New York Diary

You are what you eat?

Flipping through The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, is an enlightening exercise in understanding one's food. Who would have thought that the calories we Americans eat are to an unprecedented extent derived from corn? Who considers the lack of a "food culture" in America to be an important factor in everything from dieting fads to obesity? Who, other than Pollan, is crazy enough to produce a meal by hunting and gathering, in this day and age?

Some of these insights about food are really quite shocking. In just one example, we learn that the energy in a chicken McNugget comes almost exclusively from corn--from the nearly-exclusively corn-fed chicken to the modified cornstarch that binds the meat together, from the soy lecithin for flavoring (the name is deceptive--it can be, and usually is, derived from corn) to the corn flour breading on the outside, and even to the corn oil that the thing is cooked in. In some very real sense, a meal of chicken McNuggets is processed corn held together by processed corn, breaded by processed corn, fried in processed corn. And don't even get me started on the sauces for this scrumptious meal. (They're full of high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch, xanthan gum, dextrose, and even caramel color, all of which are corn-derived.) It's an historical anomoly to eat like this: in other times and places, chicken feed off of wheat and grubs (which in turn feed off of myriad kinds of vegetable matter), corn and grass and millet and barley. Flour for breading might be wheat-based; flavoring would be herbal and therefore derived from a selection of varied and aromatic plants. Oil could come from corn, or soy, or olives, or sunflower seeds, or indeed from any number of available trees and plants. Sweetness (in a dipping sauce, for example) came from cane sugar, palm sugar, honey (flower-derived), or molasses (from sugar cane, the sugar beet, or sorghum). Corn-derived preservatives and colorings are a new culinary invention.

This is not to say, precisely, that there's a problem in depending on only one plant to convert solar energy into the bulk of our food, nutritious and not-so-nutritious--but it is to point out how strange this moment is in the history of human gastronomy. We Americans eat more single-mindedly than anybody else, ever. This represents a monocultured victory over environment: corn is a versatile, hardy, nutritious foodstuff. It's not crazy that we should depend on it more even than the Inuit depend on fish (which, incidentally, eat any number of varied aquatic vegetables anyway). Pollan does a superb job of showing how strangely we eat, however, and I find this rumination compelling.

But what's more interesting--and, sadly, less emphasized in Pollan's book--is the author's take not on food, but on people. He hypothesizes that the uniquely American dilemma of obesity stems from a uniquely American lack of a food culture. The French know how to eat healthily, Pollan suggests, because they have a long tradition of eating and eating well that has been passed down over hundreds or even thousands of years--and this tradition informs their food choices still today. Americans fall for ridiculous dieting schemes (no butter! no carbs! lots of protein! minimal protein!) because we don't have a strong cultural grounding in reasonable eating habits. The argument is a bit questionable, of course, if only because increasingly we are seeing that the "uniquely American" obesity problem is finding its way into numerous other countries with much more entrenched eating habits. Still, it's an interesting thought (and that always attracts me, what can I say). Moreover, it does seem intuitively true that a culture with no sense of "summer vegetables," a decreasing awareness of the starch-meat-vegetable mealtime trio, the need for a government-sponsored food pyramid, and no national cooking style, should be far less sure about what its people ought to be eating than another, more gastronomically aware culture.

The most interesting idea Pollan's whole book, though, is not even this speculation on the healthful influence of national pride through foodstuffs. It is instead an idea that Pollan tosses around in the introduction and then quickly dismisses as inessential to the main investigation of his text. That's a shame. Where our food comes from, and how it gets to our table, does make for interesting reading. But the idea that our biological ability to eat nearly any organic thing has made us smarter and more social--well, that makes for interesting thinking. And it's an idea that Pollan never follows up on, and one whose case he doesn't compellingly make.

I wish he did. For the Omnivore's Dilemma, succinctly put, is the question of what to eat. It's a question that doesn't plague many animals: "The koala bear doesn't worry about what to eat," Pollan rightly tells us. "If it looks and smells and tastes like a eucalyptus leaf, it must be dinner. The koala's culinary preferences are hardwired in its genes." But for omnivores like ourselves--and rats, for that matter--the question of what to have for supper is much harder to answer. The abundance of choice creates a stress where other species have none. At the same time, though, omnivory allows us great versatility: people (and rats) can live almost anywhere on earth (which stands in stark contrast to the Australia-bound koala). Our ability to eat almost anything shapes us in many more ways than simply determining the kinds of nutrients we ingest.

By far the most provocative claim that Pollan makes along these lines--the claim he doesn't follow up on, and the claim that I wish was the basis for this book--is that omnivory implies mental acuity. After all, Pollan says, unlike other animals, we have to have complex memory and pattern recognition skills just to eat. The fact that our food preferences aren't genetically hardwired means that we have to consider food anew each time we are hungry. What do I feel like eating today? Are those the same berries that made me sick last week, or are they more like the sweet berries I picked for supper a week ago? Is it better to roast my fish or eat it raw, like sushi?

There's a social and educational angle to this, too: maybe I've never encounetered these berries before, but my parents tell me not to eat them because they're poisonous. I was taught to cook my food, to grind my grain to make flour, to shop at Wegman's and to put the leftover chicken in the freezer. Baby humans starve when left alone; grown men have learned to feed themselves. For people, eating implies memory, learning, conscious consideration, and possibly even rationality.

This leads Pollan ultimately to suggest that "the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore's dilemma" (though he foists responsibility for the claim onto "many [unnamed] anthropologists"). In other words, people are smart--at least in part--because it's impossible to survive as a dumb omnivore. If we were stupid, we'd starve.

Pollard's book is more about food than it is about people (grand designs to the contrary notwithstanding). But it seems to me that the smartness claim might be interesting and easy to test--and not by anthropological theory, but rather by hard scientific experiment. If we looked at the brains of people and of rats and discovered that they both had disproportionately large frontal lobes, for example--while intermediate, non-omnivorous species did not--that would provide some compelling evidence for a specific, definable link between what we eat and how our brains are wired. And that would make for a great book.

posted by Skay @ 5:55 PM