Matt, can you give me a short bio, plus some background on 5barx.com?

"I come from a cow family that has made a living from cows for more than 50 years and has been doing AI for almost as long. For the last 14 years our operation was mostly registered Angus using the "best" genetics bull studs had to offer. In May 2008 the registered herds were dispersed and the business continues today as a commercial operation in Mount Gilead, NC. In 2006, I decided to start a separate herd of my own and this became Vanguard Livestock.
"5BarX.com was started in December of 2005 in response to a need for open discussion about cattle breeding for a small group of breeders that don't fit into the mainstream crowd. I was not deserving to be in their group, but I was the guy that could figure out how to get a modern message board running. My main objectives were to have a place where discussion could develop freely and provide an archive for many topics discussed by some of the country's best breeders for others to read at any time in the future. We currently have about 500 computers accessing our website daily and discussion that is about as lively and informative as cattle talk gets."

You've been a long-time observer of the cattle business. One of the things that's interested me about you was your "journey of discovery" that eventually brought you to Aubracs. Can you tell me about that and why you decided Aubracs were the cattle for you?

"Moving around the country in the military gave me an opportunity to see many things I had never heard of and to question everything at least once. When I decided to put together my own herd, I knew it would have to do something different to thrive; this something was to make the best commercial females I could for the replacement market in my area.
"As best I could tell, I needed moderate framed, maternal cattle of two breeds that would complement each other well. Being from an Angus family, I chose to use an Angus-Continental cross and figured it would be easy to find the right continental breed.
"After visiting a few herds, I realized there was something that gave me reservations on about every herd I saw. Then it seemed obvious to broaden my search to every breed I could find to visit. If my memory is correct I investigated about 10 breeds (from Limousin to Senepol to Sussex!) to work well with my Angus and about a year later I decided there was no complementary breed that I would be happy with and I would just have to compromise and deal with the problems.
"A couple of months later, Eric Grant sent me a few emails about coming to a sale in Nebraska (8 hours from home) and it seemed like just another small breed wanting to do the same things everybody else was. I couldn't imagine what I would get out of it, but after talking to him on the phone I realized I had somehow agreed to go to his sale and it happened to be 2 days before a Braunvieh sale in the same part of Nebraska. There was a blizzard the day before the sale and the 8 hour drive turned into a 15 hour snow ride with peril at every mile marker. I arrived at the sale barn 15 minutes before the sale and hurried in through the snow to show them I came like I said I would and suffer through the sale. About the time I got in the door, I realized I had just walked by some fine looking animals and went back out to look again. About halfway through the sale, I realized that I had found the breed I was looking for: moderate framed continental, heavy muscle, masculinity in bulls and femininity in heifers, not one bad udder in the sale and the best feet and legs on any group of animals I had ever seen.
"To this day my Aubracs are exactly what I want and are good enough that all of my registered Angus cows are bred to Aubrac bulls. The only thing I don't like about them is that I only get one calf per cow per year!"

As a person who's heavily involved in moderating online discussion about the cattle business, what are some of the key trends that you see -- what are people talking about -- what are the challenges we face and what are our opportunities?

"Some of the trends of the last year have been a more mainstream movement to moderate cow type, more creative grazing systems, the impact of high corn prices, and direct marketing of natural and grass-fed beef. With a tight financial market, buyers are afraid to spend money and sellers are lowering their price because they need cash flow. This leaves the average producer getting slapped from both sides and will make it hard for many operations to remain (or become) profitable.
"Many cattlemen will have to pay more attention to every aspect of their operation. The vast majority of farmers and ranchers I meet don't scrutinize what they do every day; they just keep doing it until all of the money runs out. The only way to keep a business in business is to turn every action into a business decision and think through every penny spent, every tractor cranked and every feed bucket fed. Cattlemen who can keep it together in the next 5 years or so should be in a great position to really make money on the upswing."


When you look at the industry today -- how it's structured, the people who are involved, etc. -- what kind of opportunities exist for small breeds like Aubracs to carve out a niche in both the production and consumer marketplaces?

"My decision to breed Aubracs was a direct response to hard-keeping mainstream Angus genetics that have no muscle other than ribeye, terrible structure and no consideration of longevity. Producers that have been using only "progressive" Angus genetics for many years are going to realize that they are ending up with cows that are too big, that wont ever see their tenth birthday and cant survive on grass, water and minerals. This is where the Aubrac breed is ready to step in and help those producers bring a balance back to their herd in one generation.
"Combining favorable carcass results with the Aubrac's easy fleshing ability, I am optimistic that they will be good in a grass-fed environment. It takes a certain type of animal to finish on grass and I think the Aubrac might be it."

What lessons can Aubrac breeders learn from the mistakes and successes of other breeds?

"One issue I am concerned about is breed character. My Angus are black and my Aubracs are brown! Why would I want to make my Aubracs more like Angus? I can't tell you why Aubracs are better than Angus if they are the same. There is a reason we have breeds that are different and unique - they do certain things well that other breeds don't. If we make them the same, we might as well all have the same mediocre cattle.
"If we are all heading different directions, we will end up like every other breed association with lots of variation in type and function between breeders of the same breed. The only thing that makes a breed is the breeders in it. If a breeder applies selection pressure toward an ideal Wagyu, down the road the breeder will end up with pretty much a Wagyu even if they started with Charolais. It's all about what we decide is ideal. The selection pressure of breeders in a certain group is what determines the type of cattle in that group; it has less to do with what you start with and more to do with where you are headed. As Shane Castle writes: ?If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there!'"

In what ways do you expect Internet communications, promotions and advertising to impact the way cattle producers do business? What role will it play in your own operations?

"The time to receive feedback from any event is vastly reduced from 10 years ago. Within an hour of a bull sale being over, thousands of people can know exactly what each lot brought, you can check on your kids at daycare in real time through web cams, and buyers can buy cattle in their pajamas at home. Response to customer issues will be expected in hours, not days or weeks. Visiting every customer regularly is the only way to stay in touch with their needs and maintain "market share". If a breeder only sees you when you come to his sale, you dont have as much loyalty to him as the other breeder that comes by to see how the weaned calves are doing.
"Internet communications make advertising like a pro cheap and easy. Where else can you get a 24-hour/day advertisement for $5/month? Being good at marketing will continue to challenge our creativity and constitution.
"To separate myself from the rest, I plan to have all business records online for all to see in detail. If I can show other producers exactly how I am making a profit, I think they will want to try the same recipe and hopefully that recipe includes my cows and bulls."

Doc, what are some of the more significant changes you've have seen in the cattle business in your lifetime?

My interest in Beef Cattle began when I was a youngster on a Missouri Farm and we had a Mixed Angus x Dairy- x "whiteface" x whatever-bull-was-handy-at-the-time "Cow Freshener" type herd. This was in the 1930's-?40's depression years, and we were fortunate to even find a "bull" to use when a cow was cycling! Being a "Type "A" personality, I felt that was not a satisfactory way to succeed in my future life's choice of a career, therefore I chose to get an Agricultural Degree when I was discharged from World War II Air Corps Service and expand my efforts in the direction of Beef Cattle Production.

After College, I taught Agriculture for about five years, and became an astute observer of the "Beef Cattle Scene", if you will, and have seen profound changes in the World Beef Cattle landscape - or Arena, which have transpired from what used to be called "Raisin' Cows". After changing careers and becoming a Dr. of Chiropractic and practicing about 35 years, I retired, realizing that one can take the boy out of the country, but CAN'T take the country out of the boy, therefore I continued to keep an active interest in Beef Cattle for my entire lifetime, and have realized that "the more things change, the more they stay the same!"

The short, squatty, "Belt-Buckle" type Show Cattle of the ?40's thru the ?60's did not answer the meat market demands of the day. Wiser heads prevailed in the Angus, Hereford, and Shorthorn Commercial Breeders, and in the early 1970's a concerted move to ?CHANGE' the seed stock "type" demanded by the feedlots and beef Retailers resulted in the influx of foreign breeds being imported into the United States and Canada, primarily from Continental European Countries. These details are documented widely in the beef industry, and makes for fascinating historical study.

The more significant changes resulting from these importations were not only an increase in the size of the progeny resulting from the use of the new breeds, but the realization by the Purebred Breeders of the "Pony Type" Registered stock that it was imperative that they "CHANGE" the Genetic Templates of the purebred seed stock. By so doing, these actions motivated and stimulated cattle producers into utilizing the ?improved' Genetics, and thus stimulated Purebred seed stock sales.

As a result of these mating protocol changes, an astonishing discovery of a new and exciting factor resulting from "Cross Breeding" these new, unrelated breeds with the standard British Breeds (Angus, Hereford, Shorthorn) occurred. That factor was "Hybrid Vigor, also known as heterosis, - which is a marked increase in performance and output - which results in PROFIT! Cross breeding techniques of chickens, swine, sheep, and goats were accepted practices, but perhaps the longer Gestation periods of cattle precluded very much experimentation with beef cattle, and therefore little was known about the potential successes which could be realized by intelligent utilization of Genetics and wise seed stock selections for cross breeding purposes.

As more and more purebred Breeder's came to appreciate the potential profits which were GOING to be realized by the utilization of improved Genetics in being able to predict those improved traits and characteristics in their seed stock animals, it became obvious that there had to be SOME manner of categorizing and recording the predicted differences between animals and their abilities to transmit characteristics and traits to their progeny in a reasonable, practicable and feasible manner, and to be able to expect those results to be consistent, and to be able to display the differences resulting from mating individuals to other individuals, either members of the same breed of cattle, or to cattle of different breeds.

After considerable study and investigation by many Universities and private individuals pertaining to the problem, a method (or TOOL) was derived, and carefully planned, expanded, and developed to be able to consistently achieve success in the prediction of how the progeny of each animal could be expected to perform relative to the progeny of other animals listed in a database. This COLOSSAL differentiation of cattle breeding practices opened the door to astounding CHANGES in the way beef producers managed their herds, their breeding and mating methods, and their entire seed stock selection methods from only ?eye-balling' their selections, to scientifically planning their future protocols - with the goal of PROFIT in the forefront of their objectives. To me, THIS is the MOST significant change performed and brought about in my lifetime - MOST significant because it has allowed the expansion of highly important factors surrounding the selection of seed stock not only for Maternal results, but for precise and profitable production of Terminal feedlot candidates.

This method of determination of characteristics and traits became known as EPD's , or Expected Progeny Differences. By the continuing expansion of these tools, or precepts, Beef Cattle breeders have been able to maintain a ?balance' of traits and characteristics within, and ACROSS breeds. As a result of very careful utilization of these proven tools, "Crossbreeding" has become the ?touchstone' of Crossbreeding seedstock selection. Other changes have been introduced into the armamentarium of seed stock selection technology, such as DNA, recognition of the importance of ?functional traits', the ability to recognize and accept genetically transmitted abnormalities, and others as well.

What are some of the key mistakes the industry has made in delivering a product to the consumer marketplace?

I think that the most flagrant and egregious error that the Beef Industry has made since the 1930's was the decision, by some(!), to reduce the overall physical size of the seed stock which was producing the germ plasm of breeding herds. This action ultimately affected many genetic traits and characteristics in a negative manner, which was instrumental in the determination of the quantity and quality of meat market products appearing on grocery store shelves. This time period, post WW II, coincided with expanding business profits, and helped create the culmination and cessation of the World Financial ?Great' Depression, which had business and discretionary spending locked in a vise-like grip.

Suddenly, money was available for more spending on creative comforts, among them being delicious food, namely juicy, tender, mouth-watering - - BEEF! Now - the operative question of the day became - how can that delectable Protein source - Beef - be made available to the satisfaction of ALL concerned? Producers were more preoccupied with the financial returns that THEY received from their marketing efforts than what the consumer wanted. The Great Depression had dictated that philosophy and subsequent attitudes by virtue of the necessity of making a living from Agriculture.

The "Dust Bowl" years in the Midwest predicated two very undeniable truths: a) every beef producer must be capable of providing a comfortable living from their efforts, and b) the beef consumer must be satisfied with the beef products presented at the retail beef outlets and counters.

The answer evolved over several years as a result of the demand by consumers, and the necessity of producers to realize a profit from their breeding and marketing efforts. Post War College education opportunities abounded, knowledge of production methods exacerbated a "desire to learn" new ways and means of management practices, and, eventually though advanced marketing protocols, the Beef allegory became "BEEF - IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER!" Outstanding Public Relations!

Another key mistake made in product delivery for consumers was mistaking "Fat" for Quality. This gross error was provoked by both the beef cattle feed lots, AND the ultimate end-product consumer/meat customer. Excessive ?fat' on the live animal earned dollars for the producer/breeder (he thought ), and convinced the housewife that she was doing her job in feeding her family - UNTIL --- the "Fat Hit the Fan", and negative health problems became the order of the day with heart attacks, strokes, occluded arteries, atherosclerosis, fatty degeneration, and - - DEATH! As a result of these startling events, beef consumption decreased markedly, and the "other" meats supplied the demand and took up the slack. As a result, the "Fat Was in the Fire", and breeders, marketers, and consumers alike demanded "CHANGE"!

At this point in time, the beef Industry, again, had gone full circle, and the time was ?prime' for the acceptance of new ideas concerning improved breeding practices, focusing on beef characteristics and traits which would result in quality meat for the consumer and PROFIT for the producer.

There are enough key mistakes made in EVERY industry to fill dozens of "Management Manuals" and "Policy Procedures" Handbooks, therefore this diatribe could continue interminably. Suffice it to say - mistakes will always be made by human beings, corrections will always be attempted, and some will be successful and some will be unsuccessful. The successful corrections will be as a result of meticulous attention to details, and repetitive efforts directed toward perfection.
. . . and the beat goes on!

What have been some of the industry's succeses?

No Industry, Commerce, or Business is ALWAYS wrong, and the Beef Industry is no exception. Success stories are rampant in our history, and to reiterate some of them could fill volumes. One could itemize. ad infinitum, beef cattle success stories of dozens of breeds. I think it would be bordering on EXCLUSIVITY to begin summarizing the hundreds of thousands of beef ranches and farms, both purebred and commercial, neighborhood butcher shops, feed lots, meat markets, - actually any commercial business in which producing and marketing beef cattle is involved, including their produce and/or by-products. There would be no way one could avoid eliminating specifics and categories. Therefore I would quote Peter Roget's Preface to his First Edition Thesaurus and say. . . "I trust to the candor of critics who, while they find it easy to detect faults, can at the same time, appreciate difficulties."

What kind of opportunities exist for small breeds such as Aubrac's to carve out a niche?

The opportunities for establishing a niche, nook, cranny, or corner for Beef Breeds possessing small numbers of cattle can be secured by determination, perseverance, and continual focusing on a goal! The establishment of tenets or principles of which members of a Breed Association such as Aubrac International, Inc., have, and the developing of rules and regulations under which EVERYONE who is a member of said association participates and follows will eliminate flawed premises, incorrect guidelines, and result in a force (association members) all striving toward achieving the same objectives.
Focusing on precise details pertaining to specific breed characteristics and traits, emphasizing the strict usage of accepted Genotype, Phenotype and Functional Traits of the Breed in establishing the ideal model or template Cow and Bull will entrench these factors which are requisite for the anchorage of a Breeds' consistency. These are mandatory precepts to follow for the purpose of avoidance of mistakes other breeds and associations have experienced, and to capitalize on the successes which have been demonstrated by the CONTINUING progress of other breeds.

"Build a Better Mouse Trap!" "Build It and They Will Come!" These assertions seem trite, but there is truth in wisdom - and perseverance and adherence to them - almost to a fault - should preclude an organization flailing away in their own ineptness and inabilities. By perusing the failures of other businesses - beef cattle breeds among them - one may avoid fatal mistakes and mismanagement bungling.

The marketing, advertising and production efforts of Beef Cattle breeders often determine the success or failure of their operations. Large ranches or cattle operations with adequate capitalization behind the business spare little expense in promoting their production results. Advertising one's merchandise, whatever the product(s) may be is as essential as producing the product itself. The Beef Cattle business is no exception. The annual increase of livestock is the "marketable commodity" which must be marketed in such a manner so as to provide working capital for the demand of expenses of production, AND profit for the entrepreneur. If either of these entities appear on the negative, or loss side of the financial ledger, the business cannot remain as a functioning business pursuit for long.

There are given factors which are necessary in order to enable the buying public to be apprised of one's operation and marketable produce. Specifically, for a breeder of AUBRAC cattle, the marketing "targets" (those who should and would benefit from the acquisition of your produce - calves, cows, heifers, bulls, and/or meat) are usually unfamiliar with you, with your ranch and your product.

Therefore - the operative word for your marketing efforts to be successful is "EXPOSURE"! Exposure to the Beef Industry, which includes current producers and breeders, potential producers, feed lots, retailers, and the general public. How is this prerequisite to be accomplished? By Merchandising - which is that part of marketing involved with promoting sales of merchandise (your cattle), such as using effecting means of selecting, pricing, displaying, and presenting your objects and items (cattle) for sale! By the use of Beef and Agricultural Periodicals, Newspapers, Specialty Publications, by hosting Field Days on your Ranch or Farm, Publicized Production Sales and educational brochures and Sale Catalogs, producing your own Ranch Website, AND - the use of professional Marketing Agents. These Agents are Professionals, whose business it is to make YOUR BUSINESS -THEIR BUSINESS!

AUBRAC CATTLE, being one of the more "unfamiliar" beef cattle breeds in the United States and Canada, is in a unique position of being a fresh, new, and exciting breed with which to begin, expand your operation and capitalize on that "uniqueness" through the now-accepted utilization of "THE CROSSBREEDING TOOL!" There are very few beef cattle breeders who are not familiar with the term "Crossbreeding", but insofar as a thorough and detailed understanding of the methods and protocol advantages of the systems, most ranches are skeptical of the reported profits and increased productivity of correct crossbreeding management practices.

In My Opinion, THIS is where the Aubrac Breed has an opportunity to not only "carve out a niche' in the Beef Cattle Industry, but "CHISEL out a solid granite ledge engraved "Stamped and Approved for Crossbreeding Programs". Given their extraordinary and distinctive Genetic and Phenotypic traits, combined with their strong Functional Characteristics, using Aubrac cattle in organized Crossbreeding protocols could create outstanding complimentarity and heterosis results.
Overwhelming amounts of instructive and educational material available for designing a crossbreeding system precludes extensive explanations in this treatise. However Aubrac Beef Cattle may be able to fulfill a necessary requirement in a crossbreeding program that other beef breeds heretofore have not been able to provide! Their Growth, Carcass and Subcutaneous Tissue factors just might be expedient and fitting for the Terminal AND Maternal forums!

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Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," in his office at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. (BAP photos)

Journalism professor Michael Pollan's new book on the U.S. food chain provides few soundbites ? but much to chew on

By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 11 April 2006

BERKELEY - Thanks to recent investigative works such as "Fast Food Nation" and "Supersize Me," a growing number of Americans are scrutinizing ingredient labels and asking, What is this stuff? Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, can tell you. In a just-released new book, he takes readers to the feedlot, to the farm, and into the woods in search of the origins of our dinner. Will we have the nerve to follow?

"Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost," writes Pollan in "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals."

By the time readers reach this passage, which comes at the very end of the book, they will be able to answer at length. They will have tagged along as Pollan traces the path from earth to plate taken by four meals ? from McDonald's, Whole Foods, a small Virginia farm, and a "first person" dinner that he killed, foraged, and grew himself. Pollan is a genial tour guide through a variety of disciplines. Along the way to his main destinations ? the feedlot where "his" steer is being fattened, the vast facility where organic baby lettuces are being washed and bagged, the pasture in which chickens joyfully root through cow manure, or the forest where he is helping to disembowel a wild boar he has just shot ? he delivers fascinating mini-lectures on agricultural history, plant biology, food chemistry, nutrition, and the animal-rights debate.

Readers of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" will learn that the bulk of the American diet comes from one plant: corn. Grown on massive farms, oceans' worth of the golden kernels and green stalks are then processed, deconstructed, and reassembled in factories into everything from a Chicken McNugget to salad dressing. We eat so much corn that, biologically speaking, most Americans are corn on two legs.

Berkeley residents and other health-conscious readers who are right now comforting themselves with the thought, "But I don't eat that stuff; I shop at Whole Foods," will learn some things about the label "organic" that will forever affect, for example, how they look at Rosie the Organic Chicken. And no reader, meanwhile, will be able to ignore any longer the fact that America's seemingly endless supply of cheap food, whether grown industrially or organically, "is floating on a sinking sea of petroleum."

Do Americans really want to know what we're eating? That's the central gamble of Pollan's book. Are we disturbed enough by mad-cow disease, E. coli outbreaks, mercury levels, and reports like last week's New York Times story on arsenic levels in chicken to look, as the old saying goes, at how the sausage is made?

Book jacket of Omnivore's Dilemma Or do we just desperately want someone trustworthy to answer the question that kicks off "The Omnivore's Dilemma": "What should we have for dinner?" To tell us, once and for all, fats or carbs, McDonald's or Whole Foods, steak or tofu, sugar or high fructose corn syrup or aspartame? Such are the decisions underpinning the "omnivore's dilemma" of Pollan's title.

If you're hoping that Pollan will put an end to our food anxiety by just telling us what to eat, forget it. "I don't think it's a journalist's job to issue shopping lists or policy descriptions," Pollan explains over lunch. "We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are ? the environment, your health, animal welfare ? the answers are going to be different for every person."

Defying the bread fatwa

Here's yet another tough question: Where should one take Michael Pollan for lunch? He agrees to meet at Phoenix Next Door, a few blocks from his office at the Graduate School of Journalism, which he had not yet tried since moving to Berkeley from Connecticut in 2003. For the curious, we both had the spaghetti, housemade with organic, local ingredients and topped with a spicy ragú of "naturally raised" beef, lamb, and pork. However, when ordering, neither of us asked what "naturally raised" entailed, although we both admitted later that we usually would have.

"I'm not an ayatollah about this stuff, I'm really not. I don't hector people," insists Pollan, who doesn't seem like a food fascist either in the book or in person. Tall and lanky, with a bald promontory of a forehead and a meter-wide grin, he manages to seem simultaneously bookish and outdoorsy. In a sense, he's the journalistic heir to English agronomist and organic agriculture pioneer Sir Albert Howard, who died in 1947: Howard, quotes Pollan, believes we should treat the "whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject."

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" grew out of the final section of Pollan's best-selling last book, "The Botany of Desire," which looked at apples, tulips, cannabis, and genetically modified potatoes from the evolutionary point of view of the plants. The potato chapter "was the first time I really learned how we grow food in this country," he explains. "I'd been to little hobby farms, but I hadn't seen a 10,000-acre, monoculture potato field, where the soil has been absolutely sterilized, so doused with pesticides that people can't even go into it for four days."

The other catalyst was the moment in the fall of 2002 when Americans en masse foreswore bread for bacon and embraced the Atkins diet. "All of a sudden we completely flopped the identity of good and evil in the diet we'd been eating since 1977. Carbohydrates, not fat, became the enemy," marvels Pollan. "That said to me that this is a nation with an eating disorder."

Children of the corn

The four meals in "Omnivore" ? call them Industrial, Big Organic, Pastoral, and Hunter-Gatherer ? seem very different, but they can be plotted on a continuum between two ways of looking at the food chain: as a machine, or as a living organism.

In Industrial, the most mechanical of the four, inputs of patented seeds and fossil energy are converted into outputs of carbohydrates and protein. This machine became truly turbocharged in 1947, Pollan writes, when the U.S. government had a huge postwar surplus of ammonium nitrate (the main ingredient in making explosives). Ammonium, it had been known for some time, is an excellent source of nitrogen for plants, which helps them convert sunlight into carbohydrates. So the government instructed an Alabama munitions plant to make chemical fertilizer from its bomb material, and modern-day fertilizer was born. (Similarly, modern pesticides were derived from poison gases first developed for wartime use.)

What a dollar buys in the average U.S. supermarket:
1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies, vs. 250 calories of carrots; 875 calories of soda, vs. 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

To simplify Pollan's intricate, mesmerizing history drastically, the boom in synthetic fertilizer enabled farmers to grow vast quantities of corn without bankrupting their soil. Corn pushed out pasture-raised cattle and pigs and chickens, as it became more economical to warehouse them together in "Confined Animal Feeding Operations," or CAFOs, and stuff them full of corn. One hitch: the stomachs of cows, one of the few mammals evolutionarily designed to be able to eat grass, can't digest corn. It turns their stomachs acidic and makes them sick. No problem, says the machine: Just pump the cows full of antibiotics, which has the added benefit of making them grow bigger and fatter faster, so they can be slaughtered younger. At least most cattle still live outdoors, Pollan writes, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own excrement. Pigs and chickens, which can digest corn, suffer even more squalid existences, as he describes in the lone section of the book in which outrage can be detected beneath his even-handed tone.

The Industrial machine has been fine-tuned to produce vast quantities of processed cheap food. But its cheapness is deceptive. Corn, a farmer tells Pollan disdainfully, is the "welfare queen of crops." Every bushel of corn currently enjoys a 50-cent subsidy from the U.S. government, the result of a spike in food prices in the early 1970s that caused the Nixon administration to switch free-market tactics. "We've been supporting agriculture since the Depression, but we've changed the way you do it ? from essentially supporting the farmers to supporting the crop," says Pollan.

Supporting the crop means supporting agribusiness, which leverages cheap ingredients into high profits. Corn is cheaper than sugar, so high fructose corn syrup replaced it as sweetener in sodas in the 1980s, and in just about everything else ever since. Corn stripped to its building blocks and reassembled is now the source for most food additives, from sweeteners to stabilizers to artificial colors and preservatives. In one of the book's most jaw-dropping statistics, Pollan writes that more than a quarter of the 45,000 items in an average American supermarket contain corn.

"Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes.everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn," he writes. "Indeed, even the supermarket itself ? the wallboard and joint compound, the petroleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built ? is in no small measure a manifestation of corn. And us?"

Yup ? we're corn chips in clothes. Pollan confirmed this using a mass spectrometer operated by UC Berkeley colleague Todd Dawson. (Carbon derived from corn has a special marker that can be tracked and measured.) The McDonald's meal that the Pollan family consumed in the car for Omnivore Meal No. 1 might have looked like a hamburger, chicken nuggets, and a salad, but it was engineered overwhelmingly from corn.representing enough bushels to overflow the trunk, he calculates.

Getting out of the maize

OK. Americans are as corny as they come. So what?

"To start, it's a problem from a health point of view," says Pollan, explaining cheerfully that as omnivores, humans need about 50 different molecules and atoms ? amino acids, minerals, phytochemicals, fat, sugar, etc. "A lot of people eating a fast-food diet ? not just the drive-through kind, but also microwaveable and other prepackaged meals - are malnourished." Another UC Berkeley colleague, biochemistry professor Bruce Ames, is studying obese California children who have rickets, a deficiency traditionally associated with starvation. "By eating from one very narrow cut of nature's bounty, you're not going to get all the nutrients you need. We need to eat at least 10 plants to get those 50 nutrients."

Other, bigger hidden costs are also associated with corn-based cheap food. "We pay with our taxes, because it takes heavy, heavy government subsidies to produce food that cheaply," he says. "We pay with the public health system, with failing antibiotics [whose overuse in cattle has given rise to new antibiotic-resistant strains of 'super-bugs']. We pay with the miles-wide dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico [caused by nitrate-dense agricultural runoff carried out by the Mississippi River]. We pay by having to defend our high-energy food system by fighting wars in the Middle East."

You see, the American corn diet is really an oil diet. Corn, as Pollan puts it, "is the SUV of plants. Growing it the way we do requires it to guzzle fuel in the form of fertilizer, about a quarter to a third of a gallon of petroleum for each bushel." Processing the corn requires even more energy, as does moving those corn-derived products around the country. A diet based on cheap fossil fuel is rather vulnerable right now, Pollan points out: "If oil gets dramatically more expensive, that will change our food system as much as food policy or consumer choice."

"Once upon a time there was a happy cow."

If industrial agriculture has turned nature into an oil-slurping machine, then surely organic agriculture, which treats the food chain more like a living organism, is better, right?

Well.as with many things in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," the answer is a little more complicated than those cartoon labels of "happy cows" frolicking on pesticide-free grass, or stories about "free-range vegetarian" chickens on egg cartons, would have us believe. Pollan calls these labels and similar conscience-appeal marketing "Supermarket Pastoral." He might as well call them fairy tales. Under his scrutiny, they hold up "about as well as you would expect anything genuinely pastoral to hold up in the belly of an $11 billion industry, which is to say not very well at all."
Food energy in a 1-pound box of prewashed organic lettuce: 80 calories

Fossil-fuel energy spent growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting box of lettuce from California to East Coast:
More than 4,600 calories

Long before it became a USDA label ? and a permission slip to charge more at the cash register ? "organic" was a philosophy. The word "organic," Pollan writes, was chosen in 1942 by J.I. Rodale, the founding editor of "Organic Gardening and Farming" magazine, to emphasize that nature, not a machine, is the proper model for agriculture.

Several decades and several food scares after "Silent Spring" and "Diet for a Small Planet" gave birth to the '60s organic movement, "organic" is now a very big tent. Under this tent are some very strange beasts, such as organic feedlots and organic high fructose corn syrup. Big Organic, represented by the companies able to supply Whole Foods and Fresh Fields outlets all around the country, has more in common with Industrial than with the quaint red barns pictured on their labels, says Pollan. (Those barns can only be honestly claimed by Pastoral, the small local farms that may or may not be organically certified, but do a much better job of mimicking nature's way of producing food.)

Grimmway and Cal-Organic, two of California's biggest organic vegetable suppliers, were started by conventional growers looking for a more profitable niche and concerned that their preferred pesticides were about to be banned by California. Horizon, the top supplier of organic milk, is owned by Dean Foods, the largest conventional milk bottler in the country; Horizon's "happy cows" rarely encounter a blade of grass, writes Pollan. Instead of gamboling in the pastures, most of them stand around in a dry lot "tethered to milking machines three times a day."

And Rosie the Organic Chicken? She lives in one of several low, football-field-sized sheds in Petaluma, Cal., with 20,000 other chickens, sipping water from tubes and eating organic corn and other feed from elevated trays. Pollan made two separate visits, wearing a special HazMat-type suit to prevent spreading infection in the crowded quarters (the birds cannot be treated with antibiotics then sold as organic). Not a single chicken ventured out one of the shed's two doors to the outside while he was there. "I think the 'free range' conecept is for our benefit," he concludes.

Right about now, many readers are probably despairing. (I was.) Pollan sympathizes: "People say, 'Now you're telling me organic is not what I thought?' There is this feeling that's it's too complicated, it's too hard. But ethical choices are hard. We like it when Whole Foods comes along and says, 'It's OK. Just shop here; we've checked everything out for you.' But have they really? You can buy farmed Atlantic salmon at the Whole Foods right here in Berkeley ? one of the least sustainable foods out there."

In the second half of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan leaves the supermarket behind and goes back to the land: to a small farm in Virginia, and to the California hills to hunt wild pigs and mushrooms. On Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, he learns how intensively grazing cattle on grass ? moving them daily and following them with chickens, then pigs ? can actually end up producing more topsoil and more fertility than was there before. In effect, "there can be a free lunch in nature," Pollan marvels, one powered by free solar energy captured by grass.

Compared to Industrial and Big Organic, this poster child for Pastoral food is extremely labor intensive. Intentionally, it would never scale to an industrial level. Which means farms like it are few and far between; Pollan knows of no California counterpart. Since Salatin is not willing to ship his food out of state, as that would violate the principles of sustainability, most readers will never taste a meal raised quite as sustainably and ethically. Nor is the average reader likely to be able to enjoy a meal like Pollan's fourth, which he hunted (wild boar), foraged (wild mushrooms, Bing cherries, and yeast for the bread), or grew (lettuce, herbs) almost entirely himself.

So in the end, we've come full circle. What should we have for dinner, darn it? Knowing what we know, how do we navigate the sea of choices, all of which seem to be ethically compromised in some way?

"I hope the answer is not 'Ugh, this is just too complicated, I give up,'" says Pollan mock-wearily. "The answer is to figure out what your values are. You care about the environment? There's a certain way to eat. If you care about our dependence on oil, there's a certain way to eat. If you care about pesticides and your health, then going to Whole Foods will pretty much take care of you. If you care about the animals, there's another set of labels to look for."

Pollan's section on animal rights and vegetarianism, by the way, makes for very thought-provoking reading. He concludes that it's not the principle of eating animals that's wrong, but the practice: the manner in which most cows, pigs, and chickens are raised for food in this country is truly abhorrent. Healthier and more humane options do exist that are better for the animal, for our health, and for the planet. (Pollan is pretty persuasive on the ecological havoc that would be wreaked if we all became vegetarian.) "You can buy grass-fed beef right here at Berkeley Bowl. And I still buy Rosie's. I saw it, and I still eat it," offers Pollan. "Rosie chickens are not leading idyllic chicken lives, but I don't think they're suffering" ? they're not debeaked or as overcrowded as conventional birds, nor are they eating rendered chicken parts or reconstituted manure.

Ultimately, it's about incremental improvements. "I'm a half-a-loaf guy. You take it as far as you can, and inevitably you make compromises," he says. "We get three votes a day, actually more, when we eat. If we cast some of those votes with full consciousness of what's involved, and try to make better choices ? which might entail spending more money or going out of our way ? then that will help create the food chain we want."

He shrugs: "I'm sorry it's not easier, but it's also not that hard." And with that, Michael Pollan picks up a piece of bread and polishes off the last tasty bits of sauce from his lunch. "Mmm. This was really good."

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