Takeaways from The Omnivore's Dilemma: Part I
A look inside US industrial agriculture
If regenerative agriculture is such a win-win for crop yield and the environment, why is only 1.5% of US arable land farmed regeneratively?
I picked up The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan to start to understand the US food system and answer this question. In this post, I share my main takeaways from Part I, in which Pollan traces the journey of a McNugget from an industrial farm to a McDonald’s drive-through. If you’re also coastal city-dweller like me, you’ll probably be surprised by what you learn about corn, US farm policy, and agribusiness.
We’re a nation of corn people
I’ll start with Pollan’s punchline: “that’s us: processed corn, walking.”
It would appear that 21st-century North Americans have managed to consume an unprecedented amount of corn carbon. Bear with me—it’s not that we consume a lot of whole corn. It’s simply that a lot more of the carbon in our bodies originated from corn, as opposed to wheat or legumes. This is easy to believe when you consider corn-fed beef, corn-fed chickens, and therefore corn-fed milk and eggs, high fructose corn syrup, and a variety of processed oils:
A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived by corn.
I do find this reductionist claim slightly opportunistic—after all, you could similarly argue that we’re walking carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, etc—but Pollan’s point still stands: corn is king in the average American diet.
Science sidebar: how we know this
Corn has the marvelous privilege of being a “C-4 plant.” “C-4” indicates that during photosynthesis, where other plants might create compounds with three atoms of carbon, corn creates compounds with four. Moreover, C-4 plants tend to capture a greater proportion of a particular carbon isotope, carbon-13, relative to carbon-12. As such, scientists have studied the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in humans and uncovered its ever-increasing prevalence in our diets.
Haber-Bosch and Butz beget agribusiness
How did we get to this point? Corn had been prized in America for its versatility and the efficiency of its sunlight-to-carbohydrates operation, but “by the 1980s the diversified family farm was history… and corn was king.” Today, the US is the largest producer, consumer, and exporter of corn in the world.
Pollan attributes its explosion in the US to two helping hands, one biological and one economic: the' Haber-Bosch process and Earl Butz’s US Farm Policy.
Haber-Bosch’s synthetic fertilizer
If carbon determines the quantity of life, nitrogen determines the quality. However, it’s only present in limited quantities in the ground, replenished from atmospheric nitrogen by nitrogen-fixing plants. Farmers needed to give their land breaks to prevent them from getting “corn sick,” plant legumes to help add nitrogen to the soil, or supplement with natural fertilizer in the form of manure or compost.
Until one day in the 1950s, when synthetic ammonium nitrate fertilizer created by the Haber-Bosch process found its way to American farmlands:
Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material—chemical fertilizer—into outputs of corn.
It’s been estimated that if had synthetic fertilizer not arrived on the scene, the world’s population would be 40-50% smaller than it is (a là Paul Ehrlich’s feared scenario depicted in The Population Bomb).
Fritz Haber was the scientist who discovered the process to “fix” nitrogen from the air into a molecule that could be used by a living thing, while Carl Bosch is credited for commercializing it. Most accounts of Haber acknowledge the controversy of his other work, and I’ll do the same here; even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920, “his chemistry kept alive Germany’s hopes for victory” in World War I and also developed poison gases including Zyklon B.
US Farm Policy
This one came more of a surprise to me. I’ve only recently started to appreciate the magnitude of the influence of policy. To see it in play in agriculture was enlightening, to say the least.
When it comes to food, nature can make a mockery of the classical economics of supply and demand—nature in the form of good or bad weather, of course, but also the nature of the human body, which can consume only so much food no matter how plentiful the supply.
Pollan outlines two systems used to reconcile the economics of nature with those of markets: one established as part of New Deal farm programs, the other the legacy of Butz, Nixon’s second Secretary of Agriculture.
Before Butz
Here’s how farmers were protected against yearly fluctuations in yield. First, storable commodities including corn were given a target price based on the cost of production. Then, whenever the market price fell below that target, farmers could either:
take out a loan from the government with corn as collateral to store until prices recovered and he could sell the corn at a profit
if prices stayed low, keep the money and the corn would be stored by the government in the “Ever-Normal Granary” (apparently this concept along with its quaint name was first established in the 1st century BC under the Chinese Qing Dynasty)
Separately, as a sign of foresight in the wake of the Dust Bowl, the government also paid farmers to idle land at risk of degradation.
After Butz
Butz was a proponent of a highly centralized, efficient agricultural system; he saw America as a future leader in corn exports. In a time of soaring food prices, he set to work ensuring supply would never fall short again. Chief among his accomplishments were the abolishment of the Ever-Normal Granary and replacing the government loans with a new system of direct payments to farmers:
Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any price, since the government would make up the difference.
In other words, farmers were now incentivized to grow as much corn as they could “and American farmers pushed to go flat out could grow a hell of a lot of corn.” As far as I know, the structure of this policy hasn’t changed.
Agribusiness at large
Why meat is cheap
In short, the generous supply of cheap corn enabled a generous supply of cheap meat. Pollan claims that because corn became so cheap, “it cost a farmer more to grow feed corn [for their cows] than it cost a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) to buy it.” That was corn’s first win, freeing the meat industry into factory logic of its own.
My impression is that this factory logic then further drove an increasing prevalence of corn in the cows’ diets, to maximize the throughput of carb calories converting to protein calories and therefore the return of meat on the dollar:
Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet.
In fact, Rich Blair, a cow-calf operator featured in the book, says: ”In my grandfather’s time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter... Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.”
Processed foods of corn excess
We also have cheap corn to thank for the processed foods market. We start with the observation that humans generally have a maximum amount of food they can consume, no matter how plentiful the food:
(Food industry executives used to call this the problem of the “fixed stomach”; economists speak of “inelastic demand.”)
The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact… What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year—1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is that Wall Street won’t tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.
According to Pollan, once corn became such a commodity, food businesses needed to figure out a new way to “get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food”, or get consumers to eat more of it.
This trick of getting people to pay more for the same content is apparently well demonstrated by the journey of General Mills, which you might be familiar with as the maker of so many beloved cereals. General Mills started out in 1926 as a mill selling whole wheat flour, moved into bleached flour when the whole wheat was commoditized, then “enriched” flour when bleached was commoditized, then moved into cake mixes and sweetened breakfast cereals—”selling convenience, with a side of grain and corn sweetener.” As for getting consumers to eat more—we only need to look at McDonald’s supersizing and the fact that a 32 oz of Diet Coke costs just pennies more than a 16 oz.
Agribusiness may win the battle but not the war
There’s no doubt that without industrial farming, we probably wouldn’t have as easy access to food, especially protein-rich meat and dairy products. That said, Pollan exposes many long-term risks, some familiar and some new, that I found worrisome.
So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be not cheap at all… It doesn’t take into account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance…the cost to taxpayers of the farm subsidies… and it certainly doesn’t take into account all the many environmental costs…
I’ve already discussed the impact of industrial agriculture on soil health, so I’ll focus on the public health risks and heavy fertilizer application.
Because cows’ digestive systems are not actually suited to handle such a rich corn-based diet, they almost as law develop illnesses like acidosis and liver abscesses. To keep to the desired pace of output, though, they are then regularly fed antibiotics Rumensin and Tylosin, which “is now generally acknowledged… [to be] leading directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs.”
From what I can tell, there is hope for sustainable development and use of fertilizer, and one thing that certainly needs to change is its regular overapplication. Farmers are typically incentivized to apply more than needed, and this directly harms the environment in two ways:
Fertilizer run-off contaminates nearby water reserves and also triggers algal blooms. Algal blooms are bad because the algae consume most of the oxygen that other organisms rely on, leading to so-called dead zones.
Fertilizer evaporates as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.
Thanks for joining me on this tour through Part I of The Omnivore’s Dilemma! Let me know what you think and if you’d like a similar review of Part II, which covers alternative agriculture (organic, farm-to-table).