The omnivore's dilemma: the secrets behind what you eat

What should we have for dinner? It seems such a simple question, yet for us, it has become a source of profound confusion and anxiety. As a culture, we seem to have arrived at a place where our native wisdom about eating has been replaced by a national eating disorder, a landscape of food fads and scientific pronouncements where bread can become a villain overnight. The American supermarket, with its forty-five thousand items, presents itself as a landscape of astounding biodiversity. Yet this is an illusion. To answer that simple question about dinner, I realized I had to become an ecological detective, to follow our food from the earth to the plate. My wager was that by tracing our three main food chains - the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer - I could begin to understand not only what I was eating, but what it truly means to eat.

My first journey took me deep into the heart of the industrial food chain, and I expected my investigations to lead me to a wide variety of places. Instead, at the beginning of almost every trail, I found myself in the same place: a field of corn in the American Midwest. The great edifice of choice in our supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation dominated by a single species: *Zea mays*. Corn feeds the steer that becomes the steak and the chicken that becomes the nugget. It is the modified starch that glues our processed foods together and the high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens our drinks. A scientist can prove this with a snip of hair; the carbon isotopes don't lie. When you look at the ratios, we North Americans look like “corn chips with legs.” We have become, without ever realizing it, the corn people.

On a farm in Iowa, I saw how this giant tropical grass has remade the American landscape, pushing out animals, other plants, and even people. Here, farming is no longer a sun-driven cycle of fertility, but an industrial process powered by fossil fuels. The invention of synthetic nitrogen - a legacy of World War II munitions plants - allowed corn yields to explode, but at a tremendous ecological cost. This river of cheap grain, subsidized by government policy, flows directly to the feedlot, a teeming, foul-smelling city of cattle. Here, animals exquisitely evolved to eat grass are forced to eat corn, a diet that makes them sick and requires a constant regimen of antibiotics. It is a biological absurdity that creates new problems, like the evolution of deadly, acid-resistant *E. coli* that can find its way from their gut into our own.

From the feedlot, the corn-fed steer makes its way to the slaughterhouse, but the journey of the corn kernel itself is even more complex. It travels by train to a wet mill, a stainless-steel beast that digests the grain into its chemical components: starches, sugars, acids, and alcohols. These are the building blocks of processed foods, from Cheez Whiz to Twinkies. The most valuable of these is high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener cheaper than sugar that has fueled the supersizing of our portions and, with it, an epidemic of obesity. This entire journey of forgetting culminates in a meal eaten in a moving car: a quart-sized Coke, Chicken McNuggets glued together with cornstarch, and a hamburger from a corn-fed cow, all of it consumed in a vehicle that is itself running on corn ethanol.

To see if there was another way, I traveled to a farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley that stands as the mirror opposite of the industrial model. At Polyface Farm, I found not a monoculture of corn but a polyculture of perennial grasses. Here, I was told, “I'm a grass farmer.” The farm is a complex, stacked system where a half-dozen animal species are raised in an intensive rotational dance of symbiosis. Cattle graze a pasture one day, and a few days later, laying hens arrive in a portable “Eggmobile” to spread the cowpats, eat the fly larvae, and fertilize the field. The animals do most of the work, turning sunlight captured by grass into an astounding cornucopia of meat, milk, and eggs, all while healing the land and building new soil. It is a farm that models itself on a natural ecosystem, a place where the logic of biology, not industry, rules.

But I soon discovered that not all alternatives are created equal. The word “organic” has become a powerful story in the supermarket, a kind of pastoral poetry that conjures images of small family farms and happy animals. I followed this story to California, the heart of the “organic empire,” and found a different reality. I visited vast, industrial organic farms where thousands of acres of lettuce are grown in monoculture, and sheds where twenty thousand “free-range” chickens live out their lives without ever feeling the sun on their backs. The organic movement, which began as a critique of the industrial food system, has largely been absorbed by it. The result is a contradiction in terms: industrial organic, a food chain that may not use chemical pesticides but is still floating on a sinking sea of petroleum to ship its produce across the continent.

My final journey was an attempt to create the shortest and most transparent food chain of all: a meal I would hunt, gather, and grow myself. This was a personal, almost philosophical, quest to eat in full consciousness, to take direct responsibility for the killing of the animals I eat. I had to learn to fire a gun and to distinguish a delicious mushroom from a deadly one, confronting the omnivore's dilemma in its most elemental form. I needed a Virgil, a guide, and I found one in a burly Sicilian blacksmith named Angelo, a man for whom foraging, hunting, curing, and cooking are not hobbies, but a way of life.

With Angelo, I walked through an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of my prey. Hunting powerfully inflects a place, sharpening the senses and anchoring you to the present in a way I had never experienced. It is a vacation from the human condition, a return to a state of being where you are tied to the earth and to the animal you pursue. After one failed attempt, I found myself on a steep hillside as a line of wild pigs came over the crest. The world exploded in a confusion of adrenaline and noise, and when the fog lifted, a 190-pound sow lay dead on the road. Your pig. The elation of the kill soon gave way to the messy, visceral reality of butchering the animal, a process that confronted me with my own animality and the profound ambiguity of taking a life.

The final meal was a kind of ceremony. The menu featured wild Sonoma pig, braised and grilled over an olive-wood fire; fettuccine with morels I'd foraged in a burned forest in the Sierra; fava beans and salad from my garden; bread leavened with wild yeast captured from the Berkeley air; and a galette made from cherries gathered from a neighbor's tree. My guests were the friends who had guided my foraging. Every item on the plate told a story, connecting us to the forests, fields, and people who had nourished it.

This was the perfect meal, not because it was flawlessly cooked, but because it was eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it. It was a meal that had been fully paid for, leaving no hidden costs to the environment, to public health, or to the future. To compare this transcendently slow meal to the fast-food feast of corn is to marvel at the different ways we can engage with the world that sustains us. One is based on knowledge, the other on ignorance. In the end, what I learned is that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.