The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History Of Four Meals Quotes
"Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent tubes, the American supermarket doesn’t present itself as having very much to do with Nature."
"If you do manage to regard the supermarket through the eyes of a naturalist, your first impression is apt to be of its astounding biodiversity."
"Every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain that begins with a particular plant growing in a specific patch of soil."
"The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn."
"The notion of switching to some other crop Naylor gruffly dismisses. 'What am I going to grow here, broccoli? Lettuce? We’ve got a long-term investment in growing corn and soybeans.'"
"It’s difficult to control the means of production when the product you’re selling can reproduce itself endlessly."
"When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel."
"The usual way a domesticated species figures out what traits its human ally will reward is through the slow and wasteful process of Darwinian trial and error."
"We have perturbed the global nitrogen cycle... more than any other, even carbon."
"Farming is riding tractors and spraying; the number of riding and spraying days it takes to raise five hundred acres of industrial corn can probably be counted in weeks."
"This is a system designed to keep production high and prices low."
"Ecology teaches that whenever an excess of organic matter arises anywhere in nature, creatures large and small inevitably step forward to consume it."
"The only way a farmer like George Naylor can keep his income from declining is by producing still more corn."
"The principal task of the industrial food system is finding people and animals to consume cheap corn."
"The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to argue with; it has made meat so cheap and abundant."
"Public health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth."
"The great advantage of processing food is that it allows you to capture more of the money a consumer spends on food."
"Food systems can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods."
"The industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie."
"We subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots."
"Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease."
"The same farmer who is applying toxic fumigants to sterilize the soil in one field is in the next field applying compost to nurture the soil’s natural fertility."
"The existential challenge facing grasses in all but the most arid regions is how to successfully compete against trees for territory and sunlight."
"In the case of artificial manures—the original term for synthetic fertilizers—Howard contended that our hubris threatened to damage the health not only of the soil (since the harsh chemicals kill off biological activity in humus) but of 'the national health' as well."
"To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost—to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken."
"The notion of imitating whole natural systems stands in stark opposition to reductionist science, which works by breaking such systems down into their component parts in order to understand how they work and then manipulating them—one variable at a time."
"You have a choice of getting sad about all that or moving on. We tried hard to build a cooperative community and a local food system, but at the end of the day it wasn’t successful. This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch."
"In truth, my cheeseburger’s relationship to beef seemed nearly as metaphorical as the nugget’s relationship to a chicken."
"Greenways tackles its weeds with frequent and carefully timed tilling."
"The heavy tillage—heavier than in a conventional field—destroys the tilth of the soil."
"The organic ideal is so exacting—a sustainable system modeled on nature that requires not only no synthetic chemicals but also no purchased inputs of any kind."
"The best organic farmers deplore this sort of input substitution as a fall from the organic ideal."
"The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis."
"Is industrial organic ultimately a contradiction in terms?"
"The maw of that processing beast eats ten acres of cornfield in an hour."
"The industrialization of organic comes at a price."
"The simplicity of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance."
"The environmental benefits of this process cannot be overestimated."
"The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States."
"We’re really in a whole different business now."
"To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker’s bloodstream."
"This farm couldn’t stand any more plowing. In many places there was no topsoil left whatsoever—just outcroppings of granite and clay."
"He turned the farm into an R&D project instead of a salary project."
"One look at their books convinced him that all the advice he’d been hearing...was a recipe for financial ruin."
"Instead of building bankruptcy tubes...he started down a whole other path."
"Dad was very much a visionary and an inventor."
"Innovations like these helped rebuild the fertility of the soil."
"I still miss him every day. Dad was definitely a little odd, but in a good way."
"You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food."
"The beauty of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find their tribes, and then for the tribes to find their way to us."
"Nature does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent."
"The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture."
"The French eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules."
"Cooking, one of the omnivore’s cleverest tools, opened up whole new vistas of edibility."
"By making these foods more digestible, cooking plants and animal flesh vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans."
"So we find ourselves as a species almost back where we started: anxious omnivores struggling once again to figure out what it is wise to eat."
"The more anxious we are about eating, the more vulnerable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert’s advice."
"A vice president of marketing at General Mills once painted for me a picture of the state of the American family dinner."
"The family dinner, and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest such casualty of capitalism."
"Instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of a cuisine, or even on the wisdom of our senses, we rely on expert opinion, advertising, government food pyramids, and diet books."
"In hunting you always need to be ready. So, okay, you learned something today. Next time you will be ready and you will take your shot."
"Eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it."
"The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat."
"But the general consensus has always been that humans were indeed omnivores and, whatever spiritual or moral dilemmas the killing and eating of animals posed, our various cultural traditions resolved them for us well enough."
"Hunting is in particularly bad odor these days, even among people who still eat meat."
"We tolerate this schizophrenia because the life of the pig has moved out of view."
"Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible."
"Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away."
"Certainly looking away was now completely off the table."
"Animal Liberation, comprised of equal parts philosophical argument and journalistic description, is one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it."
"If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do."
"The human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference."
"The hunter maintains his own mental map of the same ground, marked with auspicious spots, the places he has encountered pigs before and the connecting routes he can navigate."
"Hunting offers us our last best chance to escape history and return to the state of nature, if only for a time."
"For the animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals."
"A human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world."
"The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places."
"Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat."
"To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is."
"The sound had no address; this was the grunt of the ground itself, omnipresent, more audible to my torso than my ears."
"A rounded black form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill."
"I took aim at the shoulder of the grayish pig, aligning the site’s U and I with the top of the animal’s front leg, and then inched down a shade."
"The pigs erupted in panic, moving every which way at once like black bumper cars."
"Death was quickly overtaking her, and I was relieved she wouldn’t need a second shot."
"I kneeled down and pressed the palm of my hand against the pig’s belly above the nipples and felt beneath the dusty, bristly skin her warmth, but no heartbeat."
"The first to surface was this powerful upwelling of pride: I had actually done this thing I’d set out to do, had successfully shot a pig."
"Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal."
"Using a block and tackle and a stainless steel hanger with two hooks that Angelo had forged expressly for this purpose, we’d managed to raise and hang the pig by its rear ankles from the stout limb of an oak tree."
"The stink in my nostrils was probably the contents of the pig’s intestines, which had split open on the ground, in various stages of digestion and decomposition."
"Seeing is believing has it backward when it comes to hunting mushrooms; in this case, believing is seeing."
"I thought maybe the problem was that I was a writer, somebody who might do something as crazy as publish the location of a favorite spot, so I emphasized that a journalist would sooner go to jail than reveal a secret from a confidential source."
"This was a meal far richer in stories than calories, and some of those stories, like the one about the salt, did not end well."
"Wild California pig was the main course, but which cut and how to prepare it?"