produce was available wherever she shopped almost immediately because it tasted better and she agreed with the no-pesticide philosophy. Now she shops almost exclusively at the Sacramento Food Co-Op and the Sacramento farmer’s market. The Co-Op, which appears to be a normal grocery store in most ways, sources all of their fresh products from local farmers and ranchers who are certified organic.
Everyone seems to love the organic label! Healthier? Yes, studies have confirmed this. More delicious? Most people I’ve talked to say, yes. People feel great about buying it and many are willing to pay the extra price for what they know is a better product. It’s also pretty convenient, since in all but the smallest supermarkets, there’s an organic selection of fruits and vegetables year-round and there’s even a national chain, Whole Foods, which has made it easy to shop almost exclusively organic, from broccoli to cookies, chicken to shampoo.
For better or for worse, “organic” is a word now owned by the government, and they have regulations about who can legally use it and under what circumstances. That sounds like good consumer protection, since if you’re paying a premium price for something that’s supposed to be healthier for you and the environment, you want to have some assurance that you’re getting what you pay for. At the farmer’s market, Heather views those without the certification with some suspicion, skeptical that they don’t use toxic chemicals.
Originally the organic movement meant that the product was grown or raised locally, without chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides, on a small, usually family, farm that grew many types of foods and even raised animals for milk, meat, wool, or eggs. The organic certification has codified the most quantifiable and scalable portion of that philosophy by banning man-made inputs (fertilizers and pest and weed control). Now there are huge organic growing operations that use natural fertilizers and compost (though animal waste isn’t allowed), harvest their crops mechanically, and ship all over the country — indeed all over the world — to satisfy the increasing demand for organic products.
Even Wal-Mart has started carrying organic products and produce, which potentially could be game changing. When the world’s largest retailer senses a demand for organic food and starts ordering it from farms, ranches, and dairies, you can almost feel the soil shift underneath your feet.
Natural Agriculture
“The principle of the Natural Agricultural method is an overriding respect and concern for nature. Nature can teach us everything.” - Mokichi Okada, Shumei founder
If you’re trying to find where the spirit of organic farming drifted off to, this is where you’ll find it. Natural farming, completely unregulated and therefore not really marketable without educating consumers, essentially means letting nature be the master and the teacher, where the farmer nurtures a polyculture of plants and animals on the same land and sells them, often directly to the consumer, within the same locality. With a great sensitivity to and knowledge of the local soil, climate, seasons, and the needs and behaviors of animals, the natural farmer directs nature’s fertility to produce food products that are beyond the current organic standard in many ways, and ends up making the soil and surrounding environment stronger and healthier while producing food which some would say is the most delicious of all, a throwback to how food used to taste before the rise of industrial farming.
Lack of regulation cuts both ways for natural farmers, and education is key. Those that farm naturally are enthusiastic, even strident, about the differences not only between their method of farming and modern industrial farming, but also between natural and organic farming. Natural farmers generally don’t use any fertilizer at all, and don’t compost. One of the natural farming movement’s main proponents, Masanobu Fukuoka, had been composting on his farm in Japan with nothing more than rice straw for more than 25 years at the time he wrote his book, One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming. He talks about the way you farm and what you consume being more than just a way to get or provide calories, but an entire philosophy that starts with submitting to nature, humbly accepting that it knows better than humans and human science about how to thrive and be sustainable. From that standpoint, you do as little as possible to the soil and plants, merely encouraging the growth of some plants (your crops) over others (the weeds) at the right time. He calls it the “do-nothing method,” meaning he doesn’t do anything that he doesn’t have to do in order to produce healthy plants. As a result, his land is incredibly productive and continues to get healthier the more he farms it.
Natural farming is one of Shumei’s main principles, and the Japan-based spiritual organization has natural farms all over the world and works with the United Nations in Africa to help local populations grow food using natural farming methods. In Santa Cruz, where I made the pictures about natural farming, they have a beautiful 25-acre piece of land that is run by Masaharu Noda, the Japanese farmer who lives adjacent to the farm with his wife and two children who have free run of the place. While they do till the land (something Fukuoka doesn’t do), they do not compost at all. Because the farm is about five miles from the Pacific Ocean, the soil in the clearings where they plant is rather sandy, so they enrich the soil by mixing the sandier soil with the rich humus from the nearby forest. After just two years, his yields are much better and they take a wide variety of produce to local farmer’s markets three times a week and have a successful CSA program.
Foraged
Foraging is simply gathering food that usually hasn’t been cultivated or domesticated, and would otherwise go uneaten except by other animals. This covers materials found, hunted, fished, or collected from land as well as the water, even the air if you want to count the billions of wild yeasts in the air you can use for bread.
What the heck is the use of foraging in this modern age when you don’t anticipate getting terribly lost on the way to the supermarket and have to survive in the woods without a backpack full of Cliff bars? Foraging is rarely necessary, or at least you hope it isn’t, but it is truly interesting to be able to look around and know that you could feed yourself on the surprising number of edible and accessible plants that exist in parks, forests, your neighbor’s backyard, the ocean, maybe even in the sidewalk cracks. You will definitely look at the natural world around you differently when you learn what’s edible. After reading the chapter on natural agriculture in The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he talks with a farmer who considers himself a grass farmer, I started looking at the myriad types of grass in the fields outside of Merced, Calif., where I’ve been living during this class, very differently -- through bovine eyes. Foraging takes this to another level entirely, but since we’re harvesting what nature has rather indiscriminately grown, our knowledge has to be so much greater than someone picking up a bundle of mustard greens at Whole Foods. The most notorious example of modern man’s ignorance, even fear, of wild foods is perfectly embodied by mushrooms.
Iso Rabin, who has worked mainly in food service, started Forage SF after learning to forage for wild mushrooms in northern California and then selling them to restaurants in the Bay Area, a place with a very strong and cutting-edge food culture. Using his tiny company (he’s the only permanent employee), he has a multi-pronged approach to bringing greater awareness of what’s edible in nature to the curious in California’s Bay Area. First, he hires experts to give foraging tours to people. Iso is no slouch when it comes to identifying edible plants, but he says the people he hires are incredible; you can point to any plant and they can tell you what it is and whether or not it’s edible. He also organizes the once-monthly SF Underground Farmer’s Market that is exclusively for products that have been foraged, grown or raised in people’s backyards, or made in people’s own kitchens. While not exactly legal, or even close to legal, authorities haven’t busted Rabin or the market, and the attendance has been increasing every month, with over 3,000 people coming to the last one in April.
The third prong in Rabin’s mini-empire is his monthly Wild Kitchen dinners. May’s dinner, which I attended, sold out in three days, fed 70 people eight courses over 3 1/2 hours, and there were more than 60 people on the waiting list. Not every ingredient in every one of the eight dishes is foraged, but they are all local, the ones that aren’t foraged are either natural or organic. Rabin isn’t shooting for purity; he’s looking to raise awareness of wild foods, feed people that way. I think the thing that struck me most about the dinner was how many people it took to make it happen. I have no idea how many people it took to gather the stinging nettles; black trumpet mushrooms; mussels; raise, slaughter and dress the local grass-fed beef; collect the wild seaweed; milk the cow for the handmade mozzarella; gather the mushrooms for the candy cap mushroom ice cream (they have an incredible maple syrup flavor, really!), but my guess is that it took far more than the 70 people who ate the meal to bring it to fruition. But what sweet fruition it was!