The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

1. One Farmer, 129 Eaters. Pollan visits George Naylor on his 320-acre farm in Iowa, which has been in his family since his grandfather bought it in 1919. The soil is rich—in Naylor’s grandfather’s day, it produced a variety of plants and animals that made up enough food for his family plus twelve others. Today, George grows only corn and soybeans, but he produces enough to feed 129 people. Unfortunately, though, the farm survives solely due to the support of his wife’s job and government subsidies.

Despite the fact that Naylor’s farm produces enough corn to feed 129 people, his crops aren’t sold directly as food. Indeed, he sells commodity corn, which must be “processed or fed to livestock before” a person can eat it. By the time it reaches consumers at the other end of the food chain, Naylor’s corn has become one of many ingredients in industrially-produced foods. Furthermore, the consumers know nothing about the origins of this food. “Ask one of those eaters where their steak or soda comes from,” Pollan writes, “and she’ll tell you ‘the supermarket.’”

2. Planting the City of Corn. Pollan helps Naylor plant corn, endlessly going over rows and rows in the tractor and marveling at the technological advances that allow Naylor’s farm to be so much more productive than his grandfather’s would have been. For one, F-1 high-yield corn can be planted much closer together than the corn his grandfather planted (Naylor eschews GMO corn, but the F-1 variety is still very technologically advanced).

The F-1 variety of corn can be planted so close together because every plant is genetically identical to the other. Whereas non-hybrid corn stalks would grow spindly from jostling each other for sunlight, genetically engineered corn is able to share resources like sunlight, water, and soil. The density of corn planted in Iowa mirrors the population density of many urban centers, Pollan asserts.

3. Vanishing Species. The growing profitability and efficiency of corn over the years is what helped it dominate the landscape, as farmers have done more and more to facilitate and accommodate corn’s growth. As corn became increasingly profitable, farmers grew more and more of it, which led to a decline in its price. Instead of discouraging farmers, this caused them to grow more corn—its cheapness made it the choice ingredient for animal feed, which then consolidated the industrial livestock industry and put smaller farmers out of the animal business. Instead of raising animals, they grew more corn.

By now, expanding cornfields have pushed people out, leaving emptied towns in Iowa. This is because it requires far less human labor to grow corn and soybeans than to farm the diversified holdings of the past. As a result, George Naylor’s local town is a “ghost town”—the middle school can’t even field a football team.

4. There Goes the Sun. The corn boom was aided by an agricultural revolution brought about when ammonium nitrate that was left over from World War II was converted to use as chemical fertilizer. This synthetic nitrogen ended humanity’s dependence on naturally-occurring nitrogen, which is necessary to form the building blocks of life. Fritz Haber, who first developed the method of “fixing” nitrogen, or combining it with hydrogen to make it usable to grow food, used his technology to massively increase soil fertility, growing more food for an expanding population. Unfortunately, Haber’s work also helped sustain Nazi Germany. Later in life, he collaborated with Hitler and used his scientific skills to create explosives, chemical weapons, and poison gas.

Haber’s method of fixing nitrogen relies on petroleum, which began to be pumped into cornfields in large amounts to increase the crop’s yields. Farmers no longer need to rotate crops to preserve the fertility of the soil, nor rely on corn’s natural processes of extracting nitrogen with solar energy. The new farming methods using synthetic fertilizer and pesticides created a system that used fifty gallons of oil on every acre of corn, an incredibly ecologically inefficient system, but an economically viable one as long as fossil fuels and corn are both plentiful. Unfortunately, the runoff from these petrochemical additives are poisoning the country, draining down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where the chemicals have killed off a large swath of aquatic life.

5. A Plague of Cheap Corn. George Naylor explains to Pollan how corn came to be so heavily subsidized by the government. Policies enacted during the Great Depression to ensure a steady supply of corn set a market price and worked with farmers to keep it there until the 1950s. After that, the government began to resent the power of farmers, who had become exempt from traditional market forces.

6. The Sage of Purdue. President Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture sold 30 million tons of American grain to Russia in the hopes of driving up prices and securing reelection for Nixon in 1972. The resulting scarcity encouraged farmers to grow more, and the government began subsidizing the growth of corn (up to a price that has steadily decreased since) so that farmers could sell it regardless of the market price.

7. The Naylor Curve. As corn prices have declined, farmers have continued to produce more in order to make ends meet, which only makes the cycle worse. It is inescapable, since the entire infrastructure of modern farming is now geared towards corn and soybeans, and the longer those crops are grown, the more the soil is worn out, and the more chemical fertilizer it needs. Artificially cheap corn is still a major investment by the government, which spends $5 billion a year on corn subsidies, to the benefit of the buyers of cheap corn—the giant food companies that use it. Naylor, who is barely making ends meet by keeping his farm expenses to a minimum, introduces Pollan to a neighbor who is growing a larger quantity of corn, but has taken on a second job to pay for all of the equipment he requires. By the measure of pure yield, the neighbor is doing better, but on a more comprehensive comparison, Naylor is more successful.