## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Pollan]] - Full Title: The Omnivore's Dilemma - Category: #books ## Highlights - But for omnivores like us (and the rat) a vast amount of brain space and time must be devoted to figuring out which of all the many potential dishes nature lays on are safe to eat. ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=184)) - Many anthropologists believe that the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore’s dilemma. ([Location 189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=189)) - But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat. ([Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=297)) - “What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?” Not very long ago an eater didn’t need a journalist to answer these questions. The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain. ([Location 346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=346)) - Where most plants during photosynthesis create compounds that have three carbon atoms, corn (along with a small handful of other species) make compounds that have four: hence “C-4,” the botanical nickname for this gifted group of plants, which wasn’t identified until the 1970s. ([Location 402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=402)) - In order to gather carbon atoms from the air, a plant has to open its stomata, the microscopic orifices in the leaves through which plants both take in and exhaust gases. Every time a stoma opens to admit carbon dioxide precious molecules of water escape. It’s as though every time you opened your mouth to eat you lost a quantity of blood. Ideally, you would open your mouth as seldom as possible, ingesting as much food as you could with every bite. This is essentially what a C-4 plant does. By recruiting extra atoms of carbon during each instance of photosynthesis, the corn plant is able to limit its loss of water and “fix”—that is, take from the atmosphere and link in a useful molecule—significantly more carbon than other plants. ([Location 405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=405)) - No other group of species gained more from its association with humans than the edible grasses, and no grass has reaped more from agriculture than Zea mays, today the world’s most important cereal crop. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=446)) - Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant maize in the spring of 1621, and the colonists immediately recognized its value: No other plant could produce quite as much food quite as fast on a given patch of New World ground as this Indian corn. (Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt—hence “corned beef” it didn’t take long for Zea mays to appropriate the word for itself, at least in America.) ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=462)) - (Whiskey and pork were both regarded as “concentrated corn,” the latter a concentrate of its protein, the former of its calories; both had the virtue of reducing corn’s bulk and raising its price.) ([Location 477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=477)) - Corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=489)) - Long before scientists understood hybridization, Native Americans had discovered that by taking the pollen from the tassel of one corn plant and dusting it on the silks of another, they could create new plants that combined the traits of both parents. American Indians were the world’s first plant breeders, developing literally thousands of distinct cultivars for every conceivable environment and use. ([Location 536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=536)) - Early in the twentieth century American corn breeders figured out how to bring corn reproduction under firm control and to protect the seed from copiers. The breeders discovered that when they crossed two corn plants that had come from inbred lines—from ancestors that had themselves been exclusively self-pollinated for several generations—the hybrid offspring displayed some highly unusual characteristics. First, all the seeds in that first generation (F-1, in the plant breeder’s vocabulary) produced genetically identical plants—a trait that, among other things, facilitates mechanization. Second, those plants exhibited heterosis, or hybrid vigor—better yields than either of their parents. But most important of all, they found that the seeds produced by these seeds did not “come true”—the plants in the second (F-2) generation bore little resemblance to the plants in the first. Specifically, their yields plummeted by as much as a third, making their seeds virtually worthless. Hybrid corn now offered its breeders what no other plant at that time could: the biological equivalent of a patent. Farmers now had to buy new seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation. The corporation, assured for the first time of a return on its investment in breeding, showered corn with attention—R&D, promotion, advertising—and the plant responded, multiplying its fruitfulness year after year. ([Location 561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=561)) - The higher yield of modern hybrids stems mainly from the fact that they can be planted so close together, thirty thousand to the acre instead of eight thousand in his father’s day. Planting the old open-pollinated (nonhybrid) varieties so densely would result in stalks grown spindly as they jostled each other for sunlight; eventually the plants would topple in the wind. Hybrids have been bred for thicker stalks and stronger root systems, the better to stand upright in a crowd and withstand mechanical harvesting. Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress. ([Location 655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=655)) - You would think that competition among individuals would threaten the tranquility of such a crowded metropolis, yet the modern field of corn forms a most orderly mob. This is because every plant in it, being an F-1 hybrid, is genetically identical to every other. Since no individual plant has inherited any competitive edge over any other, precious resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are shared equitably. There are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants. ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=659)) - The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America’s forests with the surplus chemical, to help out the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.” ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=716)) - All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. (This is why scientists speak of nitrogen as supplying life’s quality, while carbon provides the quantity.) ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=732)) - Although earth’s atmosphere is about 80 percent nitrogen, all those atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive, and therefore useless; the nineteenth-century chemist Justus von Liebig spoke of atmospheric nitrogen’s “indifference to all other substances.” To be of any value to plants and animals, these self-involved nitrogen atoms must be split and then joined to atoms of hydrogen. Chemists call this process of taking atoms from the atmosphere and combining them into molecules useful to living things “fixing” that element. Until a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility. ([Location 735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=735)) - Before Fritz Haber’s invention the sheer amount of life earth could support—the size of crops and therefore the number of human bodies—was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China’s opening to the West: After Nixon’s 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would probably have starved. ([Location 742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=742)) - This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process (Carl Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber’s idea) for fixing nitrogen is the most important invention of the twentieth century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber’s invention. We can easily imagine a world without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=747)) - 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. For the Haber-Bosch process works by combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious amounts of electricity, and the hydrogen is supplied by oil, coal, or, most commonly today, natural gas—fossil fuels. True, these fossil fuels were at one time billions of years ago created by the sun, but they are not renewable in the same way that the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. (That nitrogen is actually fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which trades a tiny drip of sugar for the nitrogen the plant needs.) ([Location 768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=768)) - Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum. ([Location 782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=782)) - More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food. This shift explains the color of the land: The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops to capture a whole year’s worth of sunlight; he has plugged himself into a new source of energy. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=784)) - When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=789)) - I was reminded of Thoreau’s line: “Men have become the tools of their tools.” ([Location 949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=949)) - Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth. “In my grandfather’s time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter,” Rich explained. “In the fifties, when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old. Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.” ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1169)) - Some public health experts worry that since the bovine meat and bonemeal that cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs, and fish, infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when they’re fed the protein of the animals that have been eating them. ([Location 1256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1256)) - Cattle rarely live on feedlot diets for more than 150 days, which might be about as much as their systems can tolerate. “I don’t know how long you could feed them this ration before you’d see problems,” Dr. Metzin said; another vet told me the diet would eventually “blow out their livers” and kill them. Over time the acids eat away at the rumen wall, allowing bacteria to enter the animal’s bloodstream. These microbes wind up in the liver, where they form abscesses and impair the liver’s function. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of feedlot cows are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers; Dr. Mel told me that in some pens the figure runs as high as 70 percent. ([Location 1282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1282)) - What keeps a feedlot animal healthy—or healthy enough—are antibiotics. Rumensin buffers acidity in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat and acidosis, and Tylosin, a form of erythromycin, lowers the incidence of liver infection. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1287)) - One way of looking at 534—the feedlot way, the industrial way—was as a most impressive machine for turning number 2 field corn into cuts of beef. Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 will convert thirty-two pounds of feed into four pounds of gain—new muscle, fat, and bone. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1321)) - (Compared to other food animals, cattle are terribly inefficient: The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.) ([Location 1324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1324)) - Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs, since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen. But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own stomachs, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant strains of E. coli, of which O157:H7 is one, have evolved—yet another creature recruited by nature to absorb the excess biomass coming off the Farm Belt. The problem with these bugs is that they can shake off the acid bath in our stomachs—and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the rumen with corn we’ve broken down one of our food chain’s most important barriers to infection. ([Location 1343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1343)) - So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass–powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. ([Location 1374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1374)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - What doesn’t pass through the gut of a food animal to become meat will pass through one of America’s twenty-five “wet mills” on its way to becoming one of the innumerable products food science has figured out how to tease from a kernel of corn. (These mills are called wet to distinguish them from the traditional mills where corn is simply ground into dry meal for things like tortillas.) ([Location 1393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1393)) - Wet milling is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned. ([Location 1434](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1434)) - People began processing food to keep nature from taking it back: What is spoilage, after all, if not nature, operating through her proxy microorganisms, repossessing our hard-won lunch? So we learned to salt and dry and cure and pickle in the first age of food processing, and to can, freeze, and vacuum-pack in the second. ([Location 1472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1472)) - In the third age of food processing, which begins with the end of World War II, merely preserving the fruits of nature was deemed too modest: The goal now was to improve on nature. The twentieth-century prestige of technology and convenience combined with advances in marketing to push aside butter to make shelf space for margarine, replace fruit juice with juice drinks and then entirely juice-free drinks like Tang, cheese with Cheez Whiz, and whipped cream with Cool Whip. ([Location 1480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1480)) - Corn, a species that had been a modest beneficiary of the first two ages of food processing (having taken well to the can and the freezer), really came into its own during the third. You would never know it without reading the ingredient label (a literary genre unknown until the third age), but corn is the key constituent of all four of these processed foods. ([Location 1483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1483)) - In the typical formulation, corn supplies the carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and soy the protein; the fat can come from either plant. ([Location 1488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1488)) - In many ways breakfast cereal is the prototypical processed food: four cents’ worth of commodity corn (or some other equally cheap grain) transformed into four dollars’ worth of processed food. ([Location 1508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1508)) - (Every farmer I’ve ever met eventually gets around to telling the story about the food industry executive who declared, “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.”) ([Location 1553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1553)) - why go to the trouble and expense of manufacturing food from petroleum when there is such a flood of cheap carbon coming off the farm? So instead of creating foods whole cloth from completely synthetic materials, the industry is building them from fortified apple bits, red-wine extract, flavor fractions derived from oranges, isoflavones from soy, meat substitutes fashioned from mycoprotein, and resistant starches derived from corn. (“Natural raspberry flavor” doesn’t mean the flavor came from a raspberry; it may well have been derived from corn, just not from something synthetic.) ([Location 1595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1595)) - In the 1820s the processing options were basically two: You could turn your corn into pork or alcohol. Today there are hundreds of things a processor can do with corn: They can use it to make everything from chicken nuggets and Big Macs to emulsifiers and nutraceuticals. Yet since the human desire for sweetness surpasses even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. ([Location 1660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1660)) - By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched over entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Why? Because HFCS was a few cents cheaper than sugar (thanks in part to tariffs on imported sugarcane secured by the corn refiners) and consumers didn’t seem to notice the substitution. ([Location 1680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1680)) - loved everything about fast food: the individual portions all wrapped up like presents (not having to share with my three sisters was a big part of the appeal; fast food was private property at its best); ([Location 1776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1776)) - Because a healthy soil digests the dead to nourish the living, Salatin calls it the earth’s stomach. ([Location 1988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1988)) - But it is upon the grass, mediator of soil and sun, that the human gaze has always tended to settle, ([Location 1989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=1989)) - The existential challenge facing grasses in all but the most arid regions is how to successfully compete against trees for territory and sunlight. The evolutionary strategy they hit upon was to make their leaves nourishing and tasty to animals who in turn are nourishing and tasty to us, the big-brained creature best equipped to vanquish the trees on their behalf. But for this strategy to succeed the grasses needed an anatomy that could withstand the rigors of both grazing and fire. So they developed a deep root system and a ground-hugging crown that in many cases puts out runners, allowing the grasses to recover quickly from fire and to reproduce even when grazers (or lawnmowers) prevent them from ever flowering and going to seed. (I used to think we were dominating the grass whenever we mowed the lawn, but in fact we’re playing right into its strategy for world domination, by helping it outcompete the shrubs and trees.) ([Location 2011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2011)) - “Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians—we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians ever wanted—to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn’t care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can’t bear an opt-out option. We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.” ([Location 2074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2074)) - Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away. So to bridge that space we rely on certifiers and label writers and, to a considerable extent, our imagination of what the farms that are producing our food really look like. The organic label may conjure an image of a simpler agriculture, but its very existence is an industrial artifact. ([Location 2134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2134)) - So while the posters still depict family farmers and their philosophies, the produce on sale below them comes primarily from the two big corporate organic growers in California, Earthbound Farm and Grimmway Farms, * which together dominate the market for organic fresh produce in America. (Earthbound alone grows 80 percent of the organic lettuce sold in America.) ([Location 2162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2162)) - was Liebig, in his 1840 monograph Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture, who set agriculture on its industrial path when he broke down the quasi-mystical concept of fertility in soil into a straightforward inventory of the chemical elements plants require for growth. At a stroke, soil biology gave way to soil chemistry, and specifically to the three chemical nutrients Liebig highlighted as crucial to plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, or to use these elements’ initials from the periodic table, N-P-K. ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2287)) - Humus is the stuff in a handful of soil that gives it its blackish cast and characteristic smell. It’s hard to say exactly what humus is because it is so many things. Humus is what’s left of organic matter after it has been broken down by the billions of big and small organisms that inhabit a spoonful of earth—the bacteria, phages, fungi, and earthworms responsible for decomposition. ([Location 2299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2299)) - Horizon Organic’s Mark Retzloff labored mightily to preserve the ability of his company—which is the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling more than half of the market—to operate its large-scale industrial dairy in southern Idaho. ([Location 2448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2448)) - A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. ([Location 2623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2623)) - The Cornish Cross represents the pinnacle of industrial chicken breeding. It is the most efficient converter of corn into breast meat ever designed, though this efficiency comes at a high physiological price: The birds grow so rapidly (reaching oven-roaster proportions in seven weeks) that their poor legs cannot keep pace, and frequently fail. ([Location 2680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2680)) - The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate. And while it is true that organic farmers don’t spread fertilizers made from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy-intensive process involving extra irrigation (to germinate the weeds before planting) and extra cultivation. All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, according to David Pimentel, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby. ([Location 2866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2866)) - Grass farmers grow animals—for meat, eggs, milk, and wool—but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat. “To be even more accurate,” Joel has said, “we should call ourselves sun farmers. The grass is just the way we capture the solar energy.” One of the principles of modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible farmers should rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured every day by photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum. ([Location 2932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2932)) - The unit in which a grass farmer performs and records all these calculations, deciding exactly when and where to move the herd, is a “cow day,” which is simply the average amount of forage a cow will eat in one day; for his rotations to work, the farmer needs to know just how many cow days each paddock will yield. ([Location 2977](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2977)) - As destructive as overgrazing can be to a pasture, undergrazing can be almost as damaging, since it leads to woody, senescent grasses and a loss of productivity. But getting it just right—grazing the optimal number of cattle at the optimal moment to exploit the blaze of growth—yields tremendous amounts of grass, all the while improving the quality of the land. Joel calls this optimal grazing rhythm “pulsing the pastures” and says that at Polyface it has boosted the number of cow days to as much as four hundred per acre; the county average is seventy. ([Location 2981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=2981)) - Chances are Budger has also chosen exactly which grasses to eat first, depending on whatever minerals her body craves that day; some species supply her more magnesium, others more potassium. (If she’s feeling ill she might go for the plantain, a forb whose leaves contain antibiotic compounds; grazing cattle instinctively use the diversity of the salad bar to medicate themselves.) By contrast 534, who never got to pick and choose his dinner, let alone his medications, depends on animal nutritionists to design his total ration—which of course is only as total as the current state of knowledge in animal science permits. ([Location 3052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3052)) - The shorn grass plant, endeavoring to restore the rough balance between its roots and leaves, will proceed to shed as much root mass as it’s just lost in leaf mass. When the discarded roots die, the soil’s resident population of bacteria, fungi, and earthworms will get to work breaking them down into rich brown humus. What had been the grass plant’s root runs will become channels through which worms, air, and rainwater will move through the earth, stimulating the process by which new topsoil is formed. It is in this manner that the grazing of ruminants, when managed properly, actually builds new soil from the bottom up. Organic matter in a pasture also builds from the top down, as leaf litter and animal wastes break down on the surface, much as it does on a forest floor. But in a grassland decaying roots are the biggest source of new organic matter, and in the absence of grazers the soil-building process would be nowhere near as swift or productive. ([Location 3060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3060)) - The shearing of the tallest grasses exposes the pasture’s shorter plants to sunlight, stimulating their growth. This is why a well-grazed pasture will see its population of ground-hugging clovers increase, a boon to grasses and grazers alike. These legumes fix nitrogen in the soil, fertilizing the neighboring grasses from below while supplying nitrogen to the grazers above; the bacteria living in the animal’s rumen will use the nitrogen in these clover leaves to construct new molecules of protein. ([Location 3074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3074)) - Joel’s pastures will, like his woodlots, remove thousands of pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year; instead of sequestering all that carbon in trees, however, grasslands store most of it underground, in the form of soil humus. In fact, grassing over that portion of the world’s cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably. ([Location 3085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3085)) - 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 each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. 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. ([Location 3088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3088)) - Jackson claims his group is making slow but steady progress, however, and has already disproved the conventional wisdom, widely held among botanists, that plants must choose, in effect, between devoting their energy to the production of seeds, as annuals do, or using it to survive the winter in the manner of perennials. ([Location 3098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3098)) - It’s true that prodigious amounts of food energy are wasted every time an animal eats another animal—nine calories for every one we consume. But if all that energy has been drawn from the boundless storehouse of the sun, as in the case of eating meat off this pasture, that meal comes as close to a free lunch as we can hope to get. ([Location 3104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3104)) - there are a great many reasons American cattle came off the grass and into the feedlot, and yet all of them finally come down to the same one: Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. They prize consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale. Everything about corn meshes smoothly with the gears of this great machine; grass doesn’t. ([Location 3137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3137)) - Grain is the closest thing in nature to an industrial commodity: storable, portable, fungible, ever the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Since it can be accumulated and traded, grain is a form of wealth. It is a weapon, too, as Earl Butz once had the bad taste to mention in public; the nations with the biggest surpluses of grain have always exerted power over the ones in short supply. Throughout history governments have encouraged their farmers to grow more than enough grain, to protect against famine, to free up labor for other purposes, to improve the trade balance, and generally to augment their own power. ([Location 3140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3140)) - bankruptcy tubes”—farmer lingo for silos ([Location 3219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3219)) - Left to their own devices, a confined flock of chickens will eventually destroy any patch of land, by pecking the grass down to its roots and poisoning the soil with its extremely “hot,” or nitrogenous, manure. This is why the typical free-range chicken yard quickly winds up bereft of plant life and hard as brick. Moving the birds daily keeps both the land and the birds healthy; the broilers escape their pathogens and the varied diet of greens supplies most of their vitamins and minerals. The birds also get a ration of corn, toasted soybeans, and kelp, which we scooped into long troughs in their pens, but Joel claims the fresh grass, along with the worms, grasshoppers, and crickets they peck out of the grass, provides as much as 20 percent of their diet—a significant savings to the farmer and a boon to the birds. Meanwhile, their manure fertilizes the grass, supplying all the nitrogen it needs. ([Location 3267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3267)) - “In nature you’ll always find birds following herbivores,” Joel explained, when I asked him for the theory behind the Eggmobile. “The egret perched on the rhino’s nose, the pheasants and turkeys trailing after the bison—that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate.” In each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore; they also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal’s droppings, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease. ([Location 3286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3286)) - The cows further oblige the chickens by shearing the grass; chickens can’t navigate in grass more than about six inches tall. ([Location 3298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3298)) - Is what I’m looking at in this pasture a system for producing exceptionally tasty eggs? If so, then the cattle and their manure are a means to an end. Or is it a system for producing grass-fed beef without the use of any chemicals, in which case the chickens, by fertilizing and sanitizing the cow pastures, comprise the means to that end? So does that make their eggs a product or a by-product? And is manure—theirs or the cattle’s—a waste product or a raw material? (And what should we call the fly larvae?) Depending on the point of view you take—that of the chicken, the cow, or even the grass—the relationship between subject and object, cause and effect, flips. ([Location 3315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3315)) - This pasture can absorb four hundred units of nitrogen a year. That translates into four visits from the Eggmobile or two passes of a broiler pen. If I ran any more Eggmobiles or broiler pens over it, the chickens would put down more nitrogen than the grass could metabolize. Whatever the grass couldn’t absorb would run off, and suddenly I have a pollution problem.” ([Location 3325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3325)) - Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over. In agriculture, this usually means a monoculture of a single animal or crop. In fact, the whole history of agriculture is a progressive history of simplification, as humans reduced the biodiversity of their landscapes to a small handful of chosen species. (Wes Jackson calls our species “homo the homogenizer.”) ([Location 3340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3340)) - Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. In effect, Joel is farming in time as well as in space—in four dimensions rather than three. ([Location 3351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3351)) - Making good compost depends on the proper ratio of carbon to nitrogen; the carbon is needed to lock down the more volatile nitrogen. It takes a lot of woodchips to compost chicken or rabbit waste. So the carbon from the woodlots feeds the fields, finding its way into the grass and, from there, into the beef. Which it turns out is not only grass fed but tree fed as well. ([Location 3505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3505)) - “You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” ([Location 3531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3531)) - Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.” ([Location 3772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3772)) - “This is food for folks whose faces itch when the wool’s being pulled over their eyes,” Bev said, giving me a taste of his spiel. “Instead of mad cow disease, we’ve got glad cows at ease.” ([Location 3847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=3847)) - The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture. ([Location 4114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4114)) - One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In fact, there’s research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts.) Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-inflammatory.) As our diet—and the diet of the animals we eat—shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenating oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. ([Location 4171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4171)) - Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat—long associated with cardiovascular disease—may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal’s diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with the predictable result that their omega-3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to -3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef.) The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you’re eating has itself eaten. ([Location 4182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4182)) - Being a somewhat accident-prone individual (childhood mishaps included getting bitten in the cheek by a seagull and breaking my nose falling out of bed), I have always thought it wise to maintain a healthy distance between me and firearms. Besides, you have to have had a certain kind of dad in order to join the culture of hunting in America, and mine, one of the great in-doorsmen, was emphatically not that dad. My father looked upon hunting as a human activity that had stopped making sense with the invention of the steakhouse. ([Location 4268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4268)) - “[T]here is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota,” Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac. He was talking specifically about hunting, but the same might be said of gardening or hunting for mushrooms. “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.” ([Location 4326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4326)) - The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own. ([Location 4411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4411)) - The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature. Indeed, even when we’re otherwise sated, our appetite for sweet things persists, which is probably why dessert shows up in the meal when it does. A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose (the only type of energy the brain can use), or at least it once did, when sources of sugar were few and far between. (The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate. ([Location 4472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4472)) - Our sense of taste’s second big bias predisposes us against bitter flavors, which is how many of the defensive toxins produced by plants happen to taste. Pregnant women are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, probably an adaptation to protect the developing fetus against even the mild plant toxins found in foods like broccoli. ([Location 4477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4477)) - (Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn’t disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you’d be willing to share.) ([Location 4486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4486)) - Once humans discovered the curative properties of salicylic acid in willows (the active ingredient in aspirin) and the relief from pain offered by the poppy’s opiates, our instinctive aversion to these plants’ bitterness gave way to an even more convincing cultural belief that the plants were worth ingesting even so; basically, our powers of recognition, memory, and communication overcame the plants’ defenses. ([Location 4494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4494)) - That set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine, for example, specifies combinations of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties. The meso-American practice of cooking corn with lime and serving it with beans, like the Asian practice of fermenting soy and serving it with rice, turn out to render these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would be. When not fermented, soy contains an antitrypsin factor that blocks the absorption of protein, rendering the bean indigestible; unless corn is cooked with an alkali like lime its niacin is unavailable, leading to the nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance is restored. Similarly, a dish that combines fermented soy with rice is nutritionally balanced. ([Location 4546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4546)) - Paul Rozin has suggested, only partly in jest, that Freud would have done well to build his psychology around our appetite for food rather than our appetite for sex. Both are fundamental biological drives necessary to our survival as a species, and both must be carefully channeled and socialized for the good of society. (“You can’t just grab any tasty-looking morsel,” he points out.) But food is more important than sex, Rozin contends. Sex we can live without (at least as individuals), and it occurs with far less frequency than eating. Since we also do rather more of our eating in public there has been “a more elaborate cultural transformation of our relationship to food than there is to sex.” ([Location 4578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4578)) - 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. 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, and we place our faith in science to sort out for us what culture once did with rather more success. Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore’s dilemma. ([Location 4656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4656)) - There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham. ([Location 4696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4696)) - we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. ([Location 4838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4838)) - Ancient man regarded animals much more as a modern ecologist would than an animal philosopher—as a species, that is, rather than a collection of individuals. In the ancient view “they were mortal and immortal,” John Berger writes in “Looking at Animals.” “An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox.” Which, when you think about it, is probably pretty much how any species in nature regards another. ([Location 4969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=4969)) - The farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a “serious clash of interests” with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. ([Location 5011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5011)) - The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing (and hunting) animals on it—especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein. ([Location 5021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5021)) - Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look. ([Location 5118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5118)) - Irony—the outside perspective—easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I should have. ([Location 5183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5183)) - Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter. All at once it provides the motive, the reward, and the optimal mind-set for hunting. ([Location 5262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5262)) - Those moderns who have had the clearest idea about the animals, and therefore the least uneasiness about killing them, were the Cartesians, who decided animals were, in effect, mineral—insensible machines. ([Location 5528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5528)) - Like the mirror in the convenience store earlier that afternoon, Angelo’s digital photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can’t withstand, at least not in the twenty-first century. Yet I’m not prepared to say that that gaze offers the more truthful view of the matter. The picture is a jolting dispatch from the deep interior of an experience that does not easily travel across the borders of modern life. ([Location 5545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5545)) - it. “The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.” ([Location 5574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5574)) - Before Angelo agreed to take me I’d asked a slew of acquaintances I knew to be mycophiles if I might accompany them. (The Bay Area is home to many such people, probably because mushroom hunting marries the region’s two guiding obsessions: eating and the outdoors.) I was always careful to solemnly swear to protect the location of their spots. For some people you could see at once that this was an entirely outrageous request, tantamount to asking if I might borrow their credit card for the afternoon. ([Location 5630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5630)) - The chanterelle is a mycorrhizal species, which means it lives in association with the roots of plants—oak trees, in the chanterelle’s case, and usually oak trees of a venerable age. ([Location 5646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5646)) - Our ability to identify plants and fungi with confidence, which after all is one of the most critical tools of our survival, involves far more sensory information than can ever be printed on a page; it is, truly, a form of “body knowledge” not easily reduced or conveyed over a distance. But now that I have held a freshly picked chanterelle in my hands, smelled its apricoty scent, registered its specific heft and the precise quality of its cool dampness (and absorbed who knows how many other qualities beneath the threshold of conscious notice), I’ll recognize the next one without a moment’s hesitation. At least in the case of this one species, my mycophobic instinct has been stilled, allowing me to enjoy. It’s not every day you acquire such a sturdy piece of knowledge. ([Location 5724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5724)) - plant knowledge is all but useless in understanding fungi, which are in fact more closely related to animals than they are to plants. ([Location 5740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5740)) - The mushroom is the “fruiting body” of a subterranean network of microscopic hyphae, improbably long rootlike cells that thread themselves through the soil like neurons. Bunched like cables, the hyphae form webs of (still microscopic) mycelium. Mycologists can’t dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelia are too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintegrating. Hard as it may be to see a mushroom—the most visible and tangible part!—to see the whole organism of which it is merely a component may simply be impossible. ([Location 5751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5751)) - Fungi, lacking chlorophyll, differ from plants in that they can’t manufacture food energy from the sun. Like animals, they feed on organic matter made by plants, or by plant eaters. Most of the fungi we eat obtain their energy by one of two means: saprophytically, by decomposing dead vegetable matter, and mycorrhizally, by associating with the roots of living plants. Among the saprophytes, many of which can be cultivated by inoculating a suitable mass of dead organic matter (logs, manure, grain) with their spores, are the common white button mushrooms, shiitakes, cremini, Portobellos, and oyster mushrooms. Most of the choicest wild mushrooms are impossible to cultivate, or nearly so, since they need living and often very old trees in order to grow, and can take several decades to fruit. ([Location 5759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5759)) - If the special genius of plants is photosynthesis, the ability of chlorophyll to transform sunlight and water and soil minerals into carbohydrates, the special genius of fungi is the ability to break down organic molecules and minerals into simple molecules and atoms through the action of their powerful enzymes. ([Location 5768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5768)) - The talent of fungi for decomposing and recycling organic matter is what makes them indispensable, not only to trees but to all life on earth. If the soil is the earth’s stomach, fungi supply its digestive enzymes—literally. Without fungi to break things down, the earth would long ago have suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter created by plants; the dead would pile up without end, the carbon cycle would cease to function, and living things would run out of things to eat. We tend to train our attention and science on life and growth, but of course death and decomposition are no less important to nature’s operations, and the fungi are the undisputed rulers of this realm. ([Location 5774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5774)) - (Mexicans call mushrooms carne de los muertos—“flesh of the dead.”) ([Location 5780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5780)) - It’s difficult to reconcile the extraordinary energies of these organisms with the fact that they contain relatively little of the kind of energy that scientists usually measure: calories. Because they don’t supply many calories, nutritionists don’t regard mushrooms as an important source of nutrition. (They do provide some minerals and vitamins, as well as a few essential amino acids, which are what give some species their meaty flavor.) But calories are simply units of solar energy that have been captured and stored by green plants and, as Weil points out, “mushrooms have little to do with the sun.” They emerge at night and wither in the light of day. ([Location 5792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5792)) - We don’t have the scientific tools to measure or even account for these fungi’s unusual powers. Weil speculates that their energies derive from the moon rather than the sun, that mushrooms contain, instead of calories of solar origin, prodigious amounts of lunar energy. ([Location 5804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5804)) - I gathered that Paulie Porcini was part of the subculture of mushroom hunters who travel up and down the West Coast, following the seasonal fruiting of the fungi: porcinis in the fall, chanterelles in winter, morels in the spring. “These are people living out of vans,” Ben explained, “not the types who ever watch the five o’clock news.” They cobble together a living selling their mushrooms to brokers who set up shop in motel rooms near the forests, post signs, and pay the hunters in cash. ([Location 5851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5851)) - They cataloged for me the “indicator species” for morels: other, more conspicuous plants and fungi that signaled their likely presence. Dogwood in bloom was a good sign that the soil had reached the proper temperature, as was, allegedly, the appearance of the ice plant, a big bright red phallus rising up from the otherwise lifeless forest floor; ([Location 5898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5898)) - I could see why you would want theories to organize your hunting; I’d worked up my own while hunting chanterelles with Angelo. There was so much ground to cover, and the morels were so damned quiet, that theories helped divide the field on which we were playing this game of hide-and-seek into warmer and colder areas. The theories told you when to intensify your attention, scrupulously combing the forest floor with your eyes, and when you could safely rest it. For the hunter-gatherer, high-quality attentiveness is a precious but limited resource, and theories, by encapsulating past experience, help you to deploy it most efficiently. ([Location 5903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5903)) - It was deeply satisfying when the morels appeared, a phenomenon you could swear was as much under their control as yours. I became, perforce, a student of the “pop-out effect,” a term I’d first heard from mushroomers but subsequently learned is used by psychologists studying visual perception. To reliably distinguish a given object in a chaotic or monochromatic visual field is a daunting perceptual task, one so complex that researchers in artificial intelligence have struggled to teach it to computers. Yet when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we’re hoping to spot—whether its color or pattern or shape—it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command. To get your eyes on is to have this narrow visual filter installed and functioning. That’s why Ben had me practice on his finds, to fix in my mind’s eye the pattern of morels as seen against the forest’s layer of duff. To hunt for mushrooms makes you appreciate what a crucial evolutionary adaptation the pop-out effect is for a creature that forages for food in a forest—especially when that food doesn’t want to be found. Without the pop-out effect, finding one’s dinner would depend on chance encounters with edible species and, of course, on fruit, the only important food source in nature that actually tries to pop out. Since the evolutionary strategy of fruiting plants is to recruit animals to transport their seeds, they’ve evolved to get themselves noticed, attracting us with their bright colors. In the case of the fruits and flowers, the pop-out effect is, in effect, collaborative. But just about everything else you might want to eat in the forest is hiding. ([Location 5921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5921)) - Yet at the same time the morels are trying to escape the dying forest, they also play a role in its renewal. The slightly sulfurous, meaty odor of morels attracts flies, which lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom’s hollow stalk. Larvae emerge and feed on the flesh of the morels; birds then return to the forest to feed on the larvae, in the process dropping seeds that sprout on the forest floor. Mushrooms are hinges in nature, now turning toward death, now toward new life. ([Location 5971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5971)) - Oh, it can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but in the end it isn’t really the work that produces the food you’re after, this effort for that result, for there’s no sure correlation between effort and result. And no deserving of this: I felt none of the sense of achievement you feel at the end of a season in the garden, when all your work has paid off in the bounty of the harvest. No, this felt more like something for nothing, a wondrous and unaccountable gift. ([Location 5998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=5998)) - Gathering abalone was the most arduous foraging I did for my meal, and quite possibly the stupidest. I learned later that more Californians are killed gathering abalone each year—by getting dashed on the rocks, being attacked by sharks, or succumbing to hypothermia—than die in hunting accidents. ([Location 6076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=6076)) - (Cherry trees came originally from the forests of the Transcaucus, between the Black and Caspian seas. The Bing cherry is a chance seedling discovered in a Willamette Valley orchard in 1875 and named for a Mr. Ah Bing, the Chinese farmhand who tended it.) ([Location 6133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=6133)) - Later, when I looked up the spelling of the word “ragout,” I learned that it comes from the French verb ragoûter: “to restore the appetite.” This one had done that, restoring my appetite for this meat after the disgust I’d felt cleaning the animal. ([Location 6172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=6172)) - Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers—outliers of a real life. Or better yet, preserve them but purely as ritual, for the lessons they have to teach us about the different uses to which the world can be put. Going to McDonald’s would be something that happens once a year, a kind of Thanksgiving in reverse, and so would a meal like mine, as slow and storied as the Passover seder. ([Location 6322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEIDR0&location=6322))