Last Spring, the students of the University of Maine Honors College selected Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as the text that everyone would read over the summer and that we would kick off our courses discussing this Fall. I found the text very compelling, and I was asked to prepare a few thoughts on it for a large lecture tomorrow. I thought I’d give a version of them here as well.
One of the most interesting asides in Pollan’s work is the idea that the thing humans are uniquely evolved to do is choose. Language (according to some researchers) is what gives us a unique ability to project ourselves into the future, mentally, and imagine ourselves happier for having eaten that Big Mac than having eaten those stinky overcooked Brussels sprouts. And evolutionarily this makes sense, as we’ve chosen the more calorically dense option, and increased the odds of our survival at the species level through lean times. So choosing between a Big Mac and overcooked sprouts doesn’t seem particularly taxing. We imagine two possible futures, one is more appetitive, so we choose that one. Simple.
Most of the time, however, our choices are not so simple. What happens if instead of two possible futures, you must imagine hundreds or thousands of possible options? And what if you had to do it thousands of times a day? The pressure of that kind of abundance of choice can be overwhelming. In fact, several researchers (including Myers; Schwartz; Iyengar & Lepper; etc.) have demonstrated that overabundance of options is associated with more depressed moods and even what they call “choice paralysis” – the experience of too many options making it impossible for you to decide (you’ve probably experienced this as the argument about who will decide what the group should do for dinner.) This has led researchers like Stephens, Savani, and Markus (2011) to conclude that “too much choice can be a bad thing – not just for the individual, but for society.” Making choices, particularly when the number of options in our decision approaches infinity, is psychologically and physiologically taxing.
Roy Baumeister and colleagues (see this paper, for example) argue that executive function, that is, our willful behavior and self-control is a finite resource. This is why after a grueling endeavor where you’ve had to hold your tongue (say, a particularly unpleasant conversation with a significant other’s parents) you’re more likely to be impulsive (like downing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s) and unfiltered.
The infinite options afforded us by modern convenience are simply too difficult for us to manage given our limited self-control resources. We are so busy deciding about so many “important” things in our daily lives and occupations, that we leave crucial decisions like where and what to eat to others (like marketing teams) who are willing to spend the resources to narrow the infinite options on our behalf. It seems to take fewer resources to choose between that #1 and #4 than to choose between the theoretically infinite number of meals we could construct through our local megamart.
Not only that, but it turns out that the very choices that will allow us to eat more healthily and ethically are the most difficult! In a laboratory study (linked above) participants who managed to force themselves to eat radishes instead of the more tempting chocolates were subsequently significantly quicker to give up on a difficult puzzle. They had burned up their energy fighting the more hedonistic choice.
So choosing against these hedonistic urges seems to be hardest. And choosing against hedonistic urges is what it seems like we’re most often asked to do in pursuit of healthier, more ethical food – because often these choices are between sugar bombs and monocultured corn-infused out-of-season produce. That makes the choice for ethical, sustainable food that much more difficult.
As part of my attempt, moved by Pollan’s book as I was, to summon the resources to more routinely make better and more ethical food choices (and also because I’m an unabashed foodie) I looked for ways to test Pollan’s suggestion that maybe ethical and ecological food is actually the tastiest. Thanks to Dr. Sarah Harlan-Haughey I managed to purchase some local sustainable eggs from grass-fed chickens through a farmer. They came in a clearly overused egg crate, and were of such variance of color and size that I’ve never seen. My own experience with the eggs mirrored Pollan’s. They were phenomenal. They were almost comically orange, nearing a Kraft Mac & Cheese color when beaten. And as I stood there in my kitchen eating one of the best omelets I’ve ever had, I felt like I ought to somehow feel guilty for enjoying the food this much.
You see, I spend much of my time studying the puritanical ethic. It seems to contain the basic ethos that good things require suffering, and pleasure is the mark of selfish choices. But these eggs, laid by happy hens in a local poultry wagon like PolyFace’s, were most assuredly pleasurable, and certainly seemed to also be “good” in other senses of the word. It turns the whole paradigm, and the difficulty with sustainability, on its head if the sustainable choice is also the hedonistic choice.
This idea of hedonistic sustainability is gaining popularity both inside and outside the food industry. For example, the city of Copenhagen has voted to renovate their trash-to-fuel facility. Instead of being a garish industrial eyesore in downtown Copenhagen, the new facility will be boxed inside a man-made mountain. When you arrive at the facility, you can take an elevator up through it, seeing the process of turning 1 ton of garbage into the energy equivalent of almost 2 barrels of oil. And when you reach the top, you can ski down on a green, blue, or black ski slope and end up back at the base of the elevator for another ride. All the while, you can see the carbon impact reduction by watching the emissions from the plant, which are burped out in smoke rings, 10 for every 1 ton of CO2. This plant will give the city nearly “free” heating in a very cold climate, a place to ski, beautiful architecture, and an educational facility about the impact of human energy consumption; there seems to be no downside. Both the environment and the selfish, self-controlless residents of the environment benefit.
Back inside the food industry, these ideas about hedonistic sustainability seem to be gaining support. Recently a very small Spanish farmer won the most prestigious food awards in Paris for foie gras. Foie gras is the liver of a goose that has been fattened on grain by force-feeding, a notoriously unethical practice that earned it a ban in Chicago for a time. But this small Spanish farmer didn’t force-feed his geese at all. Instead, he simply gave them as much as they wanted to eat, and in the fall, they naturally gorged themselves on his land and produced, arguably, the best possible foie gras. This Spanish goose farmer said his goal is not the foie gras but rather simply making the geese happy. He argues focusing on the happiness of the animals produces the best food. A fact he demonstrated by turning off the electric fence and removing the threat of painful shock for wandering against the wires, which encouraged his geese to eat up to 20% more.
Perhaps most amazingly, this farmer’s flock is constantly growing. As flocks of wild geese fly over the farm, the “domesticated” geese will call out. Frequently, the wild geese land, stay, and mate with the farmer’s gaggle, increasing both their numbers and their genetic diversity.
Again we’re faced with the idea that the most ethical and sustainable decisions, indeed the most economical ones, are the ones that are also hedonistic. That we can get food to taste best when we let nature create it ethically seems too good to be true. The animals are happy. The predators are happy. Farms are able to produce more calories per acre than conventional methods, and they even generate more money. Doesn’t it seem too good to be true that the best fish comes from farms where health is measured by how healthy the predators of the fish are, and where water running through the farms is cleaner when it comes out than when it enters? Is this hedonistic sustainability sustainable? How do we feed the world this way?
The argument of sustainable supporters is that humans already produce significantly more calories than would be necessary to feed all of us, but more than one billion people will go hungry today. The problem does not appear to be with producing resources, but rather with distributing them. The methods of the conventional food system (“take more, sell more, waste more”) do not appear to be working, and we empirically know that they cannot for long. So some kind of transition is necessary. What that transition looks like is still to be determined.
This book is designed to induce cognitive dissonance – the unpleasant situation where our attitudes (e.g., “smoking will kill me!”) and our behaviors (e.g., “I’m smoking a cigarette!”) conflict. Most often, when our attitudes and behaviors are in conflict, we change our attitudes, because they’re much easier to change – that is, changing behaviors requires significantly more of our resources than simply rationalizing our behavior. For example, it’s easier to rationalize with “I don’t smoke that often. I can quit whenever I want. My grandpa smoked every day until he died sky diving at 104.” than it is to admit addiction, and harness the resources to change behavior to match our attitudes.
The dissonance Pollan’s book creates is between attitudes like “eating ethically is good for the world, our future, and our souls” – all distant goals – and behaviors like deeply ingrained fast food habits which immediately satisfy. It takes a series of conscious and difficult decisions, expending our self-control, to change our behavior. But if it turns out that the right choices are the most delicious ones, perhaps the dissonance diminishes, and ethical action becomes indistinguishable from (un)selfish hedonism.
