super market choices

We sometimes do quite a bit of research on what we buy. We read reviews about car mileage and maintenance and comparison shop our electronics. Yet when it comes to food, the very items we use to nourish our bodies, we often don’t ask where it comes from and we end up having our choices made for us. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma explores the food industry and the findings are initially rather dismal.*

Low-income Iowa farmers purchase vast amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and corn seed, in order to produce more generic corn (which only pulls down prices, which will only erode the land and pollute the water). The corn will then be purchased and transformed into high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oil, the backbone of processed foods (and also found in a surprising number of other foods—cereal and bread).

Cows and chickens are crammed in confined quarters, and forced fed meat and corn mixtures (contrary to their natural diets) until they are ready for slaughter. Egg hens are crammed even more tightly than meat hens, with as many as 10% dying from the confined conditions.

While organic once offered an alternative to our mass-produced supermarket choices, it has also turned into economies of scale affair. As Gene Kahn, former (?) CEO and founder of Cascadian Farms (a big corporate organic produce company) comments, “Everything morphs into the way the world is.”

Organic produce mostly comes from large industrial size farms since it’s cheaper than buying from many individual farmers, and then tons and tons of oil are expended in shipping the produce fresh across the nation or even across the globe. Free range chickens are only given a small door open to the outside in the last two weeks of their nine week lifespan (after they have grown accustomed to staying indoors in their cooped up pen, only slightly better than those of the non-free-range variety). As Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, “Now which chicken shall we call ‘organic’? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government, because now they own the word.” I guess organic ceases to mean anything anymore when organic TV dinners are now sold at Whole Foods. (All that being said, organic food has greatly diminished the amount of pesticides and chemicals poured into our soils and waters).

So it saddens me to see even the most integral choices of our lives embedded with injustice to the poor and damage to the environment. I find it harder and harder to imagine being able to live without participating in these injustices, as I am certainly one who has benefited greatly from the comforts that these systems have afforded us.

As Geez magazine puts it, I wake up finding myself “somewhere between dreams for a better world and a padded, private life (I) didn’t exactly choose”. In today’s supermarket abundance, the vast array of flavours and textures, I don’t feel like I have very many real choices.



* This entry was compiled from quick notes I made in response to the earlier half of Pollan’s book, which was rather depressing. If I ever get around to it, I will write my response to the second half of his book, which was far more hopeful, and does offer some alternatives to our usual supermarket choices. By the way, Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent book—I highly recommend it. Not only does Pollan succeed in making 100 pages written about corn engrossingly interesting, he’s also made me rethink what and how I eat. I actually have an extra copy… so please contact me if you would like to borrow it/have it (you have to promise to read it!).