Pollan's moral-o-meter

January 27, 2008

Today's Review From

The Atlantic Monthly

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

Hard to Swallow

A review by B. R. Myers

For centuries civilized society took a dim view of food lovers,

calling them " gourmands " and " gluttons " and placing them on a

moral par with lechers. They were even assigned their own place

in hell, and I don't mean a table near the kitchen: They were

to be force-fed for eternity. Not until halfway through the Industrial

Revolution did the word gourmet come into use. Those who have

since applied it to themselves have done a fine job of converting

the world's scorn to respect. The pleasures of the oral cavity

(though we must say " palate " instead) are now widely regarded

as more important, more intrinsically moral, and a more vital

part of civilized tradition than any other pleasures. People who

think nothing of saying " I'm not much of a reader " will grow shamefaced

when admitting an ignorance of wine or haute cuisine. Some recent

movies have even tried to turn banquets into heroic affairs. Advertising

has abetted the trend, while political correctness, with its horror

of judging anyone's " lifestyle choices, " has done its bit to muffle

dissent.

The sexual revolution went faster than this but not as far, which

is why we can still call someone a lecher. Our common language

no longer has a pejorative for those who live to eat. Gourmand

has taken on an even fancier ring than gourmet, while the word

glutton can be applied only to someone who eats an enormous amount

of food at one sitting -- usually cheap food, and with the standard

of what constitutes " enormous " revised upward each year for obvious

reasons. When discussing Kim Jong Il, who dines on imported delicacies

while his countrymen starve, even our own journalists must describe

his fixation in terms of connoisseurship. The last holdover of

the old way of thinking is the Catholic catechism, which keeps

gluttony on its list of sins and indicates -- by using the word

gourmandise in the French version, and by defining sin in part

as " a perverse attachment to certain goods " -- that the original

meaning of gluttony is to be understood. No doubt this too will

change. A French committee wants to convince Rome that God condones

expensive multicourse meals; He just doesn't like us getting extra

helpings.

But the idolatry of food cuts across class lines. This can be

seen in the public's toleration of a level of cruelty in meat

production that it would tolerate nowhere else. If someone inflicts

pain on an animal for visual, aural, or sexual gratification,

we consider him a monster, and the law makes at least a token

effort at punishment. If someone's goal is to put the " product "

in his mouth? Chacun ˆÝ son goˆªt.

Still, people are more concerned about animal welfare than they

used to be. They also know that the more humanely the average

animal is treated, the better it will taste. Thus it is that Gourmet

magazine recently ran an unflinching exposÔø‡ of the conditions

in chicken slaughterhouses. But some things cannot be produced

humanely; to taste the way it should, the foie-gras duck must

be force-fed, the lobster must be boiled alive, and so on.

Literate opinion therefore suggests that a few dishes should simply

be done without. This is where the serious food lover draws the

line. " I detect a backlash...among fed up gourmands, " the editor

of Best Food Writing 2006 notes with approval, " who refuse to

renounce foie gras and caviar just because they are produced by

less-than-noble methods. " (That just because says it all.) The

backlash takes the form of pieces like Julie Powell's essay " Lobster

Killer, " which the anthology's editor found " hilarious " :

Over a period of two weeks...I went on a murderous

rampage. I committed gruesome, atrocious acts...If news

of the carnage was not widely remarked upon in the local

press, it was only because my victims were not Catholic

schoolgirls or Filipino nurses, but crustaceans. This

distinction means that I am not a murderer in the legal

sense. But I have blood on my hands, even if it is the

clear blood of lobsters.

This is a prime example of food writers' hostility to the very

language of moral values. In mocking and debasing it, they exert,

with Madison Avenue's help, a baleful influence on American English

as a whole. If words like sinful and decadent are now just a cutesy

way of saying " delicious but fattening, " so that any serious use

of them marks the speaker as a crank, and if it is more acceptable

to talk of the " evils of gluten " than of the " evils of gluttony, "

much of the blame must be laid at their doorstep. Another sampling

from Powell's piece:

People say lobsters make a terrible racket in the pot,

trying -- reasonably enough -- to claw their way out

of the water. I wouldn't know. I spent the next twenty

minutes watching a golf game on the TV with the volume

turned up...When I ventured back into the kitchen, the

lobsters were very red, and not making any racket at

all...Poor little beasties.

Zoologists have recently discounted the notion that lobsters feel

no pain when boiled alive. The gourmets' response is to giggle

at the plight of the " beasties " in the hope that others will follow

suit. (With comparable tastelessness, a piece on foie gras in

the anthology is titled " Stuffed Animals. " ) But when asked to

laugh at the suffering of a living thing, or to drown out a moral

compunction by turning up the TV, the American meat eater begins

to sense that his values are not so far from the vegetarian's

after all. If food writers want to show what " a perverse attachment

to certain goods " looks like, they are going about it in just

the right way.

This brings me to a would-be exception: Michael Pollan, the New

York Times Magazine writer whose best-seller The Omnivore's Dilemma

has just been published in paperback. In the first seven chapters,

Pollan writes of the role of corn in American life in such an

improbably thrilling manner that I have to recommend the book

despite my reservations about the rest of it. About a McDonald's

meal Pollan shared with his family in a moving car, for instance,

we learn that

if you include the corn in the gas tank...the amount

of corn that went into producing our movable fast-food

feast would easily have overflowed the car's trunk,

spilling a trail of golden kernels on the blacktop.

What a startling and memorable image; a lesser writer would have

said " road " instead, and wondered why it didn't quite work.

After this, though, Pollan moves on to explore what he calls the

" moral and psychological implications " of killing and eating animals.

The phrase shows at once where he is headed; the reason those

adjectives are so often yoked in contemporary American English

is that the second swallows up the first. A moral opposition to

the majority's way of doing things can thus be more easily treated,

as it was in the Soviet Union, as a mental-health problem. But

before going any further, I should allow Pollan to explain the

book's title. " In the fall of 2002, " he tells us,

one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human

life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table.

I'm talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight,

Americans changed the way they eat. A collective spasm

of what can only be described as carbophobia...ruined

an untold number of perfectly good meals.

So violent a change in a culture's eating habits is

surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly

it would never have happened in a culture in possession

of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating.

The feverish tone makes clear that Pollan is writing for his fellow

gourmets, the sort of people who can read the line " ruined an

untold number of perfectly good meals " with a straight face. I

can't help thinking, though, that with hamburgers and milk shakes

conquering deeply rooted diets from Mexico to Micronesia, America's

eating habits may well be the most stable in the world. Even the

Atkins-diet craze reduced national bread sales by no more than

3 or 4 percentage points. Pollan nonetheless asserts that our

dietary upheavals have returned us, with " atavistic vengeance, "

to a bewilderment last experienced millennia ago:

When you can eat just about anything nature has to

offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably

stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential

foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you. This

is The Omnivore's Dilemma...first given that name thirty

years ago by a University of Pennsylvania research psychologist

named Paul Rozin.

Then Rozin's dictionary must be the one that Alanis Morissette

used to look up the word ironic, but let that pass. Is our national

eating disorder really a matter of people pacing supermarket aisles

in an agony of indecision? Or do we perhaps feel too little anxiety

about what we eat? Despite his choice of title, the subject does

not hold Pollan's interest for long, so readers will have to make

up their own minds.

Pivotal to the book is Pollan's claim that

our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature,

both body (we possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws

of the omnivore, equally well suited to tearing meat

and grinding seeds) and soul.

One might as well describe man the way the anthropologist Ernest

Becker did, as a digestive tract with teeth at one end and an

anus at the other, and claim that the soul is shaped out of that.

In which case, I don't want one. But most of us use soul to mean

the part of humanness that is not shaped out of that. In contrast

to the fearless Becker, Pollan thinks that taking a hard look

at human nature is more a matter of leaning over the museum rail

at the caveman exhibit. Seeing only the painted mammoth on the

horizon, so to speak, he derives the rightness of meat eating

from the fact that humans are physically suited to it, they enjoy

it, and they have engaged in it until modern times without feeling

much " ethical heartburn. " (Only a food writer would use such an

appalling phrase.) According to Pollan, this " reality " demands

our respect. The same reasoning could be used to defend our mistreatment

of children: In body and instinct, we are marvelously well-equipped

for making their lives hell. If many cultures now object to abusing

them, it is thanks to new values, to people who refused to respect

the time-honored " reality. "

But by reducing man's moral nature to an extension of our instincts,

Pollan is free to present his appetite as a sort of moral-o-meter,

the final authority for judging the rightness of all things culinary.

He shoots a wild pig, for example, hugely enjoying the experience.

We even get a spiel about how hunting makes people face the inevitability

of their own death. (Psychologists have long asserted the opposite:

As Otto Rank put it, and in words relevant to meat eating in general,

" the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice,

of the other. " ) Ah, but then Pollan sees a photo of himself leering

over the corpse and feels bad. So is killing pigs right or wrong?

Or as he puts it, " What if it turned out I couldn't eat this meat? "

Spoiler alert: He could. He even congratulates himself on " doing

well by the animal " by cooking and chewing it with the proper

reverence. As reluctant as he is to attribute fear and pain to

a live animal -- one mustn't anthropomorphize! -- he sees nothing

strange in attributing a concern for decorum to a dead one. He

apparently believes that we cannot fully relate to animals until

they become food. In the introduction, we are told that eating

something -- " transforming the body of the world into our bodies

and minds " -- constitutes the deepest possible " relationship "

with it, " the most profound engagement " of all. (German police

had to listen to similar reasoning in 2002 after arresting one

Armin Meiwes, who had just put his omnicompetent jaws to work

on a Siemens engineer.) Now, Epicurus, who strikes me as a vegetarian

Pollan might listen to, made the rather obvious point that no

living thing experiences death. As soon as life ceases, the body

ceases to deserve the attribute human or animal, as the root of

the latter word makes especially clear. The pig thus takes its

farewell from Pollan almost as soon as he pulls his trigger in

greeting. The mere flesh left behind tastes remarkably like that

of us " long pigs -- to use the notorious cannibal term -- and

the digestive tract cannot tell them apart at all. There is less

" transformation " going on here than Pollan would like to think.

The moral-o-meter is applied to other meats as well (the book

is subtitled " A Natural History of Four Meals " ). Pollan buys a

steer from a pasture in South Dakota, whereupon it is loaded onto

a truck. When he catches up to it in a factory farm in Kansas,

it is hock-deep in excrement. Pollan is far too talented not to

convey the ghastliness of the " manure lagoon. " (This is a writer,

to mention again his tour de force section on corn, who can make

even biochemistry vivid.) But does he sense the poignancy in the

reunion?

There stood 534 and I, staring dumbly at one another.

Glint of recognition? None, none whatsoever. I told

myself not to take it personally; 534 and his pen mates

have been bred for their marbling, after all, not their

ability to form attachments...If I stared at my steer

hard enough, I could imagine the white lines of the

butcher's chart dissecting his black hide...

It is all too obvious which of the two has a harder time forming

attachments. Then again, Pollan does not like what he sees; he

senses that cows raised in such unnatural conditions cannot possibly

taste good. Though he doesn't get to eat " his " steer, he later

finishes a fast-food cheeseburger that leaves him " simply, regrettably

full. "

The wrongness of factory farming thus established, Pollan heads

off to an idyllic farm in Virginia, " a scene of almost classic

pastoral beauty. " For all its relevance to the big picture of

American meat production, it might as well have been a place where

animals get to die of old age. But gourmets love to preach the

benefits of organic fare to the country at large, feigning a child's

ignorance of economics all the while; it is the only way they

can pass off their pursuit of pleasure as a social conscience.

On the farm, Pollan gets to try his hand at a little throat cutting:

Daniel explained that you wanted to sever only the

artery, not the head, so that the heart would continue

to beat and pump out the blood...I told myself that

their suffering, once their throats were slit, was brief.

Yet it took several long minutes for the spasms to subside...but

the waiting birds did not seem panicked, and I took

solace in their seeming obliviousness. Yet, honestly,

there wasn't much time for these reflections, because

you're working on an assembly (or, really, disassembly)

line.

There is, however, time for the reflection, " Was I going to be

able to enjoy eating chicken so soon after my stint in the processing

shed and gut-composting pile? " The paramount question of enjoyment

has ramifications for organic food in general; a gourmet is not

going to stint on his pleasure just to save the Earth. When Pollan

finally cooks a chicken for a few friends, the moral-o-meter's

reading is conclusive: The meal is " out of this world. " The only

complication is the presence of his friends' son Matthew, " fifteen

and currently a vegetarian, " who " had many more questions about

killing chickens than I thought wise to answer at the dinner table. "

Of course! But doesn't Pollan say in his introduction that the

pleasures of eating are " only deepened by knowing " ? And if it

is so natural to kill and eat animals, and so sentimental to think

otherwise, why is the vegetarian the only one who can stomach

the details? Pollan can't be bothered telling us why Matthew became

a vegetarian. We are clearly meant to take it for a mere teenage

phase, nothing a restriction of his options won't cure: " He confined

himself to the corn. "

Our investigative journalist interviews none of America's other

vegetarians, either, relying instead on poultry farmers who claim

to have sighted one or two. (We're to believe an anecdote, which

shines with all the coherence and credibility of a letter to Penthouse,

that a PETA member turned up at the " processing shed " one day,

asking to kill chickens to overcome an aversion to meat.) This

is not to say that Pollan brooks no contradiction. An entire chapter

of The Omnivore's Dilemma is devoted to a scrupulously fair debate

with the text of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and Pollan

summarizes the Australian ethicist's views in the same lively

style as his own. But he prefaces it all by smirking that he read

the book in a fancy restaurant while eating " a rib-eye steak cooked

medium rare, " thereby putting all this morality business into

the proper perspective.

Though Singer's reasoning may be inexorable, Pollan's appetite

is unimpressed:

I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality

is based on interests rather than characteristics, then

either I have to take the steer's interest into account

or accept that I'm a speciesist.

For the time being, I decided, I'll plead guilty as

charged. I finished my steak.

This spurious show of open-mindedness recalls Hans Kˆºng, the

Swiss theologian who uses a comparable technique when defending

Christianity against secular critics. The similarity is not surprising,

considering that our dietary and religious habits are both acquired

in early childhood, which makes them hard to break no matter what

we learn in later life. The Pollan-Kˆºng Technique goes like this:

One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into

a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending

that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended

it. The irreconcilability of one's belief with reason is then

held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with

which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties.

As Pollan writes:

I have to say there is a part of me that envies the

moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of

the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams

of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a

denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

How arrogant, in other words, how pitifully close to mental illness,

to want to be a better person! But this is where the Christian

and the gourmet part ways.

All the same, Pollan decides to indulge his inner George Plimpton

again, becoming " a reluctant, and, I fervently hoped, temporary

vegetarian. " How seriously he took his meat-free diet can be guessed

at. Though he claims to have stuck to it for at least a month,

this most voluble of food writers does not name a single thing

he ate. Nor, it seems, did he dine with any vegetarians.

" What troubles me most about my vegetarianism, " Pollan nonetheless

has the fatuity to write,

is the subtle way it alienates me from other people...As

a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that

I don't eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her,

she'll make something special for me, in which case

I'll feel bad. On this matter I'm inclined to agree

with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary

prohibition as bad manners...I also feel alienated from...family

traditions like my mother's beef brisket at Passover.

It is common these days to see moral arguments veer off into appeals

to self-interest. We have reached a pretty pass when they start

veering off into the realm of etiquette. The bit about Passover

surprised me a little, Pollan having just tacitly admitted what

he thinks of Orthodox Jews, but perhaps for him it's all about

the brisket. A record of the gourmet's ongoing failure to think

in moral terms, The Omnivore's Dilemma helps one to understand

why no reformer ever gave a damn about fine dining -- or the family

dinner table either. When Jesus vowed to turn children against

their parents, he knew he'd be ruining an untold number of perfectly

good meals.

B.R. Myers is a contributing editor of the Atlantic and the author

of A Reader's Manifesto (2002).

January 27, 2008

Just goes to show how much people can waffle on when they are being paid.

Incidentally, vegans also use the word sinful to mean delicious - as in

Sinfully Vegan.

Jo

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<yarrow

Sunday, January 27, 2008 6:58 AM