Michael Pollan’s article “What’s Eating America?”
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12/3/2020 What’s Eating America « Michael Pollan
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What’s Eating America
Corn is one of the plant kingdom’s biggest successes.
That’s not necessarily good for the United States.
By Michael Pollan
Smithsonian, June 15, 2006
Descendants of the Maya living in Mexico still sometimes refer to
themselves as “the corn people.” The phrase is not intended as metaphor.
Rather, it’s meant to acknowledge their abiding dependence on this
miraculous grass, the staple of their diet for almost 9,000 years.
For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain,
yet one that is also rooted in corn, not to think of himself as a corn person
suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.
Or perhaps a little of both. For the great edifice of variety and choice that is
an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological
foundation: corn. It’s not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens
and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it’s not just the source of the flour and the
oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods;
it’s not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine
cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself–the wallboard and joint
compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the
building itself has been built–is in no small measure a manifestation of
corn.
There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and
more than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food
industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different
items or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than
the clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.
How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old
World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one
of the plant world’s greatest success stories. I say the plant world’s success
story because it is no longer clear that corn’s triumph is such a boon to the
rest of the world.
At its most basic, the story of life on earth is the competition among
species to capture and store as much energy as possible–either directly
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from the sun, in the case of plants, or, in the case of animals, by eating
plants and plant eaters. The energy is stored in the form of carbon
molecules and measured in calories: the calories we eat, whether in an ear
of corn or a steak, represent packets of energy once captured by a plant.
Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories)
from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn.
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 from making explosives to making
chemical fertilizer. After World War II, 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 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 the
poison gases developed for 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.”
F1 hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than
any other crop. Though F1 hybrids were introduced in the 1930s, it wasn’t
until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that
corn yields exploded. The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed
everything–not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food
system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted.
All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature
assembles amino acids, proteins and nucleic acid; the genetic information
that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. But the supply of
usable nitrogen on earth is limited. Although earth’s atmosphere is about
80 percent nitrogen, all those atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive and
therefore useless; the 19th-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
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(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.
In his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the
Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil pointed out that
“there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen.” Before
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 had 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 13 massive fertilizer factories.
Without them, China would have starved.
This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-
Bosch process for fixing nitrogen (Bosch gets the credit for
commercializing Haber’s idea) is the most important invention of the 20th
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. Though,
as these numbers suggest, humans may have struck a Faustian bargain
with nature when Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.
Fritz Haber? No, I’d never heard of him either, even though he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for “improving the standards of
agriculture and the well-being of mankind.” But the reason for his
obscurity has less to do with the importance of his work than an ugly twist
of his biography, which recalls the dubious links between modern warfare
and industrial agriculture: during World War I, Haber threw himself into
the German war effort, and his chemistry kept alive Germany’s hopes for
victory, by allowing it to make bombs from synthetic nitrate. Later, Haber
put his genius for chemistry to work developing poison gases–ammonia,
then chlorine. (He subsequently developed Zyklon B, the gas used in
Hitler’s concentration camps.) His wife, a chemist sickened by her
husband’s contribution to the war effort, used his army pistol to kill
herself; Haber died, broken and in flight from Nazi Germany, in a Basel
hotel room in 1934.
His story has been all but written out of the 20th century. But it embodies
the paradoxes of science, the double edge to our manipulations of nature,
the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but from the
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same knowledge. Even Haber’s agricultural benefaction has proved to be a
decidedly mixed blessing.
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. That’s because 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. True, these fossil fuels were created
by the sun, billions of years ago, but they are not renewable in the same
way that the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. (That
nitrogen is fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which
trades a tiny drip of sugar for the nitrogen the plant needs.)
Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be
managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw
material–chemical fertilizer–into outputs of corn. And corn adapted
brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities
of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of
food energy. 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. More than
half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn.
From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply
drink petroleum directly, because there’s a lot less energy in a bushel of
corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half-gallon of oil required
to produce it. Ecologically, this is a fabulously expensive way to produce
food–but “ecologically” is no longer the operative standard. In the factory,
time is money, and yield is everything.
One problem with factories, as opposed to biological systems, is that they
tend to pollute. Hungry for fossil fuel as hybrid corn is, farmers still feed it
far more than it can possibly eat, wasting most of the fertilizer they buy.
And what happens to that synthetic nitrogen the plants don’t take up?
Some of it evaporates into the air, where it acidifies the rain and
contributes to global warming. Some seeps down to the water table,
whence it may come out of the tap. The nitrates in water bind to
hemoglobin, compromising the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain.
(I guess I was wrong to suggest we don’t sip fossil fuels directly; sometimes
we do.)
It has been less than a century since Fritz Haber’s invention, yet already it
has changed earth’s ecology. More than half of the world’s supply of usable
nitrogen is now man-made. (Unless you grew up on organic food, most of
the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch
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process.) “We have perturbed the global nitrogen cycle,” Smil wrote, “more
than any other, even carbon.” The effects may be harder to predict than the
effects of the global warming caused by our disturbance of the carbon
cycle, but they are no less momentous.
The flood of synthetic nitrogen has fertilized not just the farm fields but the
forests and oceans, too, to the benefit of some species (corn and algae
being two of the biggest beneficiaries) and to the detriment of countless
others. The ultimate fate of the nitrates spread in Iowa or Indiana is to flow
down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where their deadly fertility
poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the wild
growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a “hypoxic,” or
dead, zone as big as New Jersey–and still growing. By fertilizing the world,
we alter the planet’s composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.
And yet, as organic farmers (who don’t use synthetic fertilizer) prove every
day, the sun still shines, plants and their bacterial associates still fix
nitrogen, and farm animals still produce vast quantities of nitrogen in their
“waste,” so-called. It may take more work, but it’s entirely possible to
nourish the soil, and ourselves, without dumping so much nitrogen into
the environment. The key to reducing our dependence on synthetic
nitrogen is to build a more diversified agriculture–rotating crops and using
animals to recycle nutrients on farms–and give up our vast, nitrogen-
guzzling monocultures of corn. Especially as the price of fossil fuels climbs,
even the world’s most industrialized farmers will need to take a second
look at how nature, and those who imitate her, go about creating fertility
without diminishing our world.
Filed under: Corn, Farm Policy & Agricultural Subsidies, Seeds, Smithsonian
© 2020 Michael Pollan. All rights reserved.
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1. Americans don’t just grow corn to eat it on the cob. What else do we do with corn now?
2. Much of Pollan’s article consists of him connecting causes and effects — actions taken and the resulting, often unexpected consequences. How is this kind of explanation different from the explanation of, say, how a car engine works, or the carbon cycle? What does Pollan use his cause-and-effect explanations for? How do they relate to his larger argument?
3. What are some of the benefits and drawbacks to corn production today? Should we continue using synthetic nitrogen as we do, or should we curtail its use in favor of another system of producing food?
4. Pollan says that “the process for fixing nitrogen is the most important invention of the twentieth century.” Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not?