Irregular Books

In many ways, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an important book, bringing popular attention to the symbolic meaning of the problems with industrial agriculture. The parallels between the giant monocultures of corn, the crowded feedlots from which we derive our steaks and the giant corporations that feed us and harvest our labor become clear as the chapters progress.

Where the The Omnivore’s Dilemma fails to inspire is in its attacks on large scale industrial organic food production. Although the term organic has been clear for quite some time, referring to agricultural goods that are produced without the use of synthetic herbicides and pesticides, author Michael Pollan muddies the waters by supposing that organic once meant something more than that.

Organic doesn’t mean small, or good to workers, or fossil-fuel-free, or healthy for animals, or non-corporate, or sustainable. Some people have presumed that organic was equivalent to such nice qualities, but such mistaken presumptions have always been inaccurate, even before the development of large organic food operations.

Reading the arguments of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it’s difficult to disagree that our society has lost a great deal as a result of the acceptance of industrial agriculture, organic and non-organic. However, Pollan’s implication that the term organic has become less than it once was requires too many leaps of logic to be believed. Organic farming isn’t a perfect method of growing food, but it is an awful lot better than conventional industrial farming, a fact that Pollan discounts too easily.

In its descriptions of the poverty of full industrial agriculture and of the potential richness in a fully sustainable form of agriculture, Pollan is right on. It’s in his discussions of the territory in the middle that Pollan’s approach weakens, unable to compromise the quest for purity and perfection in order to grasp a step in a better direction.