"The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan, Introduction–Part I

I was working on an article about genetically modified food — food created by changing plant DNA in the laboratory.

Human beings are omnivores. That means we eat plants, meat, mushrooms — just about anything.

The omnivore’s dilemma has been around a long time. But today we have a very modern form of this dilemma. We have a thousand choices of food in our supermarkets, but we don’t really know where our food comes from.

The industrial food chain that supplies our supermarkets stretches thousands of miles and has dozens of different links. It’s a chain that’s powered by oil and gasoline and controlled by giant corporations.

For example, you might take a type of corn that resists disease and cross it with another type of corn that produces a lot of ears. The result is a hybrid — a disease-resistant plant that produces a lot of corn.

Hybrid corn quadrupled the yields of farmers, from about twenty bushels per acre to about eighty bushels per acre.

These new GMO seeds could be a bonanza for the seed companies.

No one can own the species called “corn.” It is part of the natural world, the common property of all humanity. But with GMOs, a company can own a patent on a living organism.

The family only gets by because of the paycheck George’s wife, Peggy, brings home from her job — and because of a subsidy check from the U.S. government.

But the businesses that run the grain elevators and the industrial food chain do not look at corn as food. They look at it as a commodity, something to be bought and sold.

It was a natural, solar-powered loop. The plants used the sun’s energy to make food. The bison (with the help of bacteria) ate the grass and in return planted it, fertilized it, and defended its territory. It was a successful ecological system.

In October, two weeks before I made his acquaintance, steer number 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is the hardest time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike. Cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days.

Compared to all the other things we feed cattle these days, corn seems positively wholesome.

Wallerstein explained that McDonald’s customers wanted more but didn’t want to buy a second bag. “They don’t want to look like gluttons.”

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, items that come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant.