The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore’s Dilemma explains the range of food choices we face today using four meals on a spectrum from highly processed to entirely self-gathered, thus teaching us how the industrial revolution changed the way we eat, why organic food isn’t necessarily better, what truly natural food looks like, and which options we have in making the tradeoff between fast, delicious, cheap, ethical, sustainable, and environmentally friendly meals.

In theory, corn is a great plant.

It’s highly adaptable, very resistant, and grows in large quantities fast. When the Europeans first landed in the US and discovered it, it quickly became a household name for farmers.

But you can overdo even the best thing.

Technology has advanced so far that we can now alter plants at the genetic level, and the corn industrial farmers grow now has little to do with its ancestor.

In 1920 a farmer could comfortably produce 20 bushels of corn per acre. That figure has shot to 180 today – a 9x increase!

10 years ago, it cost a farmer $2.50 to produce a bushel, but due to the already flooded market, buyers only wanted to pay $1.45.

When the government agreed to match the difference, and thus gave the farmers an artificial profit for producing corn, it ruined the supply and demand cycle of corn.

Farmers can make a ton of money from producing corn and continue to grow more and more, even though the market’s demand has long been saturated.

The excess corn is what lands in your food in the form of high fructose corn syrup and other highly processed derivatives, and is fed to all kinds of animals, who aren’t natural corn eaters, like cows, chicken and even carnivore’s like salmon.

Alright, alright, maybe you knew that already. At the very least, I’m sure you were aware that the whole processed food industry is not the greenest choice you can make. But what about organic food? Originally started as a counter-movement to processed and industrialized food, due to its popularity, organic food as a label has been swept up by the processed food lobby. Plenty of the small farms that came from the organic movement had to either let go of some of their standards in order to supply the growing demand for organic food, or go out of business. As organic businesses grew, standards were lowered, and now food companies can cut corners and still get away with labels like “organic” and “free-range”. For example, would you call 20,000 chickens in a shed with a two-week mini vacation in the tiny back yard free-range? The food industry would. And what the hell is “organic high fructose corn syrup”? That stuff is one of…