My grandmother could kill half a dozen chickens in a matter of minutes.
Bessie Revelle Dragoo had the strong arms of an Illinois farm woman, the ample waist of a good cook and the unsentimental manner that comes from being an old hand at getting the main course to the table.
She could grab a hen by the head with one hand, swing the bird aloft in a wide arc, slam it onto a stump and bring an ax down with the other hand.
I saw this just once, and that's how I remember it: deft and swift. I wasn’t supposed to see that much. My mother wanted to spare her citified daughter and so sent me to take a nap. But that life-and-death drama took place in my own back yard in Decatur. It would have been hard to miss.
When the city couldn't go to the farm, my grandmother brought the farm to the city. She helped my mother by turning the basement into a seasonal canning operation and, at least once, slaughtering dinner out by the alley.
Unbelievable as it seems now, the neighbors appeared to see nothing odd in this. Maybe that was because, in the years right after the Second World War, the neighbors weren’t that far off the farm themselves. The exodus from the country was well under way.
The farm was beginning to change, too. So was the food we ate and the way we prepared it.
By the time I came along, hog butchering was a distant memory on our farm, and nobody — my mother would stretch this word for effect — noooobody had to learn how to milk the cow anymore. When I entered high school, all that was left in the way of domestic stock was an occupying force of evil-minded "settin'" hens. They were owned by the family that has, by now, sharecropped our ground outside Camargo and lived in great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse as many generations as my ancestors had.
But even those too-intense laying hens — good for a joke on naive city cousins — had disappeared by the time I headed to college.
It no longer paid to keep animals on the farm. It was cheaper and easier to go the store, then the drive-through. Meanwhile, the land had become a monoculture, a rotation of corn and beans.
In three generations and five decades, we moved from my grandmother's fried chicken to Chicken McNuggets. The industrial food marketers call this progress. Most folks don't know the difference. And some folks don't want to know the difference.
This is the central point of author and journalist Michael Pollan’s latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. As humans, we can choose what to eat. But with choice comes danger — the possibility that our food can make us sick as easily as it can sustain us and give us pleasure. Is that mushroom edible, or poisonous? It’s important to know.
Our survival, Pollan stresses, still depends on knowing what, exactly, we're eating, so he tracks the American diet to its source. His conclusion is that, abetted by a global industrial food "system," we have grown so distant from the sources of our food we have lost our ability to make informed choices. We have become unthinking, irresponsible eaters — irresponsible to ourselves, to other animals and to the earth itself. Pollan is at his best in describing how we got to this point and what the consequences might be. As for how we might think about the food we eat — and find new choices we might want to make — he is, admittedly, as confused as the rest of us. He does offer parameters for those choices, lay out some alternatives and suggest a few compromises.
First, Pollan argues that making informed choices means facing squarely the costs of a monoculture agriculture — the costs to the land and to those who farm it, the costs to our social culture and the costs to our health. His description of the disease risks inherent in large-scale meat, egg and dairy animal operations is, to say the least, unappetizing, and he's sympathetic to those who have chosen to "turn away." A small bite will suffice: "The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever."
Pollan's descriptions of feedlots and killing floors, hog confinement and mass egg production make my grandmother's methods of dispatching animals seem enlightened. Those she raised weren't force-fed corn; they retained their beaks; they roamed at will. Then they died cleanly at the hands of the family they would sustain. Not, let's be clear, that my grandmother ever gave two seconds' worth of thought to the moral implications of the life or death of a chicken.
But an increasing number of us do. Bethany Carson's piece in this issue shows that more of us are looking for food that is organic, locally grown and humanely raised. So many, in fact, that demand is outstripping supply.
Illinois farmers, she reports, have been "slow to cash in." But if enough of them do, and enough consumers decide it's time to relearn where their food comes from, it's likely the relationship of grower to processor to consumer will change again.
Oil to food
Belly up to a barrel
We might want to think of the Middle East instead of the Middle West next time we drive past a field of corn. The gas we pump into the SUV before hitting the road should make us think twice, but so should that corn, argues author Michael Pollan.
"We seldom focus on farming's role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow," he writes in The Omnivore?s Dilemma, his critique of America's industrial food system. "For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road."
Pollan's point is not anti-farming, and certainly not anti-farmer. His argument is that we don't need as much corn as U.S. farmers grow ? and that American agriculture is costly in ways most of us don't stop to calculate.
Farmers, struggling to meet the dictates of a stratified industrial food market, plant corn fenceline to fenceline because that's what manufacturers want. And, because somebody has to consume it, manufacturers keep finding ways to put more of it into what we eat.
Meanwhile, the national food industry that has evolved in the past 50 years sucks up a lot of no-longer-so-cheap oil. According to Pollan, "one-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food."
We consume more energy than we produce, he writes. "From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink the petroleum directly, because there's a lot less energy in a bushel of corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half gallon or so of oil required to produce it."
Peggy Boyer Long
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, July/August 2006
