The Omnivore's Dilemma Summary

Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is divided into three sections: corn, grass and forest. This review will cover part I of three, which are all within the corn section. Pollen starts with corn, just one kernel of it in a field in Iowa, and tries to track its journey to our dinner plates. It turns out an unexpected amount of corn appears in processed foods, non-food products and diets of animals who were never meant to eat it. This section will make you take a hard look at how prevalent corn is in our lives and why. In Part I, the Industrial Food-corn, takes the reader from the farm, to the feedlot, following the processing plant and finally to the consumer.
The Farm Corn can be grown year round on the same land with the use of fertilizer from cattle, and augmenting plant genetics to create hybrid strains of corn. This has resulted in corn becoming the most dominant force in industrialized
agriculture. Thus, cheap corn makes it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of grazing on grass, and raise chickens in giant factories than in farmyards.
The Feedlot Mr. Pollan estimates approximately 60% of livestock end up in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The cattle are fed three times a day, of a mixture of corn, beef tallow from the slaughterhouse, or chicken litter and drugs digest this mixture. “Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn, a compact source of caloric energy, get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like”(Pg. 5). Cattle evolved eating grass, not grain.
The Processing Plant Pollan estimates that about 18,000 of the 90,000 kernels in a bushel of commodity corn leave the field and go to processing plants, where food science takes over, creating corn oil, corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, even xanthan gum. Corn is also used to create ethanol additives in some gasoline’s, adhesives, coatings, stabilizers, thickeners, gels, and viscosity-control agents. Only a small fraction of corn grown in this country is directly consumed by humans.
The Consumer Most of the corn is not for our direct consumption, but becomes a part of everything else that we eat.
“17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup is being produced each year” (Pg.118). “There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn” (Pg. 19). “The power of food science lies in its ability to break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system (Pg. 115). In addition to figuring out all the corn involved in a typical families fast food meal, Pollan hypothesizes that places like McDonald’s have become a sort of comfort food. “There are 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget, thirteen of which are derived from corn” (pg. 120). There is corn sweetener in burgers, as if all the corn used to fatten the cow wasn’t enough. “Forty-five of sixty items on a McDonald’s menu contains high fructose corn syrup” (pg. 122).
Conclusion
Corn, Pollan contends, is a main driver of the industrial food chain. Pollan states, “the plague of cheap corn goes on,” creating poor farmers, polluting the environment, damaging our health, and raising the federal debt. The role of corn which has played in our lives for centuries was a source of food and survival, and now plays the role of an interchangeable commodity.

Reference

Pollan, Michael. Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 1/e for DeVry University. 1. VitalSource Bookshelf. Pearson Learning Solutions, Sunday, March 11, 2012. <http://online.vitalsource.com/books/9781256120735/id/pg43>