Seconds, Anyone? - article from Time magazine

[Guest guest]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1177012,00.html

From the Magazine | Arts

Seconds, Anyone?

A new book suggests we need to look closer--much

closer--at what we eat

By RICHARD LACAYO

Posted Sunday, Mar. 26, 2006

Consider the Chicken McNugget. What's in it exactly?

There's some chicken, of course. Salt, no doubt. And

then there's all that mysterious stuff identified in

the ingredients brochure. Sodium aluminum

phosphate--what is that, and where does it come from?

For that matter, where does the chicken come from?

Right there, Pollan tells us, is the problem

with the way we eat now. We're clueless. In The

Omnivore's Dilemma (Penguin Press; 450 pages), he

tries to cut through this fog of unknowing. The title

refers to the predicament of animals, including rats

and humans, that can eat just about anything, whether

it's bad for them or not. He has no doubt that much of

what we eat is bad for us, for the animals we feed on

and for the environment. The author of Second Nature

and The Botany of Desire, Pollan is willing to go to

some lengths to reconnect with what he eats, even if

that means putting in a hard week on an organic farm

and slitting the throats of chickens. He's not Paris

Hilton on The Simple Life.

Pollan divides our food sources into four categories.

One is industrial, meaning giant agribusiness. Then

there are the two kinds of organic, large and small

scale. Finally there's anything hunted and foraged. He

goes on an adventure down each food chain, fattening a

beef calf for market or following the path of

industrial corn all around the country. Each trip ends

in a meal made of foods from that category.

Modern agriculture leaves him deeply troubled. He

marvels at how massive surpluses of corn, made

possible by the use of noxious chemical fertilizers

and pesticides, have led to the rise of huge feedlots

where cattle are pumped full of antibiotics and

corn-based feed to hasten them to their fate as

cheeseburgers. Organic farming? It has its virtues,

but he discovers that our visions of contented cows

and free-range chickens don't always match the

realities. In a final lunge toward authenticity, he

forages for mushrooms in a burned-over pine forest and

shoots a wild pig, a primal confrontation that briefly

reduces Pollan, an inexperienced hunter, to a state of

near panic as he pulls the trigger while the pigs

madly scatter. But in this clearheaded and sometimes

heartbroken book, that would be the only time he gets

seriously confused.

From the Apr. 03, 2006 issue of TIME magazine