The Omnivore's Dilemma

I have nothing but praise for Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is informative, engaging, thoughtful and thought-provoking. I especially enjoyed the ecological perspective that Pollan employs as well as the intellectual humility with which he writes. Intellectual humility, by the way, I find myself prizing more and more highly everyday.

Ecological Perspective. We often think of literary analysis and the tools employed in such analysis as being useful for, well, literary analysis alone. But Pollan demonstrates just how far a simple literary conceit, a metaphor, can go in explaining the way behavior is organized. How a Cartesian metaphor largely explains the contemporary model of industrial agriculture. How an ecological conceit yields a totally different specimen, the Polyface Farm in Virginia that calls itself "beyond organic," or "postindustrial." The implications are dramatic for a term that I've been thinking a lot about recently, "efficiency":

Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over...By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence--by definition, the very opposite of simplification...Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature...(214-215)

I still need to do a bit more thinking about this, but I think the distinction between industrial efficiency and ecological efficiency is important and exciting. Especially with all the attention that "energy efficiency" has received recently.

Intellectual Humility. The book's NYTimes reviewer criticizes Pollan for being too nice a guy, for failing to judge when judging was clearly called for. To be sure, Pollan is neither didactic nor vituperative in his style, but I take the book's balanced argumentation as a sign of intellectual humility, something that Pollan clearly values as well:

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. (148)

I like this a lot: "a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery..." On buying Argentina-grown asparagus from Whole Foods, Pollan writes:

The ethical implications of buying such a product are almost too numerous and knotty to sort out: There's the expense, there's the prodigious amounts of energy involved, the defiance of seasonality, and the whole question of whether the best soils in South America should be devoted to growing food for affluent and overfed North Americans. And yet you can also make a good argument that my purchase of organic asparagus from Argentina generates foreign exchange for a country desperately in need of it, and supports a level of care for that country's land--farming without pesticides or chemical fertilizer--it might not otherwise receive. Clearly my bunch of asparagus had delivered me deep into the thicket of trade-offs that a global organic marketplace entails. (175)

The material in this book could easily have lended itself to a rhetorical attack on the vices of industrial agriculture. But Pollan refuses to deliver on that account, and the final product is incredibly refreshing. Though I am none the wiser as to how one ought to disentangle the moral knot presented.