Nature vs. Human Intervention Theme Analysis

In his investigation of where food comes from, Michael Pollan argues that eating is a person’s most direct engagement with nature.

Nature, left to its own devices, will produce the plants and animals that humans use for food, but human intervention has inalterably changed these processes, from the agricultural development and cultivation of land and the domestication of animals to the scientific engineering of highly processed foods. The need to produce a huge volume of food to feed a large population has led to the development of a vast and complex industry; one that is responsive to the demands of the economy. Pollan shows how these systems have modified the state of the natural landscape, and the condition and behaviors of the plants and animals that we eat, and, in turn, our own behavior and condition.

“The omnivore’s dilemma,” for which the book is named, refers to the difficult choices we make about what to eat, because there are so many options available to us as omnivores. The sheer number of choices has been magnified in the modern era, when most Americans are no longer limited by seasonal or geographical restrictions in their diet. Pollan argues that making these choices constitutes our most essential and fundamental engagement with the world, on multiple levels. The number of living humans and our power over many elements of the natural world makes it nearly impossible to prevent the choices we make from affecting other species and their ecosystems.

Although it may seem like there is a line between the part of nature that is unaffected and that which is affected by human activity, Pollan argues that this is blurrier than it may seem. He explains that any kind of agricultural production at all involves human intervention, and our large population has led us to organize agriculture on a large scale. The scientist Fritz Haber first discovered that fertilizer, which uses elements that existed in small amounts naturally, could be made artificially. This vastly increased the available quantities of fertilizer, and has inalterably changed the food and energy cycle: “It has been less than a century since Fritz Haber's invention, yet already it has changed the earth's ecology. More than half of the world's supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made.” Our use of fertilizer has served to “alter the planet's composition of species and shrink its biodiversity,” but it has served some species well, including ours, since we benefit from the vastly increased production of food. Crops that can handle large amounts of artificial fertilizer, like corn and grass, have also fared well.

Pollan writes about how the development of modern industrial agriculture has also deeply changed the lives of the animals we farm: “America's food animals have undergone a revolution in lifestyle in the years since World War II.” Forcing animals to subvert their natural roles, instincts, and internal processes—including feeding cows corn instead of grass, and keeping pigs and chickens enclosed in tiny spaces—are radical impositions on them. Because we eat these animals, we also can’t escape the effect these changes have on us: “A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.” Our changes to nature for the sake of agriculture impact the health of the animals, our health, and the health of the environment, creating the need for veterinary responses to their illnesses and ecological responses to pollution and other systemic waste.

Other innovations in the food system have come back to haunt us. An obesity epidemic has arisen because so many plentiful calories are now available. In his fast-food meal, Pollan writes, “Judith, Isaac, and I together consumed a total of 4,510 calories at our lunch—more than half as many as we each should probably consume in a day.”

After writing about the drawbacks of our industrial agricultural system, Pollan cautions against the conclusion that a system with less human intervention would be better. Nutritionally, there is evidence that this is the case: “A growing body of scientific research indicates that pasture substantially changes the nutritional profile of chicken and eggs, as well as of beef and milk.” And yet, the complicating details need to be considered. Pollan writes, “Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef.” The purity of a product also depends on the side effects it produces, as seen in the case of large organic farms whose outputs are uncontaminated by chemicals, but which rely on an enormous amount of petroleum to run.

The organic industry has grown up to market to consumers who seek more natural products, but the institution of government-regulated standards for labelling “organic” and “natural” agriculture have obscured the reality of human interventions in key ways. Many consumers are under the impression that they’re buying natural products when they aren’t. Pollan describes the way high-fructose corn syrup can be deemed “organic,” and chickens enclosed in captivity “free-range.” Conversely, other consumers are happy to completely divorce their food choices from nature, as with fast food: “In this consumer's mind at least, the link between a nugget and the chicken in it was never more than notional, and probably irrelevant.” Pollan illuminates the problems with both of these approaches, each of which arise from the industrial-sized production chains.

Ultimately Pollan argues that antidotes to these problems are the small and local approaches taken by small-scale sustainable farmer Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms, or Pollan’s hunting and foraging comrades. However, these methods are far from leaving nature untouched—human intervention in nature is unavoidable at every level of our engagement with food, but Pollan believes that the level and kind of intervention should be calibrated to assess its positive and negative effects.