Ominvores Dilemma Response 1

Rebecca Brito

Pete Knutson, PhD

Anthro 201, Wednesday

April 11, 2012

Response Paper 1: Omnivores Dilemma

            This is my second time reading Omnivore’s Dilemma. This book impacted my thoughts about food so deeply, that there is a nostalgic apprehension in revisiting the text. Michael Pollan’s brief discussion of Frits Haber and the roots of fertilizers and pesticides lingered with me long after reading the book. In reviewing the book a second time, the description of corn processing in the wetmill stood out to me. Putting these two sections together with the past year of learning through the SAGe program, and experiences in my own garden really affirms for me that I am on the right track. Here I am, two years later, hearing the call to action, again.

            It is fitting that Frits Haber was introduced through the revelation that ammonium nitrate, originally used in World War II in explosives, was now being used as a fertilizer. His professional and personal life seems to be a huge life of contradictions. As a cultural Jew, I was deeply saddened to learn that this great Jewish brain contributed to the Holocaust. He was fixing nitrogen in 1909, creating poisonous gasses by 1915 and helping with Hitler’s war on Jews and other non-Aryan groups. And yet, in 1920, he received a Nobel Prize for nitrogen fixation and the possibility to feed humanity, while he was in the thick of creating tools for the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of people, of his own people. Of course I have abstained from inorganic fertilizers ever since reading this passage as much for personal health and environmental reasons as moral and political.

            There is an appearance of efficiency in industrialization, both in the isolation of nitrogen and its fixation, as well as in the use every piece method of corn processing. Pollan does an excellent job introducing the concept in the amount of energy going in to these and other industrial food processes. We know that isolating nitrogen takes a lot of energy, as does running the factories that process corn, transportation of the food and food products.

Pollan mentioned that Naylor’s farm had probably lost half of its topsoil, going down to about 2 feet of topsoil in an area that originally probably had about four feet. The description of crop rotation in the section was brief, but we can infer that if corn was only grown twice every five years on the same plot of land, there were more than corn and soybeans in rotation prior to the late 1940’s when fertilizers where introduced to the farmer. In those days, farmers used well-documented crop rotations of both species and varieties to create genetically diverse farms with periods of fallow, covers cropping, and manure fertilization that allow nutrients to be kept in the ecosystem they originated in. The introduction of man-made fertilizers on the farm was most detrimental because it defrauded the farmer of the knowledge of soil science, a diversified business model, and separated the animal from the land in a joint effort with the tractor and mechanized farming. Going back to the farm, we see how much energy is wasted in the industrial food system that robs the soil of what it needs to support a healthy farm.

Wetmill corn processing has me grieving for the corn and food generally. We are so removed from the intention of food, nourishment and temptation to the senses, that we created a mess of compounds and slurries that leave us unsatisfied, and craving more. It is on that note that I decided to break away from industrial food and grow my own. The journey away from industrial food is complicated. I have felt like it is elitist, as being both a time and money poor individual, I have found myself back and forth across the spectrum of industrial fast food to slow organic. I think that the biggest challenge for me has been in filling my knowledge base to live the seed to table vision. I grew up on kid cuisines frozen dinners, burnt steak and boiled to mush veggies. Now starting my third year in my garden, I have been challenged with frosts, fertility, pests and diseases. It’s been pretty frustrating, really. Learning can be that way. Hopefully the raccoons will leave the chickens alone, fungus won’t attack my squash, and I have invested enough energy behind compost and chicken manure to have a fruitful harvest. This year, I am growing for fresh salads and veggies, stocking up on broccoli, peas and beans, and preparing pasta sauce and salsa. Wish me luck.