There’s a new fanatical religion that’s spreading through the food world like a common cold on a school bus. It’s based, at least loosely, on a book that paints a grim picture of the modern world and a rosy one of the world as it could be. It uses specious logic and rhetorical sleight of hand and contains contradictory information.
Its practitioners are often fanatical and dismissive of contrary views.
They believe that the greatest evil in the world is corn.
I call them Pollanists, and their scripture is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan’s polemic against mainstream food production.
The book’s premise, in brief, is that the mainstream American food system is a disaster for the environment, for our health and for animals, and that we should return to a system based on more natural agricultural methods.
There are many good points in the book, and it raises some issues that are worth considering, although its vilification of corn—and adulation of grass, believe it or not—confuse me. Worse yet, it’s really confusing its religious followers.
Pollan explains that corn is now used in all sorts of products, from animal feed to modified food starch to the dreaded high-fructose corn syrup. Grown-ups in the food world know this.
Pollan seems to think that this is a really bad thing, and I don’t know why.
He tries to explain it and says we can detect just how much we Americans are now made of corn by doing an analysis of our flesh and detecting how much of the isotope Carbon 13 is in there.
There’s nothing wrong with Carbon 13; it’s just a marker for corn, Pollan says.
Because, you see, corn is a C-4 plant, and C-4 plants, for reasons of their own, take in more Carbon 13 than other plants do. Pollan says scientists have analyzed Americans and found that we have a lot more Carbon 13 than our Mexican neighbors.
On page 23 he writes:
“Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: The animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.”
But the thing is, grass and sugarcane are also C-4 plants, and Pollan knows that because he says so later in the book.
So what is he talking about and why does he go to such a bizarre abstraction to make his point?
I think it’s because science scares many people, and they believe that if they don’t understand it, it must be their own fault, not the fault of bad science.
It certainly confused a friend of mine, who is a chef, an insulin-dependent diabetic and a smart guy, all of which means he should be pretty aware of his food and how he metabolizes it.
In an e-mail, he expressed to me his anger about corn: “When you are eating a piece of farmed fish, you are eating corn. Same with meat. As a diabetic, that is the worst thing for me.”
But, of course, he’s not actually eating corn when he’s eating farmed fish or corn-finished beef, he’s eating animal protein and fat. Corn—and all carbohydrates—require insulin to metabolize and so can raise your blood sugar. But the fish and the meat have taken care of that. They ate it and turned it into protein and fat, which don’t raise your blood sugar by nearly as much.
The fact that I had to explain that to a diabetic chef disturbed me because he should already know what affects his blood sugar.
Pollan plays other tricks. He lists things that can be made of corn, but aren’t necessarily, as though corn is at fault for being versatile.
Eric Schlosser played similar tricks in “Fast Food Nation,” incidentally, like discussing food colorings that can also be found in house paint. That doesn’t mean the colorings are bad. Water is in food and paint, too.
Pollan makes things sound gross when they’re not really. For example, he describes lettuce farm workers who are wearing blue bandages that can be detected should they fall in the food.
Well, yeah. That’s pretty much just basic common sense—and common practice in foodservice. Would he prefer flesh-colored bandages making it through the whole system?
Like any book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” has strengths and weaknesses. The biggest problem is that it has spawned a religion.