Fast Food Nation vs. Omnivore’s Dilemma

We’ve got ourselves the beginning of an intriguing conversation over at the latest Voreblog Readers Forum. Mike Allen, Erik Brueggemann and Erin argue the merits of Michael Pollan vs. Eric Schlosser when it comes to today’s “essential” food writer, plus Steve Heck makes a witty reference that you won’t appreciate unless you’ve seen I ♥ Huckabees. Why haven’t you chimed in yet? Is it because we smell or something? So what if we do? Comment now!

LocaVoreblog Roasts a Chicken!

PART II:  MAIN COURSE

Last week, I (Erin) detailed my trip to Green Acres Farm where I picked up my very own locally-bred, hormone-free, humanely-raised chicken (named “Darryl”). After thawing Darryl in our fridge, I prepared to cook what, by Vore standards, qualified as a feast. Usually our “dinner” is a bowl of pasta, a salad, or a slice of stromboli. An accompanying side dish is practically a buffet, so Friday’s meal constituted a miracle. Somewhere, my mother cries silently to herself that she failed to make me a proper woman.

Adios Self-Esteem: Even illustrations have perkier breasts and superior domestic skills!

Before we could please our palate with the succulent breast, thigh and wing of poultry, I had to do the inevitable: Face the chicken. I did not want to face the chicken because raw chicken, especially a whole chicken, is slimy and gross. And decapitated.

On the bottom shelf of the fridge, Darryl was still next to that Yuengling but thankfully the Mexican leftovers had been tossed out. As I placed him in the roasting pan, delicately spreading his legs and wings, I was acutely aware that Darryl was an animal. Since reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve more or less reconciled my guilt over eating animals, but even still, the nausea set in and I couldn’t help but feel sad when looking at the stump that used to hold a head. Pollan writes that as he got closer to his food (both on an emotional and geographical level), he felt overwhelmingly thankful for it. There was a story behind his meal. It wasn’t faceless or pre-packaged. It was Darryl, who had been sacrificed for our appetite.

Into the oven went Darryl, along with some butter, rosemary and sea salt.  An hour and fifteen minutes later, out came a fragrant, oven-browned bird that looked camera-ready.

Who wants my butter pecan thighs?

I fixed steamed vegetables from my parent’s garden and cheesy-tomato rice (a Vore staple) to go along with the chicken. I felt proud of my meal, which then made me feel embarrassed that normal people have real meals every night of the week. Oh well, guess we’re a different type of normal.

Suck it, Betty Crocker!

The meal did not come without a cost, as in the amount of money we paid for it. Darryl was no cheap chicken. (He was about $3.50 a pound.) But what did we get for that price? Chicken that tasted as fresh as any we’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. Could we afford to eat Darryl on a nightly basis? No. Are we willing to pay more every so often for a gustatory experience of this kind? Based on LocaVoreblog experiment #1, the answer is “absolutely.”

POSTSCRIPT FROM BEN: Darryl was delicious. Erin said I should write that I ate two pounds of him, but I’m certain it was not two pounds. But it was a lot. A delicious lot. This locavore thing is deliciously good!

POSTSCRIPT FROM ERIN: For an absurd and hilarious encounter with Danish film, allow me to recommend The Green Butchers, starring one of my favorites, Mads Mikkelsen, better known as Le Chiffre from Casino Royal. It’s about two Danes who are in the very bad habit of killing people and then selling those people disguised as chicken. Also, Mikkelsen sports a mean male-pattern baldness look.

Ben og Erin Vore sige: Watch De Grønne Slagtere for dit helbred!

Sneak Peak: The Very First LocaVoreblog

PART I:  The Appetizer

You may recall we made some new year’s resolutions about eating healthier. You may also recall our obsession (primarily Erin’s) with Michael Pollan’s eye-opening and addictive books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. In short, Pollan submits that the best and healthiest way to live — for people, for the animals they eat, and for the local economies in which they live — is a primarily local diet free from over-processing, hormones, chemicals, or any food with ingredient lists full of hard-to-pronounce words. 

Nearly six months later and nary a paper to grade, I (Erin) finally made my first trip to a local farm. Indian Hill’s Green Acres Farm is a mere five minutes away, and as my friend Katie pulled into the drive, a herd (at least I think it was a herd, maybe it was a gaggle? A pack? A litter?) of sheep were munching on green grass underneath the shade of tree. Bucolic and serene, it was something out of Anne of Green Gables or Little Women. It was also blazing hot. Some of the sheep were panting and looked like they wanted to jump out of their winter coats. Gail and Katie brought their babies, and I think they enjoyed the sheep as much as I did. One lamb suckled from the teat of his mother. I threw up a little in my mouth.

Anyway, we walked into the farm store, listened to a very friendly and sweet employee give us the farm spiel after telling her that we were first-time farm goers, and I quickly grabbed a dozen eggs and an entire chicken.  Yes, friends, the Vores are now the proud owners of our very own chicken.

If Scooter-Thomas tries to eat me, so help me God I will peck his eyes out.

So far he seems happy.  Ben affectionately calls him Darryl, and he happily clucks his way through our back yard.

Actually, Darryl looks more like this:

All I'm missing are my feathers, head, and feet! Adorable!

The only caveat is that Darryl came frozen. Green Acres slaughters two steers a month, and only has fresh chicken when they are ready to, uh, go on “vacation” to a sprawling “Canadian Farm” to drink daiquiris all day.* Currently, Darryl is thawing in the fridge next to some old Mexican left-overs and a Yuengling. Tomorrow, per the helpful lady’s instructions, I will preheat the oven to 350 degrees, cook Darryl for twenty minutes or so, take Darryl out of the oven, “pull his legs,” whatever that means, baste him with butter, rub him with rosemary, massage him with salt, stick him back in the oven for an hour or so, and enjoy his flavorful flesh.  

As a two-time vegetarian and someone who generally feels a mixture of sadness and nausea about meat, I’m actually excited to get my hands dirty with this bird. I’m hopeful that it will be a success and that our first adventure as real locavores will encourage us to go back time and again.  

 

* = They do not go to a farm in Canada or anywhere else. They get dead through a process I don’t like to think about. 

Friday Recommends: Food

      

 

One of our New Year’s resolutions was to eat healthier. We’ve made this resolution before, with mixed results. This year we made the resolution less from a vague desire for general self-improvement and more because of a writer named Michael Pollan. His book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, made both of us drastically rethink our diets. If ignorance is bliss, Pollan is a buzzkill. 

Ben, who works in a retail establishment which sells books, has always been conflicted about The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book intrigued him, but the customers who asked about it did not. They were evangelistic about the book. They would grab Ben’s arm and insist he read it. They were generally what one might stereotype as “crunchy” or “granola” (or “crunchy granola“).  They spoke of produce the way people usually speak of rapturous sexual experiences. ( “The fresh squash I ate last night was nothing short of orgasmic.” Or, “You would not believe the tomatoes I just grew in my garden. I want to make love to them.”) Ben wanted nothing to do with them. Also, the words “raw food” scare him. We’re perfectly comfortable with our packaged food, thank you very much! 

If you’re brave enough to crack open The Omnivore’s Dilemma, however, chances are good that you’ll change your mind about not just packaged food, but also corn, meat, Chicken McNuggets, organic food, the FDA, food labels, mushrooms, hunting and gathering and, last but not least, your local supermarket.

About that Chicken McNugget: Do you know how many ingredients are in one? Thirty-eight. Chicken is one of them. But, as Pollan writes,

To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

 

Pollan devotes himself to scaling those high walls. He goes to CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and slaughterhouses. He visits a Wendell Berry-like farmer in Virginia named Joel Salatin, who invites Pollan to slaughter chickens in the killing cones on Salatin’s land, Polyface Farms. ( “It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am,” Pollan writes, “that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.”) And he spends the final third of the book learning to hunt and gather. He forages for mushrooms, shoots a wild pig and collects Bing cherries from a neighbor’s tree (which he feels no guilt about once he learns about usufruct). 

Among the many things Pollan shows us along the way, several stood out:

1. The word “organic” doesn’t inherently mean “better.”
2. The words “free range” shouldn’t bring to mind rolling, verdant fields stretching to the horizon.
3. Mad cow disease was the result of cattle being fed other cattle. We conveniently forgot and/or never learned that. (Who wouldn’t go a little mad eating your own species?)
4. Americans eat one-fifth of our meals in the car.
5. Farmers are fond of the saying, “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.”
6. Food industry marketers are mostly evil.
7. We will never, ever gut a pig.

 

Pollan’s follow-up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, attempts to condense all of this wisdom into practical dietary advice. Pollan is so good at condensation he boils it down to seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This seems disarmingly simple, but as 2009 has already taught is, simple is not easy. Take the first two words: “Eat food.” Well, we all eat food, right? Except how much of what we usually eat is actually food? What about microwave meals? Canned soups? Pop Tarts? They’re all … kind of food. But have you looked at the label? How many of those ingredients can you actually identify?

Pollan observes how these heavily processed foods are all located in the middle of the supermarket, whereas things that actually look like food — vegetables, fruit, fish, dairy — are on the periphery. So we’ve been shopping the periphery more lately, making a delicious roasted vegetable salad two, maybe three times a week, feeling pretty good about our diet until Pollan tells us that a more “radical” strategy would be to not buy food at a supermarket period, but rather at Findlay Market or directly from a farmer. Of course, the most radical strategy of all would be growing our own garden. (Just not in January.)

Erin, who has twice now been a vegetarian (her longest stint stretching from the end of college in 2002 until May of 2004 when she went to Italy and had prosciutto for the first time), has always felt a tugging at her conscience about the mistreatment and killing of animals. It wasn’t until she read The Omnivore’s Dilemma that she finally felt okay about eating animals so long as they were treated well, fed well, and killed well (i.e., with the utmost respect and reverence for the provision their lives offer). Salatin claims (and his customers testify) that his animals, which are allowed to roam freely in green fields munching on various grasses and acting like animals are meant to act instead of cooped up in an overcrowded cage, actually taste fresher and better. That means a more chickeny chicken, a beefier steak, and richer yolks for your morning eggs. Salatin and Pollan actually seem to make the case for the eating of animals to promote the cycle of life — so long as they’re the right animals coming from the right places. After Pollan, Erin is now ready to find a farm from which to buy eggs and chicken (and perhaps the occasional pork tenderloin). 

As we tiptoe into food radicalism, Eat This Not That: The Supermarket Survival Guide has the virtue of meeting us where we’re at. Given that Kroger and Biggs are still our major food suppliers, we’re trying to make smarter choices about what we buy there. ETNT offers, in colorful, simplified fashion, a comparison of the good and bad (or bad and better) options in the supermarket aisles. Ben will never give up his beloved cereal. But he might give up Basic 4 now that he knows it includes partially hydrogenated oils and “a huge helping of sugar” (13 grams). The better, if more cardboard-tasting option would be Fiber One Raisin Bran Clusters, with the same amount of sugar to appease Ben’s sweet tooth but less calories and fat and three times the fiber.

We’re not sure what Michael Pollan would make of ETNT (we suspect he’d approve), but we recognize that changing your diet, like changing any habit, will be incremental. Instead of going straight from A to Z by forsaking microwave pizza for arugula, it’s more realistic to go from A to B, then B to C, until you’ve gone so far that you can’t fathom your old philistine diet but can also envision a new and increasingly healthier one. 

Pollan concedes that eating healthier will cost more. But what have we sacrificed for cheap food? Our long-term health. Our connectedness to the earth. Our sense of community. (How many of us still sit down at a dinner table with friends and family anymore?) What have we lost by having the choice to pay 99 cents for a slab of beef at McDonalds (though slab implies something hearty and substantial)? “Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or, now, forgetting,” Pollan says. Our food culture, he suggests, has become heroic at not knowing.

There are many who are far ahead of us on the path away from industrialized food (what Pollan broadly calls “the Western diet”), and we recognize that we’ll never get away completely. But we’re at least at letter B, if not even C or possibly D. We think we eat healthier that the average person, but who doesn’t think that? Have we become one of “those” people Ben used to be leery of, given to waxing rhapsodically about tofu and sprouts? We’re not going to grab you by the arm, but if you, like us, are trying to eat more real actual food, we recommend (enthusiastically!) The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a great starting point.

The Seventh Voreblog Readers Forum: New Year Resolutions

This will be our year / Took a long time to come.  - The Zombies

 

Our resolutions for 2009:

1. Eat more locally. This is largely a byproduct of Erin reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, which Ben is reading now. (Joint review to follow soon!)

1a. Cooking & eating in more, which for Ben means diversifying his cooking repertoire (or, “Preparing meals without the microwave”).

2. Work out four days a week (Erin) and run 12 miles a week/600 miles this year* (Ben).

3. Adopt another kitten.

4. Participate in the great colon cleanse of 2009!

Ben will be ok at failing #3, which was added without his approval. As was #4.

 

For the Seventh Voreblog Readers Forum: What are your resolutions for 2009?

 

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* = Ben is expecting his new Nike + iPod toy to provide significant motivation.