Omnivore's Dilemma

I asked him what was on his bookshelf. J. I. Rodale. Sir Albert Howard. Aldo Leopold. Wes Jackson. Wendell Berry. Louis Bromfield. The classic texts of organic agriculture and American agrarianism.

As it happens, in the years since Howard wrote, science has provided support for a great many of his unscientific claims: Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composted soils;1. such plants are more vulnerable to diseases and insect pests;2. polycultures are more productive and less prone to disease

the word “organic” to food and farming occurred much more recently: In the 1940s in the pages of Organic Gardening and Farming. Founded in 1940 by J. I. Rodale, a health-food fanatic from New York City’s Lower East Side, the magazine devoted its pages to the agricultural methods and health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—“organ

industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat. “Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it.

There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

including most of the farmers who raise food animals, do our very best to avoid thinking about, let alone having anything directly to do with, their slaughter. “You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

“decidedly Eastern, connected, holistic product, and selling it through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system.”

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows t

This is why Howard spent so much time studying peasant agricultural systems in India and elsewhere: The best ones survived as long as they did because they brought food forth from the same ground year after year without depleting the soil.